TOUCHING THE GREAT LAKES and plunging into the South, the State of Illinois offers tremendous diversity. What it lacks in geographical variation is more than compensated through a rich blend of people, places, customs, and of course, a past that reveals the conflicts, clashes, and compromises marking our life as a nation. As Americans of the early twenty-first century redefine themselves in a changing world, Illinois's shared past opens insights.
This combined Summer/Fall issue of the Journal illustrates a state's history from the battles between local breweries in Rock Island to Black workers’ response to bitter discrimination, exclusion, and violence to the competing visions of Czech Americans and Czech nationalists at the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. These pages reveal the struggles of a headstrong, courageous to the point of foolhardiness veteran of the Philippines war and the improbable rise of an unassuming immigrant to leadership in the Capone mob...
