with ROBERT DIRKS
Emeritus Professor of Anthropology
Illinois State University
America’s Gilded Age, the last quarter of the nineteenth century, is renowned for the excesses of robber barons and tycoons. The lavishness of their tables impressed contemporaries and historians alike. Continue reading
“For many people Henry Ford’s 1913 Detroit assembly line is a symbol of technological triumph. This book shows that Chicago’s 1865 disassembly line was an earlier more complete wonder, rapidly transporting animals, keeping them healthy and watered, dividing them into a wide variety of products, communicating ownership and destination, and keeping meticulous accounts of all the processes. Continue reading
Presented by Dave Hoekstra and Paul Nathin
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. loved the fried catfish and lemon icebox pie at Memphis’s Four Way restaurant. Beloved nonagenarian chef Leah Chase introduced George W. Bush to baked cheese grits and scolded Barack Obama for putting Tabasco sauce on her gumbo at New Orleans’s Dooky Chase’s. Continue reading
Presented by Daniel Block and Howard Rosing
Chicago began as a frontier town on the edge of white settlement and as the product of removal of culturally rich and diverse indigenous populations. The town grew into a place of speculation with the planned building of the Illinois and Michigan canal, a boomtown, and finally a mature city of immigrants from both overseas and elsewhere in the US. Continue reading
Jelly Belly’s Vice Chairman Bill Kelley will unwrap the roots of the Goelitz candy empire, which began as a storefront in Belleville, Illinois. While now headquartered in California, their legacy candy corn has been made in North Chicago since 1913. Continue reading