Never before has the story of Chicagoland's great southwest side been told in such a sweeping manner. This book contains the only history of the Belt railroad yards, the giant Clearing Industrial District, Midway Airport and many other subjects too numerous to mention in such a short space. More important yet are the stories of the Indians and settlers, the aviators and industrialists and the ordinary people who have made Clearing what it is today. "A Little Known Story of the Land Called Clearing" is the end product of twenty years of research by local author Robert Hill whose grandfather arrived in 1909 and opened the first hardware store in the community. Originally published in a limited quantity in 1983, this treasure trove of local Chicagoland history has been reissued and updated by permission of the Hill family. Now the generations to come will learn the history of a land called Clearing.

Discover the history of Garfield Ridge, one of the 77 communities of Chicago. This sometimes forgotten corner of the city has a long history that is interwoven with the history of Chicago itself. With over 60 photos and maps this book, put together by the Clear-Ridge Historical Society, is the first attempt at telling the story of this historic community.

Sociologist Maria Kefalas travels to one of Chicago's last remaining working-class "white" neighborhoods to consider the significance of home, community and nation a generation after Martin Luther King's supporters marched through the streets, demanding an end to segregation, .

Training ground of heroes and daredevils. Transportation hu

Though few of us now live close to the soil, the world we inhabit has been sculpted by our long national saga of settlement. At the heart of our identity lies the notion of the family farm, as shaped by European history and reshaped by the vast opportunities of the continent. It lies at the heart of Jane Brox's personal story, too: she is the daughter of immigrant New England farmers whose way of life she memorialized in her first two books but has not carried on. In this clear-eyed, lyrical account, Brox twines the two narratives, personal and historical, to explore the place of the family farm as it has evolved from the pilgrims' brutal progress at Plymouth to the modern world, where much of our food is produced by industrial agriculture while the small farm is both marginalized and romanticized. In considering the place of the farm, Brox also considers the rise of textile cities in America, which encroached not only upon farms and farmers but upon the sense of commonality that once sustained them; and she traces the transformation of the idea of wilderness--and its intricate connection to cultivation--which changed as our ties to the land loosened, as terror of the wild was replaced by desire for it. Exploring these strands with neither judgment nor sentimentality, Brox arrives at something beyond a biography of the farm: a vivid depiction of the half-life it carries on in our collective imagination.