What do Lucy Parsons, Clarence Darrow, Carl Sandburg, Mary MacLane, Lawrence Lipton, Elizabeth Davis (Queen of the Hoboes), Jun Fujita, Sherwood Anderson, Ralph Chaplin, Katherine Dunham, Djuna Barnes, Kenneth Rexroth, Sam Dolgoff, and Slim Brundage have in common? They were all Dil Picklers! Founded in 1914 by former Wobbly Jack Jones, Irish revolutionist Jim Larkin, and a group of fantastic IWW-oriented Bughouse Square hobos and soapboxers, the Dil Pickle in just a few years was widely recognized as the wildest, most playful, most creative, and most radical nightspot in the known universe - especially after Dr. Ben Reitman joined the club in 1917. In this book, Rosemont has collected forty-one reminiscences of the Dil Pickle by poets, artists, journalists, novelists, hobos, scholars, anarchist, wobblies, and other assorted radicals and oddballs. Among them are accounts by the club's founders, habitues, visitors, and critics. Rosemont's introduction provides the fullest account so far of the Dil Pickle's chaotic history, and goes on to explore the role of the Picklers in the arts and the 'Chicago Renaissance', along with its meaning(s) for our own troubled times.

Chicago Whispers illuminates a colorful and vibrant record of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people who lived and loved in Chicago from the city’s beginnings in the 1670s as a fur-trading post to the end of the 1960s. Journalist St. Sukie de la Croix, drawing on years of archival research and personal interviews, reclaims Chicago’s LGBT past that had been forgotten, suppressed, or overlooked. Included here are Jane Addams, the pioneer of American social work; blues legend Ma Rainey, who recorded “Sissy Blues” in Chicago in 1926; commercial artist J. C. Leyendecker, who used his lover as the model for “The Arrow Collar Man” advertisements; and celebrated playwright Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun. Here, too, are accounts of vice dens during the Civil War and classy gentlemen’s clubs; the wild and gaudy First Ward Ball that was held annually from 1896 to 1908; gender-crossing performers in cabarets and at carnival sideshows; rights activists like Henry Gerber in the 1920s; authors of lesbian pulp novels and publishers of “physique magazines”; and evidence of thousands of nameless queer Chicagoans who worked as artists and musicians, in the factories, offices, and shops, at theaters and in hotels. Chicago Whispers offers a diverse collection of alternately hip and heart-wrenching accounts that crackle with vitality.

A fascinating history of Chicago’s innovative and invaluable contributions to American literature and art from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century This remarkable cultural history celebrates the great Midwestern city of Chicago for its centrality to the modernist movement. Author Liesl Olson traces Chicago’s cultural development from the 1893 World’s Fair through mid-century, illuminating how Chicago writers revolutionized literary forms during the first half of the twentieth century, a period of sweeping aesthetic transformations all over the world. From Harriet Monroe, Carl Sandburg, and Ernest Hemingway to Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks, Olson’s enthralling study bridges the gap between two distinct and equally vital Chicago-based artistic “renaissance” moments: the primarily white renaissance of the early teens, and the creative ferment of Bronzeville. Stories of the famous and iconoclastic are interwoven with accounts of lesser-known yet influential figures in Chicago, many of whom were women. Olson argues for the importance of Chicago’s editors, bookstore owners, tastemakers, and ordinary citizens who helped nurture Chicago’s unique culture of artistic experimentation. Cover art by Lincoln Schatz

"When people imagine 1920s Chicago, they usually (and justifiably) think of Al Capone, speakeasies, gang wars, flappers and flivvers. Yet this narrative overlooks the crucial role the Windy City played in the modernization of America. The city's incredible ethnic variety and massive building boom gave it unparalleled creative space, as design trends from Art Deco skyscrapers to streamlined household appliances reflected Chicago's unmistakable style. The emergence of mass media in the 1920s helped make professional sports a national obsession, even as Chicago radio stations were inventing the sitcom and the soap opera. Join Joseph Gustaitis as he chases the beat of America's Jazz Age back to its jazz capital."--Page 4 of cover.

This book presents an unflinching investigation of homelessness in the United States—a problem that has been with us since the arrival of the first English settlers nearly 400 years ago. The terms historically used to describe them include "bums," "hoboes," "migrants," "street people," "transients," "tramps," and "vagrants." Just as varied as the words we have used to describe them are the reasons many people have found themselves living in the land of opportunity without permanent residence. The book considers homelessness and its distinctive character in three periods of American history: the era of tramps and hoboes in the late 1800s–early 1900s, the era of transients and migrants in the 1930s, and the era of homeless and "street" people in the last 40 years. It clarifies the multiple meanings of the word "homeless" today and demonstrates that homelessness is a symptom of more than one problem, leading to confusion about the issue of homelessness and hampering attempts to reduce its occurrence. Author Neil Larry Shumsky, PhD, also postulates that the treatment of homelessness in England before the colonization of North America laid the foundation of pervasive American attitudes and practices.

"Founded in 1914 by former Wobbly Jack Jones, Irish revolutionist Jim Larkin, and a group of fantastic IWW-oriented Bughouse Square hobos and soapboxers, the Dil Pickle Club, in just a few years, was widely recognized as the wildest, most playful, most creative, and most radical nightspot in the known universe--especially after Dr. Ben Reitman joined the club in 1917."-- Page 4 of cover.

The period between 1880 and 1918, at the end of which Jim Crow was firmly established and the Great Migration of African Americans was well under way, was not the nadir for black culture, James Smethurst reveals, but instead a time of profound response from African American intellectuals. The African American Roots of Modernism explores how the Jim Crow system triggered significant artistic and intellectual responses from African American writers, deeply marking the beginnings of literary modernism and, ultimately, notions of American modernity. In identifying the Jim Crow period with the coming of modernity, Smethurst upsets the customary assessment of the Harlem Renaissance as the first nationally significant black arts movement, showing how artists reacted to Jim Crow with migration narratives, poetry about the black experience, black performance of popular culture forms, and more. Smethurst introduces a whole cast of characters, including understudied figures such as William Stanley Braithwaite and Fenton Johnson, and more familiar authors such as Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and James Weldon Johnson. By considering the legacy of writers and artists active between the end of Reconstruction and the rise of the Harlem Renaissance, Smethurst illuminates their influence on the black and white U.S. modernists who followed.

"IN THIS LAVISHLY illustrated collection of activist essays, articles and reviews from the late 70s to the present, the noted author of The Wages of Whiteness, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness and other pathbreaking critical studies of America's "white problem" focuses on the complex issue of MISERABILISM in its many and invariably oppressive forms."--Publisher's website.