In Chicago, it has long been common knowledge that the neighborhoods have been overshadowed by the Loop's luster. Portage Park is one of these hidden gems, offering up a wealth of history, culture, and art. As the site of a lesser-known Chicago Portage, the largest retail district outside the Loop at Six Corners, the visual backdrop of movies such as My Life and The Color of Money, and the spot where both Abraham Lincoln and John Dillinger legendarily stayed and the sister of the czar of Bulgaria prayed, this corner of Chicago has seen its share of glitz and glory. Discover Portage Park's architectural treasures, whether it is in its place as a part of Chicago's "Bungalow Belt," its wealth of notable buildings spanning different genres and time periods, or its beautiful churches and grand movie palaces. An area diverse in culture, many peoples, beginning with Native Americans and going onto the Yankees, Irish, Scandinavians, eastern Europeans, and even a Tibetan lama, have made Portage Park their home, each adding their own unique contribution to the vibrant cultural landscape. The site of the largest concentration of Chicago's legendary Polish population, it is also the place where immigrants left the inner city's ethnic enclaves to take part in the American dream.

As editor and executive editor of the Ravenna-Kent (Ohio) Record-Courier, Loris C. Troyer has been an influential figure in Portage County, Ohio, for over 60 years. Since retiring, he has written a weekly historical column. This book collects over 140 of his most memorable essays.

In this profound and disturbing exploration of the nature of guilt and vengeance and the power of evil, Israeli Nazi-hunters, 30 years after the end of World War II, find a silent old man deep in the Amazon jungle who turns out to be Adolf Hitler.

When as a child she first saw a canoe gliding on Lake Alexander in central Minnesota, Sue Leaf was mesmerized. The enchantment stayed with her and shimmers throughout this book as we join Leaf and her family in canoeing the waterways of North America, always on the lookout for the good life amid the splendors and surprises of the natural world. The journey begins with a trip to the border lakes of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, then wanders into the many beautiful little rivers of Minnesota and Wisconsin, the provincial parks of Canada, the Louisiana bayou, and the arid West. A biologist and birder, Leaf considers natural history and geology, noticing which plants are growing along the water and which birds are flitting among the branches. Traveling the routes of the Ojibwe, voyageurs, and map-making explorers, she reflects on the region's history, peopling her pages with Lewis and Clark, Jean Lafitte, Henry Schoolcraft, and Canada's Group of Seven artists. Part travelogue, part natural and cultural history, Portage is the memoir of one family's thirty-five-year venture into the watery expanse of the world. Through sunny days and stormy hours and a few hair-raising moments, Sue and her husband, Tom, celebrate anniversaries on the water; haul their four kids along on family adventures; and occasionally make the paddle a social outing with friends. Along the way they contend with their own human nature: they run rapids when it would have been wiser to portage, take portages and learn truths about aging, avoid portages and ponder risk-taking. Through it all, out in the open, in the wild, in the blue, exploring the river means encountering life--good decisions and missed chances, risks and surprises, and the inevitable changes that occur as a family canoes through time and learns what it means to be human in this natural world.

This is a history of 300 years of trade and tradition on Lake Superior's North Shore, with special interest in Grand Portage where the Grand Portage National Monument was established.

Seven muddy miles transformed a region and a nation This fascinating account explores the significance of the Chicago Portage, one of the most important—and neglected—sites in early US history. A seven-mile-long strip of marsh connecting the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers, the portage was inhabited by the earliest indigenous people in the Midwest and served as a major trade route for Native American tribes. A link between the Mississippi River and the Atlantic Ocean, the Chicago Portage was a geopolitically significant resource that the French, British, and US governments jockeyed to control. Later, it became a template for some of the most significant waterways created in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The portage gave Chicago its name and spurred the city’s success—and is the reason why the metropolis is located in Illinois, not Wisconsin. A History of the Chicago Portage: The Crossroads That Made Chicago and Helped Make America is the definitive story of a national landmark.