Back due to popular demand, another volume-Thee Almighty & Insane: Chicago Gang Business Cards from the 1960s & 1970s. Same format, but with all new content including a selection of older and rarer Chicago gang compliment cards from the North and West Sides made during the 1960s & (mostly) 1970s. This book documents a collection of historical ephemera from a period of time in which city-orchestrated displacement, the loss of industry, and racial antagonism created socioeconomic conditions that led to the formation and expansion of gangs in the streets, parks, and schools of Chicago. Once again, 70+ enlarged reproductions of original compliment cards listing members, territories, slogans, and declarations of loyalty/animosity, are brought to the forefront for examination and interpretation.

Police, the press, and the public all see the kind of violence that besets the inner city today as irrational and basically about turf, revenge, or drugs. Renowned criminologist and expert on gangs, John Hagedorn here tells a very different and little-known story centered on the dramatic rise and fall of a Mafia-like Latino organization in Chicago called "Spanish Growth & Development." Hagedorn's main informant is 'Sal Martino, ' an Italian Mafioso who became intimately involved with the "In$ane Family," one of the factions of Spanish Growth & Development. Through Sal's first-hand account, Hagedorn shows that the violence was not a result of "disorganized crime" but rather the outcome of SGD's prolonged demise. He gives us for the first time a detailed the history of SGD-the reasons for its creation, the uneasy alliances between gang families, the organization's reliance on bottom-up police corruption, and its ultimate collapse in a pool of blood at a 1999 "peace" conference. Revealing the hidden and riveting stories of Chicago gangs' efforts to build structures ostensibly to reduce violence and to organize crime, of the integration of gang and mafia history, and of the central role of police corruption in Chicago's gangland, "The In$ane Chicago Way" makes a powerful argument for the need to regard corruption as the bedrock of gang power. It dispels the notion that gang violence can be explained solely by ecological, neighborhood-based processes and sheds light on the current gang situation in Chicago by laying bare its history while raising disturbing questions for researchers, policy-makers, and the public.

Beyond Heaven: Chicago House Party Flyers from 1983-1989 catalogs a collection of flyers and other house music related ephemera from the years 1983 to 1989, courtesy of Mario "Liv It Up" Luna, a DJ living in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago during this time. These flyers, also called pluggers, were used for promotional purposes. They would be placed in record stores and passed out at schools and on the street to help get the word out about upcoming house music events. Although by no means encyclopedic, this collection documents a variety of figures from Chicago's emerging house scene: first generation "kings of house" alongside the WBMX Hot Mix 5 and other lesser-known DJs at a variety of venues. Also included in the mix are promoters, record stores, labels, and an assortment of party crews and dance groups who contributed to the growth and atmosphere of house music in Chicago. This book offers a taste of what many consider to be the best times of their lives, and for others acts as a gateway to one of greatest eras in the history of Chicago music.

Featuring a selection of Chicago gang "compliment cards" from Brandon Johnson's personal collection, this book is an ode to an idiosyncratic print subculture that arose in Chicago just prior to the digital age. Inspired by the social, athletic, and political groups that preceded them, street gangs in Chicago made business cards displaying their symbols, nicknames, territories, and enemies as a means to assert their pride, recruit new members, and serve as general tokens of affiliation. Less intended, but maybe more significant is the role of these cards as historical artifacts--not only documenting the specific histories of these gangs and their members, but also the larger social dynamics of a contentious time period of migration in the city of Chicago. With enlarged reproductions of 60+ original cards, this book is an appreciation of Chicago gang "compliment cards": their hand-drawn graphics, their blackletter typefaces, their outlandish names and clever slogans.

Filled with glamour, mystery, and madness, Archie and Amélie is the true story chronicling a tumultuous love affair in the Gilded Age. John Armstrong "Archie" Chanler was an heir to the Astor fortune, an eccentric, dashing, and handsome millionaire. Amélie Rives, Southern belle and the goddaughter of Robert E. Lee, was a daring author, a stunning temptress, and a woman ahead of her time. Archie and Amélie seemed made for each other—both were passionate, intense, and driven by emotion—but the very things that brought them together would soon tear them apart. Their marriage began with a “secret” wedding that found its way onto the front page of the New York Times, to the dismay of Archie’s relatives and Amélie’s many gentleman friends. To the world, the couple appeared charmed, rich, and famous; they moved in social circles that included Oscar Wilde, Teddy Roosevelt, and Stanford White. But although their love was undeniable, they tormented each other, and their private life was troubled from the start. They were the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald of their day—a celebrated couple too dramatic and unconventional to last—but their tumultuous story has largely been forgotten. Now, Donna M. Lucey vividly brings to life these extraordinary lovers and their sweeping, tragic romance. “In the Virginia hunt country just outside of Charlottesville, where I live, the older people still tell stories of a strange couple who died some two generations ago. The stories involve ghosts, the mysterious burning of a church, a murder at a millionaire’s house, a sensational lunacy trial, and a beautiful, scantily clad young woman prowling her gardens at night as if she were searching for something or someone—or trying to walk off the effects of the morphine that was deranging her. I was inclined to dismiss all of this as tall tales Virginians love to spin out; but when I looked into these yarns I found proof that they were true. . . .” —Donna M. Lucey on Archie and Amélie