The famous, the infamous, and the unjustly forgotten—all receive their due in this biographical dictionary of the people who have made Chicago one of the world’s great cities. Here are the life stories—provided in short, entertaining capsules—of Chicago’s cultural giants as well as the industrialists, architects, and politicians who literally gave shape to the city. Jane Addams, Al Capone, Willie Dixon, Harriet Monroe, Louis Sullivan, Bill Veeck, Harold Washington, and new additions Saul Bellow, Harry Caray, Del Close, Ann Landers, Walter Payton, Koko Taylor, and Studs Terkel—Chicago Portraits tells you why their names are inseparable from the city they called home.

How do professional associations build their resources and establish authroity? What are the conditions under which professional expertise can be mobilized for political action? If professional organizations are endowed with a wealth of resources, do they use them responsibly or only for economic monopoly? What is the potential scope of professional action today? In this pathbreaking study of the legal profession, Terence Halliday raises and addresses these questions combining extensive data from the rich archives o the Chicago Bar Association, one of the nation's largest and wealthiest bar organizations, with data from a national survey of bar legislative and judicial action. Beyond Monopoly demonstrates that the primary commitment of lawyers to economic monopoly has long been complemented by "civic professionalism" as the legal profession takes on more responsibility in the American democratic system when state capabilities diminish. Through his examination of three types of state crises in the 1950s and 1960s—the challenges to legitimacy in the legal system, the crisis of individual rights during McCarthyism and the civil rights eras, and the fiscal crises of various state governments—Halliday shows that large bar associations can have extensive influence on any institution that is regulated by law. He argues that lawyers have the capability of turning social and political issues into technical legal matters in what he calls an "idiom of legalism." Under technical guise, lawyers come to exercise moral authority. Halliday maintains that the American legal profession over the past century has gone from a formative stage, when controlling its market in the delivery of legal services was paramount, to an established phase in the past two decades, when it has committed extensive resources to the complex needs of the modern state. A de facto bargain has been struck: if the state leaves the profession's monopoly fairly intact, the profession can use its expert resources to help the state adapt to strain and crisis. It can do so not only in the legal system, where it has been championing "autonomous" law, but in other spheres as well—from the economy to the private sphere of individual rights. Halliday confirms that the legal profession deploys its expertise not merely to attain professional dominance, to control a market, or to purvey an ideology, but to increase the viability of democratic institutions. Beyond Monopoly introduces a pioneering approach to a historical and comparative sociology of the professions that will be of vital interest not only to sociologists, but to political scientists and lawyers as well.

Illinois State Historical Society Superior Achievement Award, 2013 As the first African American elected to the Illinois General Assembly, John W. E. Thomas was the recognized leader of the state’s African American community for nearly twenty years and laid the groundwork for the success of future Black leaders in Chicago politics. Despite his key role in the passage of Illinois’ first civil rights act and his commitment to improving his community against steep personal and political barriers, Thomas’s life and career have been long forgotten by historians and the public alike. This fascinating full-length biography—the first to address the full influence of Thomas or any Black politician from Illinois during the Reconstruction Era—is also a pioneering effort to explain the dynamics of African American politics and divisions within the Black community in post–Civil War Chicago. In From Slave to State Legislator, David A. Joens traces Thomas’s trajectory from a slave owned by a doctor’s family in Alabama to a prominent attorney believed to be the wealthiest African American man in Chicago at the time of his death in 1899. Providing one of the few comprehensive looks at African Americans in Chicago during this period, Joens reveals how Thomas’s career represents both the opportunities available to African Americans in the postwar period and the limits still placed on them. When Thomas moved to Chicago in 1869, he started a grocery store, invested in real estate, and founded the first private school for African Americans before becoming involved in politics. From Slave to State Legislator provides detailed coverage of Thomas’s three terms in the legislature during the 1870s and 1880s, his multiple failures to be nominated for reelection, and his loyalty to the Republican Party at great political cost, calling attention to the political differences within a Black community often considered small and homogenous. Even after achieving his legislative legacy—the passage of the first state civil rights law—Thomas was plagued by patronage issues and an increasingly bitter split with the African American community frustrated with slow progress toward true equality. Drawing on newspapers and an array of government documents, Joens provides the most thorough review to date of the first civil rights legislation and the two controversial “colored conventions” chaired by Thomas. Joens cements Thomas’s legacy as a committed and conscientious lawmaker amid political and personal struggles. In revealing the complicated rivalries and competing ambitions that shaped Black northern politics during the Reconstruction Era, Joens shows the long-term impact of Thomas’s friendship with other burgeoning African American political stars and his work to get more black representatives elected. The volume is enhanced by short biographies of other key Chicago African American politicians of the era.

In The Challenge of American History, Louis Masur brings together a sampling of recent scholarship to determine the key issues preoccupying historians of American history and to contemplate the discipline's direction for the future. The fifteen summary essays included in this volume allow professional historians, history teachers, and students to grasp in a convenient and accessible form what historians have been writing about.

This is the first paperback edition of a moving appraisal of the infamous Haymarket bombing (May 1886) and the trial that followed it--a trial that was a cause célèbre in the 1880s and that has since been recognized as one of the most unjust in the annals of American jurisprudence. Paul Avrich shows how eight anarchists who were blamed for the bombing at a workers' meeting near Chicago's Haymarket Square became the focus of a variety of passionately waged struggles.

The legal profession is stratified primarily by the character of the clients served, not by the type of legal service rendered, as John P. Heinz and Edward O. Laumann convincingly demonstrate. In their classic study of the Chicago bar, the authors draw on interviews with nearly 800 lawyers to show that the profession is divided into two distinct hemispheres--corporate and individual--and that this dichotomy is reflected in the distribution of prestige among lawyers.