A treasure trove of history, profiling many aspects of life in Northwest Indiana. There's the first trolley car to enter Crown Point; the 1954 blast at the Whiting Refinery; the efforts to create the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore in 1966, and the years of effort that lead up to it. There's World War II, the Korean War, and the Cold War. And there's also people having fun, creating communities, making history on the local level. Savor this trip down memory lane!
Hey Long Island . . . Do U Remember? began in 2008 when two lifelong friends from Oceanside, New York started a Facebook group to share pictures and history of Long Island's iconic places, themes and landmarks. Hey Long Island . . . Do U Remember? is now one of the largest New York history groups on Facebook with more than 142,000 members sharing pictures and information about Long Island's colourful past. Hey Long Island . . . Do U Remember? offers us a window into the past, showing life as it was then, and stirring in us the emotions of wonder and curiosity about those who have gone before us and the lives they lived. With more than 130 photographs, many of them seen here for the first time, Hey Long Island... Do U Remember? offers a stunning portrait of this one-of-a-kind place.
An urban neighborhood remakes itself every day—and unmakes itself, too. Houses and stores and streets define it in one way. But it’s also people—the people who make it their home, some eagerly, others grudgingly. A neighborhood can thrive or it can decline, and neighbors move in and move out. Sometimes they stay but withdraw behind fences and burglar alarms. If a neighborhood becomes no longer a place of sociability and street life, but of privacy indoors and fearful distrust outdoors, is it still a neighborhood? In the late 1960s and 1970s Carlo Rotella grew up in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood—a place of neat bungalow blocks and desolate commercial strips, and sharp, sometimes painful social contrasts. In the decades since, the hollowing out of the middle class has left residents confronting—or avoiding—each other across an expanding gap that makes it ever harder for them to recognize each other as neighbors. Rotella tells the stories that reveal how that happened—stories of deindustrialization and street life; stories of gorgeous apartments with vistas onto Lake Michigan and of Section 8 housing vouchers held by the poor. At every turn, South Shore is a study in contrasts, shaped and reshaped over the past half-century by individual stories and larger waves of change that make it an exemplar of many American urban neighborhoods. Talking with current and former residents and looking carefully at the interactions of race and class, persistence and change, Rotella explores the tension between residents’ deep investment of feeling and resources in the physical landscape of South Shore and their hesitation to make a similar commitment to the community of neighbors living there. Blending journalism, memoir, and archival research, The World Is Always Coming to an End uses the story of one American neighborhood to challenge our assumptions about what neighborhoods are, and to think anew about what they might be if we can bridge gaps and commit anew to the people who share them with us. Tomorrow is another ending.
Conceived in 1906, during an era of formal balls and Gatsbyesque lifestyles, the South Shore Country Club began as an idyllic lakefront retreat for the wealthiest of Chicago's movers and shakers. Marshall and Fox, architects of the Drake, Blackstone, and Edgewater Beach Hotels, were hired to design an opulent, Mediterranean-style clubhouse for a membership that included the Armour, Swift, Palmer, and Glessner families. The grounds provided a private stable, beach, and golf course. Tennis, horseback riding, and skeet shooting were enjoyed by guests the likes of Jean Harlow, Will Rogers, and Amelia Earhardt. Between the first and second World Wars, a housing boom brought the development of luxury cooperative apartments and mansions to the neighborhood surrounding the club. After World War II, the new money of an upwardly mobile middle class replaced the old money of the original members. Membership peaked with the Golden Anniversary in 1956-only to decline as the 1960s brought racial and economic changes to the surrounding community. On July 14, 1974, the club held its last "members-only" event and closed the door on what some have described as "the party that lasted 68 years." The Chicago Park District now owns this once exclusive property. It has been restored to its original design and is now open to the public as the South Shore Cultural Center.
In this deluxe, all color pictorial, Russ Porter chronicles his 50-year-old coverage of these two interurban stalwarts in more than 220 beautiful, previously-unpublished color photographs. The North Shore originated in 1894 as a single-track Waukegan street car line, eventually running from downtown Chicago to Milwaukee in 2 hours, 40 minutes, with 30 trains a day each way. Some of the more famous trains the line operated were the Electroliners. Introduced in 1941, they were considered some of the finest interurbans ever constructed in North America. The line was abandoned in 1963 for economic reasons. Russ covers the trains, facilities and terminals of both lines in four color photography. The South Shore, America’s last interurban, still operates between downtown Chicago and South Bend, Indiana, and continues to haul passengers as well as freight. Begun in 1908 as the Chicago, Lake Shore & South Bend Railway, the line was originally built to high engineering standards and later rebuilt by Samuel Insull. Over the years the South Shore has been noted for its street-running, its orange cars made by Niles, Standard, Kuhlman and Pullman, and its unique 273-ton Little Joes, among the largest electric locomotives ever made.
Nearly twenty years after it was first published, Along the Great South Bay continues to be the definitive source of Great South Bay history, recounting a century in which New York's most affluent families came to enjoy the cool summer breezes of the Atlantic Ocean and the boating, fishing, and bird shooting for which the area was renowned. Newly released in paperback as an illustrated edition, Along the Great South Bay now includes 182 photographs and maps, bringing back to life the tantalizing tale of an era long gone, but no longer forgotten.
Few would imagine that the land currently occupied by the Nature Conservancy's Cape May Migratory Bird Refuge, or "the Meadows, "? was once the picturesque Jersey Shore town of South Cape May. By the early twentieth century, a striking hotel and homes designed by renowned Victorian-era architects dotted the landscape. Residents and visitors alike spotted rumrunners racing across the beachfront during Prohibition and endured World War II with German submarines lurking just offshore. But by 1954, barely a trace of the town remained except for about twenty of the original houses, which were moved a mile away. Join one of the town's last residents, Joseph Burcher, as he chronicles life in South Cape May before the angry Atlantic swallowed this serene town.
This is a reissue of the novel inspired by Hunter S. Thompson's ether-fuelled, savage journey to the heart of the American Dream: We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold... And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.
One of the most fundamental human urges is to form a pair. Despite many tendencies that threaten traditional marriage and even make committed cohabitation problematic, very few people live through adulthood without at least one lengthy relationship, and up to ninety percent of Americans marry at least once in their lives. This pioneering volume draws attention to issues that question the unspoken traditional practices underlying coupling in America. In it, some of today's most innovative feminist scholars consider the dramatic changes couples have experienced over the past fifty years, such as the proliferation of divorce, the increase in ethnically-mixed relationships, the preponderance of older couples, and the new visibility of same-sex unions. Approaching their subject from a range of disciplines, the authors explore the couple as an enduring paradigm for human relationships, despite the changes in ideology and practice that couples have experienced over time. The essays delve into such subjects as the historical roots of modern marriage, the recent phenomenon of lesbian and gay commitment ceremonies, the home as a workplace and a place of refuge, and the stresses that turn a happy marriage into an unhappy one. One chapter explodes the myth that feminists are responsible for the high incidence of divorce, while another focuses on the financial worth of the wife after the demise of a long-standing marriage. Taken together, these essays impart a deep and complex picture of the challenges facing couples in our time. The vital and engaging narratives show that however anxious our society may be in the face of dissolving marriages and dysfunctional families, couples will continue to form the bedrock of American society in the twenty-first century.
This book explores the practice of traumatic storytelling that emerged out of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and came to play a key role in the lives of the members of the Khulumani Support Group for victims of apartheid-era political violence. Group members found traumatic storytelling both frustrating and yet also an important form of memory work that shaped how they saw themselves in the post-apartheid era. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the author examines how traumatic storytelling functioned not only as a kind of psychological healing and national political theatre, but also as a potent form of social relation, economic exchange, political activism, and expressive practice. With emphasis on the personal, social, and political significance of the act of traumatic storytelling, this volume asks why members of Khulumani, despite their many disappointments, continued to engage intensively in storying their experiences for themselves and others. Examining what powers storytelling held for both group members and their witnesses, and considering the ways in which storytelling enabled new senses of self and new understandings of what was possible in the years after the end of apartheid, this book considers what we might learn more broadly from the experiences of Khulumani about the possibilities—and limits—of traumatic-memory-making as an instrument of personal, social, and political repair. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, and criminology with interest in justice and post-conflict societies.
