It was the children who died most precipitously once they survived being born. For the period 1843-1872 children under five accounted for half of all deaths in the city, and proportionately higher in the slums and tenements. Chicago's statistics were the worst.  [read more]

Links to Other Web Sites


 
Anarchy and Anarchism
Chicago
Crime, Criminals, Police and Vice
Florence Kelley
Historical Archives
John Peter Altgeld
Legal
Leopold & Loeb
Women/Social Movements

Anarchy and Anarchism

    Anarchy and Anarchist by Michael J Schaack
    A history of the red terror and the social revolution in America and Europe.

    Evidence from the Haymarket Affair 1886-1887
    This Library of Congress collection showcases more than 3,800 images of original manuscripts, broadsides, photographs, prints and artifacts relating to the Haymarket Affair. The violent confrontation between Chicago police and labor protesters in 1886 proved to be a pivotal setback in the struggle for American workers' rights.

    The Haymarket Massacre Archive, Anarchy Archives
    An online research center on the history and theory of anarchism.

    The Labadie Collection, University of Michigan
    The Labadie Collection was established in 1911 when Joseph Labadie, a prominent Detroit anarchist, donated his library to the University of Michigan. Although the Collection was originally concerned mainly with anarchist materials (the field in which it remains strongest), its scope was later widened considerably to include a great variety of social protest literature together with political views from both the extreme left and the extreme right. Materials are now collected from all parts of the world. In addition to anarchism, the Collection's strengths include: civil liberties (with an emphases on racial minorities), socialism, communism, colonialism and imperialism, American labor history through the 1930s, the IWW, the Spanish Civil War, sexual freedom, women's liberation, gay liberation, the underground press, and student protest.


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Chicago

    Alchemy of Bones: Chicago's Leutgert Murder Case of 1897, Robert Loerzel
    This web site is a companion to Alchemy of Bones, featuring a wealth of information about the people, places and subjects in the book — including many stories, facts and pictures beyond those in its pages. The author hopes that this Web site will aid people researching the history of Chicago in the 1890s, genealogy, and topics such as criminology and journalism.

    Chicago Bibliography, Chicago Public Library
    The Chicago Public Library opened its doors to the public in 1873 and has maintained its status of one of the City's most democratic of institutions — providing all Chicagoans with a free and open place to gather, learn, connect, read and be transformed.  The 79 locations of the Chicago Public Library are at the forefront of providing innovative library services, technologies and tools Chicagoans need to achieve their personal goals and to establish the City's role as a competitive force in the global marketplace.

    Chicago History Museum
    The Chicago History Museum cares for, showcases, and interprets millions of authentic pieces of Chicago and U.S. history. Our ability to illuminate the past is a reminder of what really happened once upon a time, sheds light on the present, and compellingly informs the future.

    Chicago Street Guide
    These pages were designed to give you info about Chicago streets, to help you find your Chicago relatives in other sources. This site contains the largest list of Chicago streets and street name changes in the world. Alos includes a utility to convert a pre-1909 street address to a current number.

    Encyclopedia of Chicago
    Encyclopedia of Chicago

    Famous Online Cases, Clerk of the Circuit Court, Cook County
    The Clerk of the Circuit Court archives contain original court files and documents reflecting the history of Cook County and, in many cases, the United States. While every court case is very important to the participants, some cases involving famous (or infamous) people or situations engender strong and enduring public interest. This "Famous On-Line Cases" section is an online exhibit hall featuring information about some of the most famous (or notorious) case holdings. Each case includes a narrative summary, images of some of the original case documents and advice on how to get further information about the case.

    Forgotten Chicago
    The main goal of those behind this site is to discover and document little known elements of Chicago’s infrastructure, architecture, neighborhoods and general cityscape, whether existing or historical. Secondarily, it is to expose many of those often overlooked elements of Chicago’s built environment to a wider audience will result in more interest in their preservation.

    Hidden Truths: The Chicago City Cemetery & Lincoln Park
    Hidden Truths began when I discovered the recent Internet release of the historical Chicago Tribune. I wanted to know why there was a cemetery tomb in Lincoln Park. Contemporary references only implied the Couch family vault sat where there was once a cemetery. No one seemed to know why that last vestige of the graveyard remained.

    Homicide In Chicago 1870-1930
    Leigh Bienen and her colleagues transformed a handwritten record of the 11,000+ homicides in Chicago during this period into an interactive database, and provided historical, legal and photographic contextual material; along with a dozen video interviews and 14 scanned volumes of historical works.

    Hull House and its Neighborhoods, 1889-1963, University of Illinois, Chicago
    This website contains more than 900 separate texts, including correspondence, newspaper articles, unpublished memoirs, magazine and journal articles, maps, and hundreds of images of historic significance for documenting the life and times of Jane Addams, the history of the social settlement movement and of Hull-House, and the history of the Near West Side neighborhood and its immigrant communities.  

    Hull-House Yearbook (University of Illinois at Chicago)
    In the 1900s, the world-famous Hull-House settlement house, founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, began publishing yearbooks documenting their activities. The text as accompanied by photographs of programs, classes and events. This database contains digital images of the photographs in the Hull-House Yearbooks from the collection of the University of Illinois at Chicago's Special Collections Department. They span the years 1906-1941.

    Pullman Strike Commission Report
    This detailed report of the Strike Commission appointed by President Grover Cleveland investigated the causes of the Pullman Strike in Chicago in 1894 and the resulting labor unrest. The commission was headed by Carroll D. Wright, the U.S. Commissioner of Labor Statistics and its report included testimony by George Pullman, Eugene Debs, Samuel Gompers and over a hundred witnesses.

    The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot. Chicago Commission on Race Relations
    This 1923 report gave the findings of a commission appointed by Governor Frank Lowden to investigate the social and economic causes for the Chicago Race Riot of July 1919. The report was one of the early attempts by a large U.S. city to not only study the riot but to also investigate industry, housing, racial contacts, public opinion, and crime in Chicago to determine the conditions in Chicago which led to the riot. The report was published by the University of Chicago Press.


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Crime, Criminals, Police and Vice

    Chicago HSI
    Chicago HSI is an application to research spatial relationships between homicide events in Chicago. This tool is comprised of multiple federal, state, and regional data resources organized into an intuitive visual display.

    Crime and Society: A Comparative Criminology Tour of the World
    A Comparative Criminology Tour of the World.

    Homicide In Chicago 1870-1930
    Leigh Bienen and her colleagues transformed a handwritten record of the 11,000+ homicides in Chicago during this period into an interactive database, and provided historical, legal and photographic contextual material; along with a dozen video interviews and 14 scanned volumes of historical works.

    Mad in Pursuit of Family History: Moses "Muhoney" Rafael Flanagan, Family Outlaw, Susan B. Price
    Bio of Moses Rafael Flanagan as researched and told by a relative.  Moses Rafael Flanagan was murdered on the streets of Chicago in a Prohibition-related "hit," on 7 May 1919. He was 23. He was a hood, with a hood nickname -- Muhoney or Muroney.

    National Archive of Criminal Justice Data
    The mission of the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD) is to facilitate research in criminal justice and criminology, through the preservation, enhancement, and sharing of computerized data resources; through the production of original research based on archived data; and through specialized training workshops in quantitative analysis of crime and justice data.  NACJD is home to web sites for two separately maintained programs: the Project for Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) and the Homicide Research Working Group (HRWG).

    TruTV Crime Library
    TruTV's synopsis of the Leopold and Loeb case from beginning to end. 


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Florence Kelley

    An Inventory of the Florence Kelley Collection, University of Illinois, Chicago
    The Florence Kelley Collection includes published reports and articles by Florence Kelley, a printed program for a memorial in her honor, and a few scholarly articles about her work.

    Florence Kelley Letters Project
    Kathryn Kish Sklar, co-director of the Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender, and Beverly Wilson Palmer, research associate at Pomona College, have received a grant from the National Historic Publications and Records Commission of the National Archives and Records Administration to complete their one-volume edition of the letters of Florence Kelley. This eighteen-month grant, 2004-2006, will permit Sklar and Palmer to complete the project, having launched it with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2003-2004

    Florence Kelley, Spartacus Educational, UK
    Brief bio of Florence Kelley and a list of some of her publications

    John Crerar Library
    Florence Kelley worked part time as a librarian at the John Crerar Library.

    The Selected Letter of Florence Kelley

    William Darrah Kelley (1814-1890)
    Biography of William Darrah Kelley from the United States Congress' Biographical Directory.


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Historical Archives

    American Newspaper Repository (Duke University Library)
    The American Newspaper Repository Collection dates from 1852 through 2004 and consists of approximately six thousand bound newspaper volumes and more than 11,000 unbound newspaper items, most of which came, directly or indirectly, from the British Library. Notable long runs include the World, the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune. There are also runs of foreign language and immigrant papers, such as the Yiddish Forward, the Irish World, the Greek Atlantis, trade journals, Communist papers such as the Daily Worker, and other political papers. Many of these runs apparently exist nowhere else in the original format.

    Charles Booth and the Survey into Life and Labour in London (1886-1903)
    The Charles Booth Online Archive is a searchable resource giving access to archive material from the Booth collections of the Archives Division of the Library of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE ARchives) and the Senate House Library.

    Historical Census Browser
    The data and terminology presented in the Historical Census Browser are drawn directly from historical volumes of the U.S. Census of Population and Housing. From the University of Virginia, Geospatial and Statistical Data Center

    Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970
    Statistical Abstract data present here ranges from our most recent edition to the historical abstracts compiled throughout the decades

    Homicide In Chicago 1870-1930
    Leigh Bienen and her colleagues transformed a handwritten record of the 11,000+ homicides in Chicago during this period into an interactive database, and provided historical, legal and photographic contextual material; along with a dozen video interviews and 14 scanned volumes of historical works.

    Illinois Historic Preservation Agency
    The Illinois Historic Preservation Agency operates over 60 historic sites and memorials. The Agency also administers the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. The library is the state’s chief historical and genealogical research facility that is home to the state’s world-renowned Abraham Lincoln collection. The library houses the Agency's collection of more than 12 million items of Illinois history.

    Illinois State Archives
    The Illinois State Archives serves by law as the depository of public records of Illinois state and local governmental agencies which possess permanent administrative, legal, or historical research values. Its collections do not include manuscript, newspaper, or other nonofficial sources.

    Kheel Center Archives - Cornell University
    The Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives is the unit of Catherwood Library at Cornell University that collects, preserves, and makes accessible special collections pertaining to the history of the workplace and labor relations. 

    New York Public Library—Florence Kelley Papers
    Abstract:  The Florence Kelley papers document the professional career and family life of the Progressive-era social reformer. The papers include correspondence with her grandparents Isaac and Elizabeth Pugh, her parents William Bartram Kelley and Caroline Bonsall and her children Nicholas, William Darrah, Jr., John Bartram and Margaret Kelley. Kelley's professional correspondence documents her commitment to social reform, from her time at Hull House in Chicago to her tenure as general secretary of the National Consumers' League. The collection also includes manuscripts and typescripts of Kelley's writings, address books, scrapbooks, photographs, and a few items of ephemera.

    The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America (Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study)
    The library's principal holdings date from the founding of the United States to the present and are especially rich in the areas of women's rights movements, feminism, health, social reform, education, professional life, volunteer and civic efforts, family relationships, and travel.  

    The Pullman Strike
    Part of Northern Illinois University Libraries' digitization projects, this site is a collection of documents, images and video chronicling the Chicago Pullman Strike of 1894


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John Peter Altgeld


Legal


Leopold & Loeb


Women/Social Movements

    300 Women Who Changed the World, Encyclopedia Britannica Profiles
    Learn about 300 women who changed the world—review their accomplishments, locate their birthplaces, and discover the eras in which they lived.

    Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender (Binghamton University)
    The Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender promotes research, teaching, and intellectual exchange on historical issues related to women and gender.

    Illinois Women, Alliance Library System
    First Ladies of Illinois the first one hundred years 1818-1918

    Iowa Women's Archives Founders Digital Collection
    This digital collection includes photographs and scrapbooks featuring news clippings, newsletters, and correspondence formerly owned by Iowa natives Louise Noun and Mary Louise Smith. Noun was a social activist, art collector, and author of several books on women's history. Smith was a political activist who fought for equal rights and became the first female chair of the Republican National Committee. Together, they founded the Louise Noun - Mary Louise Smith Iowa Women's Archives, which opened in 1992 at The University of Iowa Libraries.

    National Women's History Museum: A History of Women in Industry
    The Progressive Era: 1880-1930
    The "violation of woman's sphere" that Bagley addresses had to do with the emerging 19th century idea that women’s lives should be centered within the home as wives and mothers. Only men had a place in the public world of work, activism, and politics. By working in the Lowell mills, and by speaking out against the exploitation of female workers at Lowell, Bagley was challenging those views of womanhood.

    Papers of M. Carey Thomas
    Brynmawr College Library/Guide to the Papers of M. Carey Thomas

    Sophia Smith Collection – Women’s History Archives at Smith College
    The Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College is an internationally recognized repository of manuscripts, archives, photographs, periodicals and other primary sources in women's history. 

    The Gerritsen Collection
    In the late 1800's, Dutch physician Aletta Jacobs and her husband C.V. Gerritsen began collecting books, pamphlets and periodicals reflecting the evolution of a feminist consciousness and the movement for women's rights. The Gerritsen Collection has since become the greatest single source for the study of women's history in the world.

    The Lucy Parsons Project
    The Lucy Parsons Project is an online educational resource designed to publicize the life of Lucy Parsons and the struggles she championed.  Many of the struggles in which she took part are responsible for the freedoms and privileges many Americans enjoy today.

    University of California Los Angeles, Urban Simulation Team, World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, a real-time visual simulation model.
    A real life simulation model helping users understand historic urban enviornments.

    Women and Social Movements in the United States 1600-2000
    This Worldwide Web site is intended to serve as a resource for students and scholars of U.S. history and U.S. women's history. Organized around the history of women in social movements in the U.S. between 1600 and 2000, the website seeks to advance scholarly debates and understanding at the same time that it makes the insights of women's history accessible to teachers and students at universities, colleges, and high schools.

    Women Working, 1800-1930
    Web site focusing on women's role in the United States economy and providing access to digitized historical, manuscript, and image resources selected from Harvard University's library and museum collections. The collection features approximately 500,000 digitized pages and images.


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