Sweet Home Chicago

Fine as Garb's book about African American Chicago is, it does not quite come to terms with a critical shift in political perspective, or the instances in which victory proved to be more a constriction than culmination.

Discovering Mexican Literature of the United States

A keystone of the Chicano literature revival, along with a more recent novel about Mexican American social mobility, form a grand legacy awaiting our discovery.

Millennial Election Complacency

For almost all of my friends, this election was the first they could vote in. It was something special to see my friends cast their votes, urge others to do the same, and contribute to the making of America’s future. To finally be old enough to participate in the election,…

Dance and the Divided City

To anyone who asked, Katherine Dunham repeated a consistent message: training in the performing arts prepared people to face life’s problems. Too often, she felt, individuals wandered through life unaware of how the world worked and how they fit into it.

The Wire & The City

The Wire would not necessarily be described as a series about race. But that was the beauty of it.

Touring the Divided City

Neighborhoods United for Change frames St. Louis not just as a divided city, but also as one that yokes dispossession in North City to growth in South St. Louis, revealing how both North and South share similar goals.

“Don’t do day here”

At the end of “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie”—all night scenes, of course—Cosmo, John Cassavetes’s grand and expansive character of a Hollywood club owner, is hiding his wound and still trying to run the show, but the sense is that he will bleed out before the dawn. They "don’t do day here."

Remembering Pruitt-Igoe

By the time my family moved into Pruitt-Igoe about 10 years after its opening, I had no idea the “solution” had already morphed into a nightmare.

The Conservative’s Dilemma

Trump’s slash-and-burn march to the White House, one of the most stunning accomplishments in the annals of American politics no matter how loathsome the man may be to so many, ended the dynastic claims of two powerful political families: The Republican Bushes and the Democrat Clintons.

Presidential Debates: Our Union of Words

“Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric,” said Irish poet W.B. Yeats, “out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” And it is out of the quarrel of presidential candidates that U.S. voters intuit their way closer toward Election Day.

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