‘Heaven Better Informed Tonight’

“Professor Emeritus David Bevington, the extraordinarily prolific editor of Shakespeare’s full canon and author of seminal books about English Renaissance playwrights, died peacefully at home in Chicago on Aug. 2. He was 88 years old,” the University of Chicago said Monday.
“Remembered by friends and family as a vibrant, generous and intellectually inquisitive man, the longtime University of Chicago professor possessed an infectious enthusiasm for the works he taught. He lived life with boundless energy – teaching, writing, hosting social events and playing chamber music with friends until just before he died.
“As a scholar, Bevington helped build UChicago’s Department of English Language and Literature into a national center for graduate study in the English Renaissance.”

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Posted on August 6, 2019

“Edward Snowden, the man who risked everything to expose the US government’s system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first time the story of his life, including how he helped to build that system and what motivated him to try to bring it down,” Macmillan Publishers says.
“Spanning the bucolic Beltway suburbs of his childhood and the clandestine CIA and NSA postings of his adulthood, Permanent Record is the extraordinary account of a bright young man who grew up online – a man who became a spy, a whistleblower, and, in exile, the Internet’s conscience. Written with wit, grace, passion, and an unflinching candor, Permanent Record is a crucial memoir of our digital age and destined to be a classic.”

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Posted on August 1, 2019

By The Ford Foundation

A consortium of foundations – the Ford Foundation, The J. Paul Getty Trust, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation – has acquired the archive of Johnson Publishing Company, publisher of the iconic Ebony and Jet magazines.
The archive includes more than 4 million prints and negatives comprising the most significant collection of photographs cataloguing African-American life in the 20th century.

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Posted on July 26, 2019

By Wendy Mellilo/The Conversation

Smokey Bear turns 75 on August 9th.
The star of the longest-running public-service advertising campaign in U.S. history is now big on social media, with Facebook, Flickr, Instagram and Twitter accounts.

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Posted on July 21, 2019

By SIU Press

“Between 1910 and 1920, the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL) inaugurated a massive organizing drive in the city’s meatpacking and steel industries.
“Although the CFL sought legitimately progressive goals, worked earnestly to organize an interracial union, and made major inroads among both black and white workers, their efforts resulted in a bitter defeat.
“David Bates provides a clear picture of how even the most progressive of intentions can be ground to a halt.”

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Posted on July 9, 2019

By Susanna Lee/The Conversation

At the end of May, it happened again. A mass shooter killed 12 people, this time at a municipal center in Virginia Beach. Employees had been forbidden to carry guns at work, and some lamented that this policy had prevented “good guys” from taking out the shooter.
This trope – “the good guy with a gun” – has become commonplace among gun rights activists. Where did it come from?

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Posted on July 5, 2019

By Mountain School via YouTube

“Hauling books from a really nice thrift store I visited while on vacation in Chicago.”

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Posted on June 28, 2019

By Peter Martin/Aeon

In the United States, the name Noah Webster (1758-1843) is synonymous with the word “dictionary.” But it is also synonymous with the idea of America, since his first unabridged American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828 when Webster was 70, blatantly stirred the young nation’s thirst for cultural independence from Britain.
Webster saw himself as a savior of the American language who would rescue it from the corrupting influence of British English and prevent it from fragmenting into a multitude of dialects. But as a linguist and lexicographer, he quickly ran into trouble with critics, educators, the literati, legislators and much of the common reading public over the bizarre nature of his proposed language reforms.
These spelling reforms – for example, wimmen for “women,” greeve for “grieve,” meen for “mean” and bred for “bread” – were all intended to simplify spelling by making it read the way that words were pronounced, yet they brought him the pain of ridicule for decades to come.

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Posted on June 25, 2019

By Semicolon

Semicolon Bookstore located will celebrate its grand opening at 515 North Halsted Street in July from Tuesday the 9th through Saturday the 13th.
The store has been open with shortened hours since June 8th in a soft-launch period to smooth operations and get to know the neighborhood.

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Posted on June 24, 2019

By Rand McNally

Just as the first day of summer begins around the third week of June, so launches updated editions of the guide that has been helping truck drivers navigate North America for decades, Rand McNally’s Motor Carriers’ Road Atlas.
The 2020 edition of the atlas – available in paperback, and a version with laminated pages and a spiral binding – released for sale Tuesday. The atlases are available at travel centers, in bookstores and on e-commerce stores, and at Rand McNally’s online store.

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Posted on June 19, 2019