By Steve Rhodes

“The women of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church were influential leaders in the congregations of Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Senior and Junior,” Oretha Winston writes for the Defender.
“Church Ladies: Untold Stories of Harlem Women in the Powell Era, written by Martia G. Goodson, explores these women’s lives at the church and their roles in a Northern civil rights movement that took them and their pastor, the fiery Powell Junior, from protests for jobs on Harlem’s 125th Street in the 1930s to demonstrations for justice in the halls of the United States Congress in the 1960s.
“The book animates testimony from over a dozen little-recognized women paints a vivid picture of that historic church and the struggles against Jim Crow in New York City and beyond.”

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Posted on January 5, 2016

Chicago And The Birth of Gospel Music

“Gospel music historian and radio host Robert Marovich will discuss his book A City Called Heaven during a Society of Midland Authors program at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 12, at Harold Washington Library Center,” the Society says in a press release. “God’s Posse, a gospel chorus, will perform. Admission is free, and no advance reservations are required.
“Published this year by the University of Illinois Press, the book follows gospel music from early hymns and camp meetings through the Great Migration that brought it to Chicago.
“In time, the music grew into the sanctified soundtrack of the city’s mainline black Protestant churches.
“In addition to drawing on print media and ephemera, Marovich mines hours of interviews with nearly 50 artists, ministers, and historians – as well as with relatives and friends of past gospel pioneers – to recover many forgotten singers, musicians, songwriters, and industry leaders.

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Posted on December 16, 2015

An Astonishing Spectacle

“It’s impossible to pinpoint the exact moment Americans embraced industrialized food. But the first Christmas after the Civil War is a key date to note. That’s when Chicago’s infamous Union Stock Yard opened to the public in 1865,” Anne Bramley reports for NPR.

“Its promoters clearly thought there could be no more appropriate way to observe a festive Christian holiday in the midst of America’s capitalist hothouse than to open the greatest livestock market the world would ever see,” writes Dominic A. Pacyga in his new book, Slaughterhouse: Chicago’s Union Stock Yard And The World It Made

“‘See’ is the key word here. Because the new modern industry was quite a spectacle to behold, says Pacyga, and it was by watching it that Americans began to change their relationship to meat.”
Click through for an interview with Pacyga.

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Posted on December 9, 2015

By The Poetry Foundation and The Beachwood Linking & Embedding Affairs Desk 

Volatile! A Poetry and Scent Exhibition opens on December 11 at 6:30 p.m. at the Poetry Foundation Gallery with a panel featuring curator and design historian Debra Riley Parr, post-media artist Brian Goeltzenleuchter, and perfumer David Moltz discussing intersections of scent and poetry.

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Posted on December 8, 2015

By Steve Rhodes

For those of you not in-the-know, Malcolm London, the activist poet who got arrested at Friday’s protest – and then released – is a pretty remarkable talent.
The CBS Evening News once called London, just 22 now, a new Carl Sandburg; Cornel West compared him to Gil Scott-Heron.
The Tribune in particular has been right on track chronicling London over the years; Rick Kogan in particular has been a champion of London’s.
Let’s take a look at London’s press (as always, please click through for the full stories) and some of his most notable performances, including his very own TED talks.

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Posted on December 2, 2015

By The Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Visualizing Impact launched OnlineCensorship.org last week, a new platform to document the who, what, and why of content takedowns on social media sites. The project, made possible by a 2014 Knight News Challenge award, will address how social media sites moderate user-generated content and how free expression is affected across the globe.
Controversies over content takedowns seem to bubble up every few weeks, with users complaining about censorship of political speech, nudity, LGBT content, and many other subjects. The passionate debate about these takedowns reveals a larger issue: social media sites have an enormous impact on the public sphere, but are ultimately privately owned companies. Each corporation has their own rules and systems of governance that control users’ content, while providing little transparency about how these decisions are made.

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Posted on November 26, 2015

Plus: The Smut Peddler Who Was Too Real For The Art Institute

1. Third-World Meets World-Class.
The press release:

A new book, Twenty-First Century Chicago, Second Edition, investigates the social, economic, political, and governmental conditions of the Chicago metropolitan area and analyses the region’s role in today’s globalized economy.
The book, published Thursday by Cognella, focuses on Chicago’s efforts in recent years to establish itself as a top-tier Global City and it examines the governmental actions and politics of Mayors Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel as they grappled with the city’s most pressing challenges.
“In this new edition, we included Mayor Emanuel’s re-election speech from April 7th this year because he lists some of his goals for city and states how he intends to govern,” said Dick Simpson, one of the books’ three editors, a political science professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a former Chicago alderman.
“We also included several articles that are highly critical of the mayor in the book, which is an anthology of news stories, memoirs, first-hand accounts, and little known research reports advocating change for Chicago.”

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Posted on November 20, 2015

By The Society of Midland Authors and the Hideout

The Chicago Book Expo – a free pop-up bookstore and literary extravaganza – is happening from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 21, at Columbia College at 1104 S. Wabash.
Stop by the expo’s book fair, where members of the Society of Midland Authors will be selling signed copies of their books.
The following authors are scheduled to appear at the Society’s tables:

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Posted on November 19, 2015

By Adam Harris/ProPublica

On November 13, terrorists hit Paris with a series of coordinated attacks – France’s deadliest since World War II. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) claimed responsibility for the attacks, which killed at least 129 people, bringing a declaration of war from French President Francois Hollande and condemnation from world leaders. Who is ISIS and how has the militant group grown to wield so much influence? We’ve rounded up some of the best reporting on the origins of ISIS, their role in the Syrian civil war and ties to terrorist attacks across the world. Did we miss anything? Submit your suggestions in the comments.

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Posted on November 17, 2015

By Steve Rhodes

In August, the New York Review of Books published “The Mystery of Isis,” an essay built upon the books ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror and ISIS: The State of Terror. The piece was written by a ‘former official of a NATO country with wide experience in the Middle East’ and good reason to remain anonymous.
I highly recommend reading the whole thing, but just to wet your appetite, here are some key excerpts and insights:
“Ahmad Fadhil was eighteen when his father died in 1984. Photographs suggest that he was relatively short, chubby, and wore large glasses. He wasn’t a particularly poor student – he received a B grade in junior high – but he decided to leave school. There was work in the garment and leather factories in his home city of Zarqa, Jordan, but he chose instead to work in a video store, and earned enough money to pay for some tattoos. He also drank alcohol, took drugs, and got into trouble with the police. So his mother sent him to an Islamic self-help class. This sobered him up and put him on a different path. By the time Ahmad Fadhil died in 2006 he had laid the foundations of an independent Islamic state of eight million people that controlled a territory larger than Jordan itself.
“The rise of Ahmad Fadhil – or as he was later known in the jihad, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi – and ISIS, the movement of which he was the founder, remains almost inexplicable.”

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Posted on November 16, 2015