Jeff Nichols

I had a fun interview with Erin Snodgrass at Business Insider about a wonderful Chicago photo of a couple outside of divorce court. Check it out!

My interview with the Japanese TV program 「比較する世界」(“The World to Compare”) aired recently. I talked about saloon culture and crime in Chicago before Prohibition. It was a wonderful experience!

I worked as an archival research on the Kartemquin documentary For The Left Hand. The Chicago Tribune called it “seriously inspiring.” The film will be running nationally on PBS in November.

Roy’s World, a documentary looking at the Chicago childhood of writer Barry Gifford, makes its Chicago premiere at the Music Box on November 13. Barry Gifford will be there, too. I found much of the Chicago footage and images for this movie. I am really amazed how beautiful this documentary is.

For the Chicago Reader, I wrote a piece on a homegrown Chicago religion and its incredibly odd founder, Cyrus Teed. If you are into reading about religions that believe that heterosexual marriage is immoral and that the world is hollow, this story is for you.

With more than a year of being cooped up indoors, you would think that I would have been better at updating this website. I had a few articles in the Chicago Reader last year. The man who spearheaded the city’s response to the Spanish flu epidemic, Chicago Health Commissioner John Dill Robertson, was a unique Chicago character: a crackpot clinician, a masterful administrator, and ruthless political operator. Rudolph F. Michaelis is one of my favorite amateur Chicago photographers. His glass plates of Chicago were found in an attic in Berkeley, California.

I talked to Patrick and Christopher at Windy City Historians about what to see in Chicago if you could time travel to. the 1893 Columbian Exposition. It was really fun, and I hope to be back again.

My latest story for the Chicago Reader is on the Spanish influenza epidemic at Great Lakes Naval Training Station. It’s a distillation of my undergrad honors thesis, with additional research from National Archives-College Park. (At one time I thought it might go into my dissertation, which took a different direction.) I have gotten a lot of good feedback on this story, which, unfortunately, is harrowing.

I was recently interviewed by Ouest-France, the leading French daily newspaper in terms of circulation, for footage of the 1944 Battle for Brest that I stumbled upon. (The article, which was also in the print edition, is behind a paywall.)  In November, I went on WGN Radio with Matt Bubala to discuss the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and Chicago neighborhood history.  That was a lot of fun!

Roy’s World, a film about writer Barry Gilford and his childhood in Chicago in the Fifties, was selected for the Glasgow Film Festival, where it got great reviews. I can’t wait until this film has a wide release in the United States. (Unfortunately, Covid-19 has put a lot of things on hold.) A number of images that I uncovered for a 2016 Chicago Reader story about the fight to desegregate Chicago schools made their way into a major ad by the 2020 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. 

In January, the National Endowment of the Humanities awarded St. Augustine College a $99,700 grant for strengthening career readiness for Chicago Early Childhood Educators through the Humanities. A bilingual college, the vast majority of Augustine College’s student body is Latinx. With the grant, St. Augustine is developing series of core classes with topics drawn from the history, literature, art, and theater of Chicago. I was the primary consultant for the history portion of the grant. I am working to create the new curriculum, which, I hope, will inspire a new generation of children to explore the culture and history of Chicago. 

I’ve done a number of pieces for the Chicago Reader over the last few months. My first cover story for the Reader was an incomplete history of “exotic” animals running free in the city. I wrote a second story for the centennial of the 1919 Chicago Race Riot, a piece on Franklin Denison, a soldier unfairly labeled the “chief agitator” behind the riot. In a different time, it would be easy to imagine Denison as a U.S. senator, but he has been largely forgotten. I did a piece on the secret field notes from the Committee of Fifteen, Chicago’s powerful anti-prostitution organization. Committee of Fifteen investigators gathered evidence at houses of prostitution, dancehalls, and taverns. I also wrote a story on advice given by guidebooks, reporters, and visitors on what to bring, where to stay, what to eat, and what to see in Chicago during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.

I am very grateful that the Chicago Reader has given me an opportunity to write these stories. Today they announced their move to a nonprofit model for next year. If you care about local journalism, consider kicking them a few bucks.

I put up two very different stories the last few days. One was on Jimmy Terry, a forgotten working-class daredevil who performed one of the craziest stunts in Chicago history. The other was on race in Chicago in 1919, revealed through the letters of two soldiers from the South Side. I also saw the premiere of the new Eastland documentary, which incorporated long-lost footage I found in two archives. It is really great film–I hope that you check it out. Finally, Chicago Magazine chose my Twitter account for their Best of Chicago issue!

I recently wrote a wee piece for Chicago Magazine on the work of Ferd Himme, whose extraordinarily corny cartoons graced the employee magazine of the Chicago Transit Authority from the late Forties to the early Seventies. My latest Sightseeing piece for the Chicago Reader involves Mayor Richard J. Daley’s crazy scheme to place a major airport in Lake Michigan, miles from shore.

I have a couple of new pieces in Sightseeing, the Chicago history page of the Chicago Reader. The first is on Birdie Reeve, a forgotten vaudeville star with an act relying on her phenomenal speed typing skills, her photographic memory, and her sharp wit. I hope my affection for Birdie comes through. I also have a new story based on a funny, strange dictionary of criminal slang produced by the Chicago Police Training Academy. At the end, there’s a doozy of quiz.

Janny Scott’s new book, The Beneficiary, has come out to great reviews. I did research on an important, mysterious character in her book: her great-grandfather, Colonel Robert L. Montgomery. It was a real honor to work on this project.