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.