History

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and for genealogists, they certainly can be. Do you have old family photos stored in your attic or basement? Perhaps you have albums, boxes, or hard drives filled with hundreds, if not thousands, of photos. These are invaluable resources for genealogy! Have you taken time to…

Phil Christman is the author of the new book Midwest Futures - a collection of interconnected essays about the Midwest. The book expands on Christman's 2017 essay for The Hedgehog Review On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality. Both the essay and book start with a dissection of writing cliches about the Midwest as a…

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi's first book Stamped From The Beginning won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2016. It was, as the subtitle suggests, a "definitive history of racist ideas in America." Kendi's debut was an eye-opener for me when I read it, but the historical tome left me thirsty for guidance. What should…

Welcome back to the last installment of my series on the history of Mundelein. I usually would have ended my series with my last post, but if there's one thing I've learned while writing these, our present will eventually be someone's past, so why not make the lives of those future local historians a bit…

Welcome back to my series on the history of Mundelein! When we left off in my last post, it was April 1979: Mundelein's first computer store, ComputerLand, was promoting “micro-computers” as the next big thing, the old Ray brothers pavilion had been re-opened as the Diamond Lake Beach & Recreation Center, and residents were still celebrating…

As our long-time readers may know, the Cook Memorial Public Library District works closely with the Libertyville-Mundelein Historical Society, whose resources we often make use of when doing research for our blog posts. With this in mind, and considering that the library serves both communities, I thought that I would take this opportunity to do a…

Seeing as Oscar season is upon us, I thought this would be a great opportunity to delve into the history of the best place in town to catch up on those flicks all your friends are talking about and you've been-really-meaning-to-see-but-haven't-had-the-time: the cinema! Specifically, we are going to examine the long and happy history of…