Recommended Reading List

This is a list of some of the most famous books on topics of Chicago history, with a focus on the South Side of Chicago. Some of the titles here are the most recent materials published in this field. This bibliography is meant to inspire leisure reading and is not meant to be an authoritative list. This is an informal compilation written with help from University of Chicago undergraduate and graduate students, lecturers and staff. The books do not reflect the official views of the University.

Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago

From the book: Through two award-winning National Public Radio documentaries, and now this powerful book, LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman have made it their mission to be loud voices from one of this country's darkest places, Chicago's Ida B. Wells housing project. Our America evokes the unforgiving world of these two amazing young men and their struggle to survive unrelenting tragedy.

Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago

From Publishers Weekly: With more landfills per square mile than any other American city, Chicago has had some particularly colorful controversies over waste disposal over the last century. Professor Pellow traces these conflicts, examining how poor neighborhoods come to be burdened with a disproportionate amount of pollution and refuse. He offers background on Chicago's waste management from the 1880s to the present, focusing in particular on the struggle for environmental justice.

Slim's Table: Race, Respectability, and Masculinity

Distinguished Publication Award of the American Sociological Association. Review from Robert Merton of Columbia: "I know of no other sociological work – not even Du Bois's classic Philadelphia Negro – which begins to provide as keenly sensitive and deeply understanding a word-portrait of poor working-class black men. I found myself wholly absorbed by the unpretentious and subtle analysis of the complex interplay between standards of moral worth and feelings of self-esteem."

The Promised Land

From the book: Between 1940 and 1970 five million Africa-Americans left the rural South for the promised land of the urban North in the great mass migration in our country's history. This extraordinary book gives that movement faces and voices. With the passion and human observation of a great novelist, Nicholas Lemann tells the stories of the men and women who escaped sharecroppers' shacks for the dubious shelter of ghetto housing projects . . .

Constructing Chicago

From the book: Perceptive look at the creation of the parks, churches, skyscrapers, and civic buildings of the quintessential American city, Chicago. Bluestone finds that the structure of nineteenth-century Chicago was influenced as much by the moral, cultural, and aesthetic aspirations of its local elite as by the untempered forces of commerce and capital.

Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education

Professor Allen is Dean of the Division of the Humanities at University of Chicago. From the book: By combining brief readings of philosophers and political theorists with personal reflections on race politics in Chicago, Allen proposes strikingly practical techniques of citizenship. She uncovers the ordinary, daily sacrifices citizens make to keep democracy working – and offers methods for recognizing and reciprocating those sacrifices.

Making of the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960

From the book: Hirsch argues that in the post-depression years Chicago was a "pioneer in developing concepts and devices" for housing segregation. Hirsch shows that the legal framework for the national urban renewal effort was forged in the heat generated by the racial struggles waged on Chicago's South Side. He chronicles the strategies used by ethnic, political, and business interests in reaction to the great migration of southern blacks in the 1940s.

Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago

From New England Journal of Medicine (9/26/02): Why heat waves are such a quiet menace and how social conditions contributed to more than 700 deaths during a week-long wave of unprecedented heat and humidity in Chicago in 1995 are the focus of Heat Wave . . . The term "social isolation" is usually applied to those living in remote locations, but Klinenberg demonstrates that this unfortunate condition also applies to thousands of people (primarily senior citizens) in our nation's largest cities . . . Heat Wave is a fascinating book, in part because the social conditions that led to Chicago's 1995 tragedy still exist, for the most part, throughout our nation and its aging population . . .

When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor

Wilson is a former University of Chicago professor. From Publishers Weekly: A galvanizing blueprint for concerned citizens and policy makers, his scholarly study focuses on Chicago's inner-city residents. From Amazon.com: Wilson offers his take on welfare and inner-city joblessness.

Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity

By Professor Stewart of University of Chicago. From the book: The rise of cinema as the predominant American entertainment around the turn of the last century coincided with the migration of hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the South to the urban "land of hope" in the North. This richly illustrated book, discussing many early films and illuminating black urban life in this period, is the first detailed look at the numerous early relationships between African Americans and cinema. Introductory article at http://www-news.uchicago.edu/citations/05/050728.stewart.html.

Bridges of Memory

From Publisher's Weekly: A two-hour interview may only scrape the surface of a life, but Black's 36 oral histories exceed the sum of their parts. Many of the biographies of these political leaders, activists, artists and educators turn on how their considerable gifts were made manifest in the "promised land" of Chicago in the early 20th century. Among all the leitmotifs - a dissertation could be written on the repetition of the words "money," "education" and "hustle" - the conflict between national identity and racial identity emerges as one of the most profound . . .

Black Metropolis

From the book: Ground-breaking when first published in 1945, Black Metropolis remains a landmark study of race and urban life. Based on a mass of research conducted by Works Progress Administration field workers in the late 1930s, it is a historical and sociological account of the people of Chicago's South Side. Note: This book is sometimes studied more as a primary text. It is a famous work that is studied in some Univ. of Chicago history classes. For more recent research, refer to other books in this list.

Learning More?

If you are interested in learning more or going to different parts of the South Side by volunteering, here are a few resources:

• University Community Service Center
• Civic Knowledge Project, Division of the Humanities
• Recognized Student Organizations - Search Engine for community service groups

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