This extensive guide shows how the history and culture of Illinois are embedded in the names of its towns, cities, and other geographical features. Edward Callary unearths the origins of names of nearly three thousand Illinois communities and the circumstances surrounding their naming and renaming. Organized alphabetically, the entries are concise, engaging, and full of fascinating detail revealing the rich ethnic history of the state, the impact of industrialization and the coming of the railroads, and insight into local politics and personalities. Many entries also provide information on local pronunciation, the name’s etymology, and the community’s location, all set in historical and cultural context. A general introduction locates Illinois place names in the context of general patterns of place naming in the United States. An extremely useful reference for scholars of American history, geography, language, and culture, Place Names of Illinois also offers intriguing browsing material for the inquisitive reader and the curious traveler.

"Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua traces Brooklyn's transformation from a freedom village into a residential commuter satellite that supplied cheap labor to the city and the region.".

James L. Meng is a retired labor relations arbitrator who was born in the mid-American steel town of Granite City, Illinois. His parents were born in Freeburg and Newton, Illinois and were active civic leaders in their community. In his formative years, James met several occasions that comprised a very interesting youth. After graduating from college, he joined the Missouri Air National Guard where he was awarded the Airman’s Medal for Valor. Afterwards he continued his education for a Master degree. He married his lovely wife, Beverly, and had two children and four grandchildren. While cleaning out his basement, he discovered several inherited boxes containing family pictures and documents. Although not a genealogist, which he says with a great deal of pride, he fortunately decided to share his information with others, both the born and unborn. This book is written to reflect the lives and personalities of real people – not just the genealogical statistics of born on date, married on date, had child one, two, three and died on this date. These were real people who realized and conquered a variety of life challenges in Germany and in their newly adopted home in America. As a nation of immigrants, we should not let their contributions be forgotten...

Through prose and pictures, There and Here: Small Illinois Towns with Big Names celebrates the bountiful heritage and unheralded charm of Illinois. The book explores the history of more than 100 Illinois towns with foreign names, along with the state's successive capitals, to weave a tapestry of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Illinois, from Indigenous removal and slavery to mass immigration and Lincoln. Advance praise for There and Here: Jan Kostner, former director, Illinois Bureau of Tourism: “Laurent Pernot’s beautiful book unlocks the history and mysteries behind the names of many Illinois towns. There and Here is a wonderful exploration of the Land of Lincoln, giving readers many reasons to get off the highway and explore our state.” Leo Schelbert, professor emeritus, University of Illinois at Chicago, author of Switzerland Abroad (2019): “This chronicle of more than one hundred places features mostly smaller and little-known settlements in Illinois. It sketches neo-European foundations after indigenous people had been eliminated and as areas were evolving as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century neo-European domains of the present United States. Names such as Alhambra, Denmark, Liverpool, Palestine, Teheran, and Versailles, may partly point to global awareness of individual name givers. The names may claim inherently that the newly named places were joining those of the old world on an at least symbolically equal footing. Laurent Pernot’s concise textual entries are greatly enriched by numerous carefully chosen and pleasing pictures in color that offer vistas of landscapes, houses, churches, sculptures, and monuments. The chosen images speak as powerfully as the carefully crafted texts. Then and Here features however not only the creative efforts of women and men in evolving a neo-European world in a region of the Northern Western Hemisphere coming to be called Illinois. The book’s texts and pictures also point to racial conquest by encirclement, by destruction of indigenous patterns, by expulsion, and by extensive physical annihilation of native peoples. The story documents white settlers’ persistent efforts to achieve an erasure of the millennia-old indigenous occupancy and its replacement by exclusively white jurisdiction. The concise texts and numerous pictures highlight therefore a double-faced historical eighteenth- and nineteenth-century process as it evolved in today’s region called Illinois: They point to a gradual conquest characterized by totalitarian violence of invaders against millennia-old indigenous groups and by the creative replacement of an ancient native world by an exclusive establishment of neo-European cultural ways.” More about There and Here: There and Here yields a richly textured portrait of early Illinois, a place where women and men gave their new towns big names, out of hope, hubris, and maybe even denial. The book chronicles locales from Alhambra to Zion, including towns like Argyle and Norway, which served as the main gateway for immigrants from those locales into Illinois and the rest of the country. Segments about the state’s seats of power provide useful historical context for the other towns’ more localized stories. Springfield is one of no fewer than six capital cities in Illinois, alongside Kaskaskia and Vandalia, Springfield’s predecessors; Cahokia, center of the largest pre-Columbian civilization in what is today the U.S.; Fort de Chartres, the heart of France’s Upper Louisiana; and Nauvoo, the first great Mormon metropolis. There’s also Metropolis itself, home of Superman. And Popeye reigns sovereign in Chester. There and Here captures times and people full of abnegation, conflict and hope; the bravery and altruism of the Illinois frontier cannot hide the darker side of the state’s history. From the town's various histories emerges a picture of ethnic and racial brutality, from the violent treatment of tribes to slavery in the southern part of the state, and to lynchings in places like Cairo and Paris. Author Laurent Pernot, an immigrant from France, takes a fresh look at his adoptive state, unearthing tales and turf unsuspected by most Illinoisans.

Russell P. Strange "Book of the Year" Award from the Illinois State Historical Society, 2012. On the eve of the War of 1812, the Illinois Territory was a new land of bright promise. Split off from Indiana Territory in 1809, the new territory ran from the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers north to the U.S. border with Canada, embracing the current states of Illinois, Wisconsin, and a part of Michigan. The extreme southern part of the region was rich in timber, but the dominant feature of the landscape was the vast tall grass prairie that stretched without major interruption from Lake Michigan for more than three hundred miles to the south. The territory was largely inhabited by Indians: Sauk, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, and others. By 1812, however, pioneer farmers had gathered in the wooded fringes around prime agricultural land, looking out over the prairies with longing and trepidation. Six years later, a populous Illinois was confident enough to seek and receive admission as a state in the Union. What had intervened was the War of 1812, in which white settlers faced both Indians resistant to their encroachments and British forces poised to seize control of the upper Mississippi and Great Lakes. The war ultimately broke the power and morale of the Indian tribes and deprived them of the support of their ally, Great Britain. Sometimes led by skillful tacticians, at other times by blundering looters who got lost in the tall grass, the combatants showed each other little mercy. Until and even after the war was concluded by the Treaty of Ghent in 1814, there were massacres by both sides, laying the groundwork for later betrayal of friendly and hostile tribes alike and for ultimate expulsion of the Indians from the new state of Illinois. In this engrossing new history, published upon the war's bicentennial, Gillum Ferguson underlines the crucial importance of the War of 1812 in the development of Illinois as a state. The history of Illinois in the War of 1812 has never before been told with so much attention to the personalities who fought it, the events that defined it, and its lasting consequences. Endorsed by the Illinois Society of the War of 1812 and the Illinois War of 1812 Bicentennial Commission.