The book covers the long-forgotten history of Lake County, Illinois. The period takes place mainly in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The first chapter tells the story of Robert Dady. Starting with nothing and never learning to read or write, Robert would become the largest landowner in the county. His daughter, Nellie Conrad, became one of Waukegan’s most successful businesswomen. She built the Times Theater, Roller Rink, two subdivisions, plus miscellaneous other real estate ventures. The next chapters concern Lake County violence in the form of fights, mobs, and riots. Most kinds of violence were common and accepted in society. Penalties were light for all but the worst crimes. Ethnic Lake County and North Chicago follows. Profiles for the various ethnic groups are covered. The area had Albanians, Armenians, Blacks, Bulgarians/Macedonians, Croatians, Czechs, Danes, Finns, Germans, Greeks, Irish, Italians, Jews, Lithuanians, Poles, Romanians, Russians, Slovaks, Slovenes, and Turks. Next are stories about Lake County men who overcame adversity. Most had little education and not many prospects. They overcame it all and became successful men in their communities. Famous Lake County women follow the men. These women had an impact on a number of county affairs. One Lake County woman was the first woman to vote in the state. The Lake County Historical Society is named after one of the county’s most influential women. The next chapter concerns Lake County women acting badly. Some Lake County women were anything but meek, and the reader might be surprised at just how violent some of them actually were. None of the county’s women could keep up with Lake County’s all-time worst woman. The next chapter tells the story of the Bender family. The Benders lived in the country for a time but were sent packing because of their detestable ways. They soon settled in Kansas and became one of the most famous serial killers in American history. Kate bender was the brains of the whole operation. The book finishes up with miscellaneous stories about Lake County men and women. Some of the stories covered include Lake County’s lynching record, hermits, gypsies, women farmers, and Lake County’s strongest man. Also included is the Fats baseball team. The Fats played baseball in the county a number of times and sported a 640- pound first baseman. Located in the ethnic Jewish profile is the story of Meyer Kubelsky, father of comedian Jack Benny. Jack Benny is Waukegan’s favorite son but not so much Meyer.

Continuation of Part One. Monroe to Lincoln, each president a chapter. The struggle between Jeffersonianism and Hamiltonianism continues, but slavery warps the debate. Westward expansion, tariffs and free trade vs. government/business collusion. The Great Awakening. John Quincy Adams. Marshall, Clay, and Lincoln. Jackson and Van Buren. And finally, Puritans and Cavaliers dispute once again their deep cultural divide in another great and terrible civil war on a new continent. CONTACT: mark.david.ledbetter@gmail.com

For the first half of the twentieth century, private agreements to impose racial restrictions on who could occupy property decisively shaped the development of American cities and the distribution of people within them. Racial restrictions on the right to buy, sell, or occupy property also effectively truncated the political, social, and economic citizenship of those targeted for exclusion. In Patchwork Apartheid, historian Colin Gordon examines the history of such restrictions and how their consequences reverberate today. Drawing on a unique record of property restrictions excavated from local property records in five Midwestern counties, Gordon documents the prevalence of private property restriction in the era before zoning and building codes were widely employed and before federal redlining sanctioned the segregation of American cities and suburbs. This record of private restriction—documented and mapped to the parcel level in Greater Minneapolis, Greater St. Louis, and two Iowa counties—reveals the racial segregation process both on the ground, in the strategic deployment of restrictions throughout transitional central city neighborhoods and suburbs, and in the broader social and legal construction of racial categories and racial boundaries. Gordon also explores the role of other policies and practices in sustaining segregation. Enforcement of private racial restrictions was held unconstitutional in 1948, and such agreements were prohibited outright in 1968. But their premises and assumptions, and the segregation they had accomplished, were accommodated by local zoning and federal housing policies. Explicit racial restrictions were replaced by the deceptive business practices of real estate agents and developers, who characterized certain neighborhoods as white and desirable and others as black and undesirable, thereby hiding segregation behind the promotion of sound property investments, safe neighborhoods, and good schools. These practices were in turn replaced by local zoning, which systematically protected white neighborhoods while targeting “blighted” black neighborhoods for commercial and industrial redevelopment, and by a tangle of federal policies that reliably deferred to local and private interests with deep investments in local segregation. Private race restriction was thus a key element in the original segregation of American cities and a source of durable inequalities in housing wealth, housing opportunity, and economic mobility. Patchwork Apartheid exhaustively documents the history of private restriction in urban settings and demonstrates its crucial role in the ideas and assumptions that have sustained racial segregation in the United States into the twenty-first century.

Forgotten Reformer traces criminal justice practice and reform developments in late nineteenth-century America through the life and career of Robert McClaughry, a leading reformer. As a warden of one of America's toughest prisons, as a chief of police of Chicago, as a superintendent of two different reformatories, and as one of the first wardens of the federal prison system, McClaughry developed and led a reform movement that resonates today. As a founding member of the reformatory movement that sought to "save" young first offenders, McClaughry advocated new sentencing structures, probation, parole, and rehabilitative regimes within new institutions for young first offenders called reformatories. McClaughry then successfully got these reformatory ideals placed into adult prisons. In addition, McClaughry became American's main advocate for a criminal identification method called the Bertillon system. He set up the first identification bureaus at the Illinois State Penitentiary, the Chicago police department, and the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas and these became models for others across the country. Finally, as a founding member of the National Association of Chiefs of Police (today the International Association of Chiefs of Police) and the National Prison Assocation (today American Corrections Association), McClaughry sought to professionalize police and prison administrators.

Gone, but not Forgotten refers to the author's maternal lineage: the Ankrom family. She traveled far and wide to courthouses, cemeteries, and libraries, gathering family information. This book goes through the tenth generation of the Ankrom family, going back into the 1700's, when Richard and Elizabeth Ankrom were living in Frederick County, Maryland.