This project sheds light on the history of the Pledge of Allegiance as a cultural ritual while at the same time highlighting ongoing controversies that surround it.

Dr. Rebecca S. Graff's web exhibit unearths the consumer habits of the men, women, and children who lived on Chicago's Gold Coast at the turn of the 20th century. Selected artifacts recovered from excavations at the Charnley-Persky House (11CK1248) in 2010 and 2015 examine these consumer choices, locating their sites of manufacture or point of sale in Chicago and around the globe.

In 1945, the Chicago Tribune held a design competition for modest family homes. The designs reveal what Americans expected oftheir postwar homes, while the changes in the built homes indicate how American housing preferences have evolved. Our interactive map shows the locations of homes we have identified.

A choose-your-own-adventure story exploring common causes of death in Chicago's history, written by students in associate professor of anthropology Holly Swyers's "Medical Anthropology" class. Choose your own route through Chicago history to learn about public health and the syndemic theory of disease: will you come out alive?

The practice of drag in Chicago is longstanding and has made a political impact. From a criminalized act to the central feature of a political campaign. Drag has come a long way, baby!

This project explores Chicago’s elite from 1860 to 1940. Elites are those individuals who have disproportionate access to the most scarce and useful resources in society: wealth, political power, signs of cultural legitimacy, and valuable social ties. The history of capitalism is characterized by sharp and durable inequalities between social classes. But the structures of this inequality has…

This project documents the history of racial restrictive covenants in Cook County, Illinois, seeking to unearth artifacts of this history and link them to related housing discrimination tactics, such as redlining, panic peddling, and blockbusting. The documentary evidence, shown in an interactive map and timeline, presents a new view of this troubling and relevant history.