Ron Grossman

The Haymarket Martyr's Statue in Forest Home Waldheim Cemetery honors the people who were hanged following a bombing at Chicago labor rally in the late 1800's.

As Chicago teachers vote to authorize a strike, a look back at the city’s labor history

September 27, 2019 at 4:54 p.m.

Chicago wouldn't be facing a potential teachers strike in October if Jacob Loeb had his way in 1915. As president of the Chicago Board of Education, Loeb established a rule...

The Promontory Apartments, center, shown Sept. 19, 2019, was the first Chicago high-rise designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The building, which was completed in 1949, is up for a landmark designation as the ultimate ancestor of the glass-and-steel towers that define urban skylines on every continent.

Flashback: Mies van der Rohe profoundly reshaped Chicago’s skyline with his structurally austere vision

September 20, 2019 at 9:57 a.m.

With war brewing in Europe in 1939, a Glencoe businesswoman reported to the FBI that she'd discovered a Nazi plot at a Midwestern summer resort. "I've just returned from Pine...

People gather to watch the fire at the Union Stock Yards in 1934.

Flashback: It blotted out the city from the sky: The 1934 Union Stock Yards blaze is the other great Chicago fire

September 6, 2019 at 9:04 p.m.

Chief Fire Marshal Michael Corrigan feared he was witnessing an apocalypse when flames raced across a labyrinth of livestock pens on Chicago's South Side, 85 years ago. "At one time...

A 1864 portrait of Albert Cashier, who enlisted with the 95th Illinois Infantry in 1862 and served as a rifleman through three years and some 40 Civil War battles.
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Flashback: Union soldier Albert Cashier, born a woman, fought valiantly as a man in the Civil War

August 31, 2019 at 11:55 a.m.

Although newspapers across the U.S. and abroad carried Albert Cashier's obituary when he died in 1915, the Civil War veteran had lived in obscurity. A loner, Cashier during his service...

An American flag flies near the Statue of Liberty on Liberty Island on Aug. 14, 2019, in New York City. Acting Director of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli reworked the words of the Emma Lazarus poem "The New Colossus" as he defended the Trump administrations immigration policies. The poem appears on a plaque inside the Statue of Liberty. The 1883 poem by Lazarus is often cited as an inspiration statement about Americas attitude toward immigrants.

Column: Anniversary of the first slave ship in America is especially somber given our current political mood

August 23, 2019 at 8:15 p.m.

Four hundred years ago this month, a group of enslaved Africans was brought to Virginia on the White Lion, a freighter that doubled as an auxiliary warship of the British...

The first Chicago Public Library was housed inside an old water tower on the southeast corner of LaSalle and Adams streets. The site is now the Rookery Building in Chicago. (Wikimedia Commons)

Flashback: How the Great Fire of 1871 gave rise to the Chicago Public Library

December 31, 2024 at 11:21 a.m.

The day before the Great Chicago Fire, the baiduhai published the latest installment of an editorial crusade for a public library, a cause seemingly reduced to ashes along with...

A group of boys crowds around a Good Humor ice cream truck in the 1940s.

Flashback: Good Humor delighted generations with its curbside delivery of ice cream bars — and not even the mob could stop it

August 2, 2019 at 2:00 a.m.

For Chicagoans of a certain age, the sound of bells on a hot summer evening is a hallowed childhood memory. It called a timeout to schoolyard softball games. Ball players...

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