When Jonathan Foiles was a graduate student in social work, he had to choose between a mental health or policy track. But once he began working, he found it impossible to tell the two apart. While helping poor patients from the South and West sides of Chicago, he realized individual therapy could not take into account the importance unemployment, poverty, lack of affordable housing and other policy decisions that impact the well-beings of both individuals...

"Now a documentary narrated by Common, produced by Grant Hill, Dwyane Wade, and 9th Wonder, from filmmaker Mary Mazzio The moving true story of a group of young men growing up on Chicago's West side who form the first all-black high school rowing team in the nation, and in doing so not only transform a sport, but their lives. Growing up on Chicago's Westside in the 90's, Arshay Cooper knows the harder side of life. The street corners are full of gangs,...

The first comprehensive behind-the-scenes look at the tumultuous single term of Mayor Lightfoot and the chaos that roiled the city and City Hall as she fought to live up to her promises to change the city's culture of corruption and villainy, reform its long-troubled police department, and make Chicago the safest big city in America. -- adapted from jacket

The memoirs of Jane Addams, a pioneer American activist/reformer, social worker, public philosopher, sociologist, author, and leader in women's suffrage and world peace. Addams created the first Hull House, a settlement house in Chicago.

"In his magisterial Great American City, Robert J. Sampson puts social scientific data behind an argument that we all feel and experience everyday: the neighborhood you live in has a big effect on your life and the city you live in. Not only does your neighborhood determine where your nearest hospital is, what kind of schools your children can attend, or how many police officers you might encounter (and how they respond to you), it affects how you...

1906 best-seller shockingly reveals intolerable labor practices and unsanitary working conditions in the Chicago stockyards as it tells the brutally grim story of a Slavic family that emigrates to America full of optimism but soon descends into numbing poverty, moral degradation, and despair. A fiercely realistic American classic that will haunt readers long after they've finished the last page. Published privately by Sinclair in 1906 after commercial...

In a time of unregulated madness, nowhere was it madder than Chicago at the dawn of the Roaring Twenties. Enter slick, charismatic lawyer Leo Koretz, enticing hundreds of people to invest as much as $30 million -- $400 million today -- in phantom timberland and nonexistent oil wells. In a rip-roaring tale of greed, corruption, deceit, and a brilliant con man on the town and then on the lam, Dean Jobb shows us that the American dream of easy wealth...

Coval's poems celebrate the history of Chicago from the perspective of those on the margins, those whose stories often go untold. In doing so he honors the everyday lives and enduring resistance of the city's workers, poor people, and people of color, whose cultural and political revolutions continue to shape the social landscape.

"This is an account, written with insight and sympathy, of the life of the hobo, life in 'Hobohemia,' a frontier that was already beginning to vanish when this study originally appeared in 1923. The author, drawing from his own experiences as a hobo, pictures life in the 'main stem' of Halsted and State Streets in Chicago. Here are the customs and class distinctions, language, songs, moral and intellectual life of this body of men who, for widely...

Much of what defined the nation as it grew into a superpower was produced in Chicago. Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to coast journey included a stop there, and this flow of people and commodities made it America's central clearinghouse, laboratory, and factory. And even as Chicago led the way in creating mass-market culture, its artists pushed back in their own distinct voices. Chicago native Thomas Dyja re-creates the story...