Archive Dive

Archive dive: the year 1971 in review

by Brianna Wellen on December 17, 2018 at 1:17PM

Exactly 47 years ago today, on December 17, 1971, the Chicago Reader published its very first year-in-review piece titled "Our Panel of Experts Present their Awards for 1971." An "exotic" juice smoothie from a stand in the Randolph Street train station was named the best non-restaurant meal.

Archive dive: How Soul Train, the show that put black music on TVs across America, got its start in Chicago

by Brianna Wellen on December 10, 2018 at 1:37PM

Jake Austen explored the book and the history of the series in the 2008 article "Soul Train Local." Compared to the national version, Chicago's Soul Train was low-rent.

Archive dive: Revisiting the canal that made Chicago what it is today

by Brianna Wellen on December 3, 2018 at 1:32PM

Even the mischievous boys who filled the ceremonial wheelbarrow with mud before the scandalized eyes of their elders knew the significance of the proposed Illinois and Michigan Canal: it would connect Lake Michigan with the Illinois River, almost 100 miles to the west, thereby linking the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River for navigation. It would bring forth a crop of thriving towns from the prairie soil.

Archive dive: how grassroots groups around Chicago put police abolitionist ideas into practice

by Brianna Wellen on November 26, 2018 at 10:56AM

The idea of police abolition in the city gained national attention when Jessica Disu unintentionally brought up the issue during a heated discussion on Fox News. From there it became clear that many local groups were ready to stand with her.

Archive dive: A report from Morton, Illinois, the self-declared pumpkin capital of the world

by Brianna Wellen on November 19, 2018 at 11:00AM

The Nestle USA plant in Morton produces Libby's Pumpkin using proprietary seeds to produce pumpkins with more meat, fewer seeds, less water. Inside the factory, somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of the seasonal workers come from tiny La Soledad.

Former Chicago Bulls guard Craig Hodges was dropped in 1992 for suspicious reasons

by Steve Heisler on June 4, 2018 at 6:00AM

," Hodges told the columnist. "Then you have us playing in here—how much money did we make here last night?

That time a Cook County judge ruled on the case of a man he himself put in prison when he was still a prosecutor

by Maya Dukmasova on May 25, 2018 at 6:00AM

In 2006 the Reader's John Conroy—who broke the Burge torture scandal in 1990—reported a remarkable story about Judge Nicholas Ford, who ruled on a request for a postconviction hearing from a man he himself put behind bars, a man who claimed that the confession Ford used to prosecute him was coerced out of him with electric shock by one of Burge's close associates. Lawyers who defend police-torture victims in Chicago long ago reached a harsh conclusion about Cook County's criminal judges: most have a vested interest in refusing to acknowledge police brutality.

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