The appearance of pink and white cherry blossoms in Chicago’s Jackson Park marks an end to winter and ushers in a long-awaited spring. In this blog post, CHM curatorial intern Eva Mazzeno talks about the history behind those trees and Chicago’s connections to Japan and Shintō. Entrance to Garden of the Phoenix and cherry More
In 2018, the Chicago History Museum acquired the Chicago Sun-Times photography collection, which spans from the 1940s to the early 2000s—one of the largest newspaper photograph collections ever acquired by an American museum. In this blog post, CHM metadata librarian Izzy Westcott explains how the massive collection was processed and made searchable to the public. More
As a young girl, Rev. Christine V. Hides loved to read and dreamed of solving mysteries. Now Hides has helped the Chicago History Museum solve one. After visiting the Vivian Maier: In Color exhibition, she identified the location where Vivian Maier took a photograph after recognizing two stained glass windows in an image. Rev. Christine More
This blog post has been adapted from an essay by CHM intern Megha Khemka, based on her work in the summer of 2022 focused on Chicago’s history with immigration. Whatever your current picture of undocumented individuals, it’s probably incomplete. I know mine was. Immigration was a topic I thought I knew well; my parents were More
This summer, Lily Mayfield assisted CHM technical services librarian Elizabeth McKinley in the Abakanowicz Research Center. Mayfield writes about her experience discovering the full names of women featured in the Museum’s carte de visite collection. How can one study the past without knowing the names of those who came before? That is the question posed More