The Years They Raised Chicago

Chicago, Illinois sits at the southernmost end of Lake Michigan. In the early days of the United States, it was a great place to build a city. The lake supplied the fresh water they needed to live. Trees were everywhere, providing wood for buildings. The lake supplied the settlers with numerous kinds of fish, including trout, sturgeon, carp, and catfish. There was good farm land nearby for growing crops. The lake even provided a means to ship the grain they raised to the east. Everything seemed perfect. Unfortunately it was too perfect. People flocked to Chicago by the boatload, and many more came overland. In 1840 the population was 4,470. Twenty years later it had grown to 112,172! But the homes did not have plumbing. People would use a chamber pot to go to the bathroom in. The pot would then be dumped out into the street. There it would mix with the horse manure from the thousands of horses that walked the streets every day. Something had to be done! Find out how they solved the problem by raising an entire city in this fun 15-minute book. Ages 8 and up. Reading Level: 6.5 LearningIsland.com believes in the value of children practicing reading for 15 minutes every day. Our 15-Minute Books give children lots of fun, exciting choices to read, from classic stories, to mysteries, to books of knowledge. Many books are appropriate for hi-lo readers. Open the world of reading to a child by having them read for 15 minutes a day.

At the height of the cocaine-fueled 1980s, Carolyn Wilkins left a disastrous marriage in Seattle and, hoping to make it in the music business, moved with her four-year-old daughter to a gritty working-class town on the edge of Boston. They Raised Me Up is the story of her battle to succeed in the world of jam sessions and jazz clubs—a man’s world where women were seen as either sex objects or doormats. To survive, she had to find a way to pay the bills, overcome a crippling case of stage fright, fend off a series of unsuitable men, and most important, find a reliable babysitter. Alternating with Carolyn’s story are the stories of her ancestors and mentors—five musically gifted women who struggled to realize their dreams at the turn of the twentieth century: Philippa Schuyler, whose efforts to “pass” for white inspired Carolyn to embrace her own black identity despite her “damn near white” appearance and biracial child; Marjory Jackson, the musician and single mother whose dark complexion and flamboyant lifestyle raised eyebrows among her contemporaries in the snobby, color-conscious world of the African American elite; Lilly Pruett, the daughter of an illiterate sharecropper whose stunning beauty might have been her only ticket out of the “Jim Crow” South; Ruth Lipscomb, the country girl who dreamed, against all odds, of becoming a concert pianist and realized her improbable ambition in 1941; Alberta Sweeney, who survived a devastating personal tragedy by relying on the musical talent and spiritual stamina she had acquired growing up in a rough-and-tumble Kansas mining town. They Raised Me Up interweaves memoir with family history to create an entertaining, informative, and engrossing read that will appeal to anyone with an interest in African American or women’s history or to readers simply looking for an intriguing story about music and family.

Take in the sights of Chicago's forgotten byways, including a cow trail through a downtown hotel. Pause reflectively at the cemetery in a working scrapyard and the church built without a nail. Stop by the one-time homes of Walt Disney, Joe Louis, Hillary Clinton and Al Capone. Along the way, greet forgotten Chicago notables like the vice president who won a Nobel Prize and wrote a number-one pop hit. From the shortest street to the oldest house, John R. Schmidt visits the sites of Chicago's neglected history.