Illinois Highlights

In celebration of Women’s History Month, we at the IDHH would like to introduce Hazle Buck Ewing, passionate activist for women’s suffrage and lifelong member of the Bloomington League of Women Voters.

Ewing joined the women’s suffrage movement in 1915, and worked to secure voting rights for women through her writing, her attendance at conferences, and her financial support of the movement. She continued to promote women’s rights after the passage of the 19^th amendment by supporting the Equal Rights Amendment and voting in every election beginning in 1920, only stopping when she was too ill to leave her home. She died at the age of 88 on August 29, 1969. 

The Hazle Buck Ewing Women’s Suffrage collection from Illinois State University is comprised of materials created and collected by Ewing during her involvement in the women’s suffrage movement. The collection has over 150 items and includes letters, articles, pamphlets, and photographs that give insight into the efforts made by early 20^th-century suffrage activists to secure women the right to vote. 

To celebrate Hazle Buck Ewing and Women’s History Month, here are a few of our favorite items from the collection: 

In August, we celebrated the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, featuring images of women exercising their right to vote from the McLean County Museum of History’s Pantagraph Negative Collection (1940-1945). 

View the complete Hazle Buck Ewing Women’s Suffrage Collection in the IDHH. 

View more items related to women’s suffrage in the IDHH. 

Healthcare providers play a critical role in caring for patients and saving lives, especially during a pandemic. For roughly a year now, these front-line workers have continued the dedication and sacrifice of the healthcare profession, putting themselves at risk for COVID-19 while taking care of their patients in hospitals, nursing homes, and other facilities around the world.

To celebrate these healthcare providers, the IDHH welcomes our new contributor Methodist College and their History of Methodist College collection. Now a four-year, private, not-for-profit college, Methodist College was established in 1900 as a nurse training program by the deaconesses of the Methodist Episcopal church in Peoria. The History of Methodist College collection reflects the growth of this nurse training program into a four-year college, with over 1,200 items that include class groups, study sessions, diplomas, student bulletins, and patient care throughout the last century.

Here are a few of our favorite items from the collection:

Want to see more?

Browse the full History of Methodist College collection.

View more items in the IDHH related to Nursing and Healthcare.

To learn more about Methodist College, visit Methodist College’s site.

To celebrate Black History Month, the IDHH is featuring the Daily Egyptian Diversity News Archive collection from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SIUC). This collection includes select articles from the 1930s to the 1970s relating to the African American populations at SIUC, digitized from the microfilm archives of SIUC’s award-winning student-run newspaper the Daily Egyptian. Begun in 2006, this digitization project was a collaboration between SIUC’s Vice Chancellor for Diversity and Morris Library Special Collections Research Center.

Topics covered include the activities of the local chapters of Alpha Kappa Alpha and Alpha Phi Alpha (the first intercollegiate historically African American Greek-lettered sorority and fraternity, respectively); African American performers visiting the campus; athletics, courses, and faculty; and the struggles of African Americans living in the racially-segregated United States.

Here are a few articles from the full collection:

Want to see more in the IDHH?

Browse the full Daily Egyptian Diversity News Archive

Browse all items from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

View more items related to African-American cultural heritage and Black History

Happy New Year, everyone! With our first harvest of 2021, the IDHH now contains 471 collections from 146 contributors, for a total of 382,479 items of five different formats: images, text, physical objects, video, and audio. We’d like to start the year by highlighting our two new oral history collections.

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The East Central Illinois Oral Histories collection from Eastern Illinois University features nearly 100 interviews with transcripts, originally recorded between 1977-1989. As the interviewees discuss their lives and histories, the topics covered include the Civilian Conservation Corps, shoe sales, the US Civil War and the World Wars, funeral homes, agriculture and farm life, labor and railroads in Illinois, taxes, temperance and Prohibition, and basketball.

To browse the full East Central Illinois Oral Histories collection, please visit the IDHH here.

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The Recordings of the Illinois Labor History Society collection from Roosevelt University features over 120 recordings, dating from the 1970s to the early 2000s. Topics include labor unions such as the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), labor strikes and lockouts, women and African-Americans in labor, and remembrances of the Haymarket Square Riot. Notable voices in the recordings include labor activists Leslie “Les” Orear, Lou Krainock, Ralph Helstein, and Victoria “Vicki” Starr.

To see the full Recordings of the Illinois Labor History Society collection, please visit the IDHH here.

This year has no doubt been marked by the coronavirus pandemic. The Illinois State Museum has started a collection documenting Illinoisans experiences of the initial days shelter-in place and the summer’s movement for justice following the deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville through art, personal essays, and photographs. The collection is on-going, but here are a few already in the collection:

For the rest of the collection and to read the reflections of people who have contributed their images and stories, please visit the IDHH or the Illinois State Library. If you’re interested in sharing your Covid-19 story, this page on the Illinois State Museum’s website has the information you need.

We’ve been lucky to have so many new collections this fall. Bensenville Community Public Library recently joined us and has contributed images from their Bensenville Historical Collection to the IDHH.

Here’s a few I love:

To see the full collection of over 1,200 images, click here to visit the IDHH.

Hi Readers, we’re delighted that the IDHH is continuing to grow. We’re welcoming LaSalle Public Library and the Illinois Valley Local History Collection.

The Illinois Valley Local History Collection is a gem. It includes over 80 photographs from the earliest parts of the 20th century, including images of city life as the city was being built, the Illinois and Michigan Canal, and the coal industry in North Central Illinois.

Here are a few choice images from the full collection:

To browse the full collection, please visit the IDHH here.

Collections from Illinois Eastern Community Colleges are now available on the IDHH. A district of four community colleges, these collections make a fantastic addition to the Hub, giving us a close look at student and community life, as it happened and documented in yearbooks, newspapers and more.

The LTC Lincoln Logue Collection includes Lincoln Trail College’s yearbooks spanning 1971-1983 with some retro-gems.

WVC’s Student Newspapers collection chronicles several different student newspapers beginning in 1968 with the founding of WVC Broadcast. Other local publications are included–relating to WVC history and community.

The MCHS 2017 Road to Peoria collection tells the story of the Mt. Carmel High School boys basketball team, whose 2017 season led them to their first State Finals game in 90 years.

For everything from Illinois Eastern Community Colleges, click here to visit the IDHH. Welcome Illinois Eastern Community Colleges!

It’s pretty well known amongst Chicago History Buffs that the Ferris Wheel debuted on the Midway Plaisance during the 1893 Columbian Exposition. The Ferris Wheel, brainchild of Galesburg-born George Washington Gale Ferris Jr., was the result of architect Daniel Burnham’s challenge to build something to rival Paris’ Eiffel Tower, built as the centerpiece of 1889’s Exposition Universelle, celebrating the centennial of the French Revolution. On this day in history, October 16th 1892, the Ferris Wheel was given the go-ahead for its inclusion in the Columbian Exposition.

“Make no little plans” Burnham said to a group of architects and engineers at dinner. While eating at Chicago chop house with the same group of architects and engineers Ferris hit on the idea; “I remember remarking that I would build a wheel, a monster. I got some paper and began to sketch it out. I fixed the size, determined the construction, the number of cars we would run, the number of people it would hold, what we would charge, the plan of stopping six times in the first revolution and loading, and then making a complete turn-in short, before the dinner was over I had sketched almost the entire detail” Ferris recalled in an interview.

There were wooden wheels that had toured carnival circuits, patented designs even, but steel was a considerable upgrade and had the same modernist industrial touch as the Eiffel tower’s steel beams. Ferris, working out of Pittsburgh was known as an engineer experimenting in steel- to make a steel structure like this- that moved,- and transport the 100,000 parts of it a third of the way across the country for reassembly, was a significant challenge. At the time of its creation the 71 ton axel was the largest single piece of steel in the world.

For more on the Ferris Wheel, click here, and more on the 1893 Columbian Exposition here. Huge thanks to the Chicago History Museum for their fantastic photos of the original wheel.

Happy September Y’all. We’re seeing our first 40 degree nights in Central Illinois, and apples are beginning to be harvested. Around Champaign-Urbana, where I’m writing from, hail storms in August significantly damaged the apple crop. One farmer who I talk to at the farmers’ market had ployed to market her hail-damaged apples as “speckled apples”, but this week looked disappointed with just a few lumpy apples.

Here’s two of my favorite pictures in the IDHH from McClean County Museum of History of the over 6,000 taken by Pantagraph photographer Frank Bill in the 1930’s and 1940’s: