Winner of the Russell P. Strange Book of the Year Award from the Illinois State Historical SocietyBaseball’s spread across Illinois paralleled the sport’s explosive growth in other parts of the country.Robert D. Sampson taps a wealth of archival research to transport readers to an era when an epidemic of “base ball on the brain” raged from Alton to Woodstock. Focusing on the years 1865 to 1869, Sampson offers a vivid portrait of a game where local teams and civic a...

A renaissance in Illinois history scholarship has sparked renewed interest in the Prairie State's storied past. Students, meanwhile, continue to pursue coursework in Illinois history to fulfill degree requirements and for their own edification.This Common Threads collection offers important articles from the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society. Organized as an approachable survey of state history, the book offers chapters that cover the colonial era, early sta...

A leading sociologist’s groundbreaking three-decade study challenges outdated views of crime and character, revealing that traditional risk factors alone poorly predict children’s futures.Between 1970 and 2020, the United States experienced a dramatic rise in crime and incarceration, followed by an unexpected decline. Along with plummeting violence came reductions in substance use, car accidents, child poverty, and lead exposure. By 2020, incarceration rates hit a ...

Great American City demonstrates the powerfully enduring impact of place.Based on one of the most ambitious studies in the history of social science, Robert J. Sampson's Great American City presents the fruits of over a decade's research to support an argument that we all feel and experience every day: life is decisively shaped by your neighborhood.Engaging with the streets and neighborhoods of Chicago, Sampson, in this new...

STORIES OF SURVIVAL is a charity anthology inspired by and dedicated to the memory of Aiki Flinthart, with all proceeds going to the Melanoma Institute of Australia. Cancer has touched the lives of many, and the Australian Speculative Fiction community has banded together to try and make a difference.This collection contains fifteen stories written by both award-winning and emerging authors in the Australian and New Zealand speculative fiction scene, all based around the theme of s...

This "landmark work in urban sociology" examines the influence of neighborhoods on social phenomena and in our lives (Claude Fischer, City & Community).For over fifty years numerous public intellectuals and social theorists have insisted that community is dead. Some would have us believe that we act solely as individuals choosing our own fates regardless of our surroundings, while other theories place us at the mercy of global forces beyond our control. The...

Are you ready to feel inspired?When you start your own business, or think about starting your own business, you will hear a lot of stories that either drive you, give you motivation and inspiration, or you hear the nay-sayers.This book is for the women entrepreneurs that want to hear the real stories of what it takes to be yourself and run a business, with all the different hats you might have to wear.Learn from inspirational women just like you who have been there,...

Most people associate storms and other big weather with death—with the kind of force that makes each of us wonder about life, and time and the nature of our surroundings. Some people go out looking for bad weather or go to places where they’re likely to encounter it. Others have the misfortune of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Still, the stories in Storm have more to say than that. They tell us about what happens when people find that treacherous weather—or when it finds them—...

Winner of an Abraham Lincoln Institute Book AwardThough not blind to Abraham Lincoln's imperfections, Black Americans long ago laid a heartfelt claim to his legacy. At the same time, they have consciously reshaped the sixteenth president's image for their own social and political ends. Frederick Hord and Matthew D. Norman's anthology explores the complex nature of views on Lincoln through the writings and thought of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Mc...

First published in 1925, The City is a trailblazing text in urban history, urban sociology, and urban studies. Its innovative combination of ethnographic observation and social science theory epitomized the Chicago school of sociology. Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and their collaborators were among the first to document the interplay between urban individuals and larger social structures and institutions, seeking patterns within the city’s riot of people, events, and influen...

One out of every ten prisoners in the United States is serving a life sentence—roughly 130,000 people. While some have been sentenced to life in prison without parole, the majority of prisoners serving ‘life’ will be released back into society. But what becomes of those people who reenter the everyday world after serving life in prison?In After Life Imprisonment, Marieke Liem carefully examines the experiences of “lifers” upon release. Through interviews with over sixty homicide of...

The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah is the location of one of the best-known terrestrial records for the late Cretaceous. A major effort in the new century has documented over 2,000 new vertebrate fossil sites, provided new radiometric dates, and identified five new genera of ceratopsids, two new species of hadrosaur, a probable new genus of hypsilophodontid, new pachycephalosaurs and ankylosaurs, several kinds of theropods (including a new genus of oviraptor and a new ...