History | Thursday, September 16,2004

“NO MEAT, NO VOTES”

The cloud of fear and uncertainty that gripped the United States during the years of World War II began to lift with the defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945, but Americans felt the war's afters

History | Thursday, July 29,2004

Springfield puts on a show for the Hoovers

By Bob Cavanagh

With all the hyperbolic and near-hysterical rhetoric flying around Springfield like so much chaff at a threshing party ("Is Springfield ready?"), one might be excused for thinking that never be

History | Thursday, July 15,2004

The Stratton Building’s midlife crisis

By Bob Cavanagh

Just west of the Capitol complex, new markers have sprouted from street signs, identifying the area as the Pasfield House Historic District. The city-sanctioned designation honors the memory of one of

History | Thursday, July 15,2004

“Uglier than ugly”

State employees may hate the Stratton, but they’re stuck for now

By Todd Spivak

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but it seems architectural historians alone find reason to swoon over the massive William G. Stratton Building, located directly west of the Capitol. Lawmak

History | Thursday, June 24,2004

When they were kings

By Bob Cavanagh

It is, at first, a vexing and somewhat daunting undertaking to write about a nearly 100-year-old high-school athletic-team yearbook picture, especially when it requires more than a little sleut

History | Thursday, June 10,2004

Robert Lanphier lights up Springfield

By Bob Cavanagh

In 1915, the city of San Francisco, which had been nearly destroyed nine years earlier by a calamitous earthquake and resultant fire, threw a comeback party for itself called the Panama Pacific

History | Thursday, May 27,2004

A whiff of the past: Remembering the Frascos’ Italian-American store

By Bob Cavanagh

Of the five senses, the olfactory sense is the most closely related to memory. All of us have experienced the phenomenon of being suddenly and almost magically transported back in time, in the

History | Thursday, May 20,2004

When Lulubelle and Scotty ruled the airwaves

By Bob Cavanagh

The decade of the 1930s marked the halcyon days of radio. Television was still a novelty, while radio technology had progressed to a high level of sophistication, allowing for not only both liv

History | Thursday, May 6,2004

A passion for rail preserved George Pullman’s legacy

By Bob Cavanagh

Although today we live in what might be called the post-railroad age, it is impossible to overstate the importance of railroads in the formation of our great nation. Before their appearance in

History | Thursday, April 29,2004

History Talk 4-29-04

By Bob Cavanagh

Justin Taft, well-known Sangamon County farmer and former Clerk of the Supreme Court, recently published a semi-autobiographical look back at his 80-plus years in a book entitled As I Saw It --