In “Stellar! Stellar!”—a column lumbered with my lamest title ever—I explored the new fund drive to help build the University of Illinois’ Springfield campus. For space reasons I was unable to explore one of the hoped-for outcomes of that campaign, UIS’s plans to posthumously turn Lincoln into an adjunct faculty member by means of a […]
James Krohe Jr.
Posted inOpinion
Reading aloud
Unless we are blessed with snow, December hereabouts can be a grim month, which might have been one of the reasons that Vachel Lindsay decided to shuffle off this mortal coil on the fifth of that month back in 1931. Which melancholy reflection started a chain of thought that took me (mentally at least) to […]
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Bearing the burden of normality
In the Fall 2017 number of The Hedgehog Review, which is devoted to critical reflections on contemporary culture, Paul Christman explores life in ” a no-place that is also everyplace and anyplace”–the Midwestern U.S. It’s a topic I’ve touched on now and then (albeit with a more local focus, meaning the state of Illinois and its parts) […]
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How high can you go?
Usually, Amazon sells stuff at a discounted price. At the moment it is trying to sell something at the highest possible price – a second headquarters operation somewhere other than its hometown of Seattle. That takes in a lot of territory, and a hundred or so U.S. cities are competing for it. The prize (according […]
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Business as usual
In 2015, in a rare lucid moment (see “A place for business to live,” Aug. 6, 2015), I suggested that Mayor Jim Langfelder’s just unveiled economic development commission include not only the usual businesspeople and pols but labor economists, urbanists, tech-heads and an historian or two, the last to remind aldermen of all the economic […]
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Stellar! Stellar!
UIS wants to be everything it can be in spite of the General Assembly, so it has launched a four-year, $40 million fundraising campaign, “Reaching Stellar: The Campaign for the University of Illinois Springfield.” Its marketing rhetoric certainly soars: “With your support, we can propel the University and today’s students to new heights and continue […]
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Neibuhr speaks to our present from the past
This was brought to my attention by the editors of the London Review of Books. It concerns something written by the influential mid-century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who as every mid-Illinoisan should know was raised and partly schooled up in Lincoln. The concluding sentence of Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History (1952) says this: If we […]
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Columbus in Illinois
I addressed the problem of Columbus Day in “What Columbus Day means to us.” I decided write the column after rejecting performing some symbolic act by which I might commemorate Christopher Columbus and his arrival in this hemisphere, like sending some poisoned candies to the day care center up the street. I didn’t relish the […]
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Lincoln wins again
Abraham LIncoln has long engaged our historians and public intellectuals. Of late he has stimulated our artists as well. The winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, Britain’s most prestigious, was Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, which imaginatively recreates the night the grief-stricken president visited the crypt holding his beloved 11-year-old […]
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What Columbus Day means to us
In my youth, Springfield’s Roman Cultural Society held an essay contest every year in which grade school kids were invited to address the topic, “What Columbus Day Means To Me.” I never entered then – I hadn’t yet learned how to spell “imperialist exploitation” – so here is my essay, 50 years late. Illinois and […]
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Making Illinois safe for the Bs
Public higher education is in trouble in Illinois. Enrollment at most of the former “normal” schools is down, costs are rising and the best in-state students are signing up to attend out-of-state schools. What to do? The Chicago Tribune editors know. In a recent editorial, the paper proposed changes in governance structure and operations intended […]
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Robert P. Howard on tape
In “Gathering nuts,” I tried to pay tribute to that a string of Springfield men who played a surprising large role in the acceptance of oral history as a means of research into the past, beginning with William Herndon, Lincoln’s last law partner. When I wrote that column I was not aware that Robert P. Howard, […]
