James Krohe Jr.

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 […]

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 […]

 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 […]

 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, […]

On my recent visit to the main campus of the University of Illinois, in Urbana-Champaign, the presence of Chinese, Korean and Indian students was marked. The university’s recruiting of the Asian student raises questions that after 150 years have never been resolved, and seldom even engaged. Which public is served by a great public university?  […]

Allow me to return briefly to the topic of metered street parking that I took up in September in “Parking smartly.” A lot of people say to me, “We should have free parking, like Decatur.” A significant fraction of local opinion (usually from small towns) don’t think anyone should have to pay for parking, and resent […]

 I am among those many Americans who believe that this country needs more immigrants, not less. (See this column and this column and this column.) I recommend to you therefore a stimulating essay on immigration policies being discussed in Washington as they pertain to Illinois, written by Sara McElmurry, assistant director of immigration at the […]

The wheels of our nation’s book review machinery turn very slowly, and only now has the first proper review of my new book, Corn Kings and One-Horse Thieves, been published. It was worth the wait.  My old friend and colleague, Harold Henderson, whom older readers of this paper will remember from his days at IT. […]