James Krohe Jr.

Illinois was demographically if not geographically a Southern state in its early years, and has long suffered from innovations in the civil realm imported from the land of molasses and mosquitoes. These include Black Codes and courthouse politics, but we would have had to add to that list if a proposed school reform bill in […]

In March a busy Springfield learned that the Dana-Thomas Foundation, the private nonprofit guardian of the state-owned and Wright-designed Dana-Thomas House at Fourth and Lawrence, had bought a two-story house a couple of doors west of the Amtrak tracks at 227 E. Lawrence Avenue and torn it down. The house died so that tourists might […]

The only suspense come election time in places such as Russia and Belarus and almost any of the Central Asian republics is not who wins but by how much. Government leaders bully, they bribe, they ban opponents from the ballot to produce vote margins for the winners so flagrantly false that they would embarrass the […]

If enough middle and high school students sign up for it, the Springfield and Ball-Chatham public school districts may offer instruction in Mandarin Chinese, the simplified official Chinese dialect used in the People’s Republic of China. Like so many trends, this one is so late making it to the Springfield area that one wonders whether […]

Maybe it was the recent election of Richard Nixon to the White House that left me looking to the past rather than to the future in 1974. That was the year I published Honest Abe’s Honest Almanac. The little book was, as its subtitle promises, “a cornucopia of amazing facts, useful wisdom and amusing anecdotes […]

Illinois has a very short list of distinguished governors and a somewhat longer one of able historians. The list of distinguished governors who also are able historians is very short indeed. Only one name is on it, that of Thomas Ford. Ford’s term in Springfield, from 1842 to 1848, was his first and only popularly […]

When I was a student, I was introduced to the concept that the simplest-sounding phrases had irreconcilable and contradictory meanings that rendered interpretation impossible. No intellectual test was more demanding, and some of the more elusive texts torture me to this day with the taunt, “Explain me!” I was in fifth grade. It was the […]

The obituaries for the political career of the unfortunate Scott Lee Cohen list as the cause of death all the common viruses of Illinois politics, from dunderheaded party leaders and lazy reporters to voters happy to buy a pig in a poke if the pig squeals the right way. But Mr. Cohen was not only […]

Many years ago, I made my first visit to the Illinois State Historical Library in its handsome but cramped new quarters beneath the Old State Capitol. Having time to kill while waiting for the staff to fetch me a book, I wandered up the stairs to the mezzanine that overlooked the reading room. There, in […]

“One thing I don’t like, and Springfield don’t like, is someone to come in from outside and tell us about Lincoln.” That was the late Murray Hanes, talking as only Hanes could talk, to the late A.J. Liebling during a 1950 interview in Hanes’s office in the late downtown Springfield. Hanes was one of old […]