City of Lake & Prairie is a collection of 19 essays by urban historians, environmental historians, and geographers interested in analyzing the unique relationships between people and nature in the Chicago area. Will Barnett’s essay uses Naperville’s May Watts and the creation of the Illinois Prairie Path as a case study to understand grassroots environmental activism and efforts to protect green space, especially prairie, in an era of rapid suburban development in DuPage County.
From ancient acorns to future forests, the story of how oaks evolved and the many ways they shape our world. An oak begins its life with the precarious journey of a pollen grain, then an acorn, then a seedling. A mature tree may shed millions of acorns, but only a handful will grow. One oak may then live 100 years, 250 years, or even 13,000 years. But the long life of an individual is only a part of these trees’ story. With naturalist and leading researcher Andrew L. Hipp as our guide, Oak Origins takes us through a sweeping evolutionary history, stretching back to a population of trees that lived more than 50 million years ago. We travel to the ancient tropical Earth to see the ancestors of the oaks evolving side by side with the dinosaurs.
This book will teach you to hand build a knife using the traditional method of blacksmiths of old – Forging. Traditional forging of a knife blade is a process which uses the ancient techniques of moving hot steel with hammer and anvil alone int a knife-form that is ready for filing, heat treating and sharpening with no or very minimal electric grinding.
Agatha Christie and her mystery novels bring to mind English country houses and railway journeys to the Riviera, but there are some surprising connections between Christie and Chicago. Follow the Chicago clues in Agatha Christie’s books in this presentation by Kate Gingold, local history writer and author of Agatha Annotated: Investigating the Books of the 1920s.