Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.
Most associate Ronald Reagan with California, but he spent his formative years in the midwest. On the centennial of his birth, a handful of small Illinois towns want a share of the limelight.
A new picture of prairie lawyers coping with bad roads and worse inns on the Illinois frontier, drawn from David Davis’ letters
Her son had her committed. She said it was so he could get his hands on her money. Now, 130 years after this bitter and controversial drama, a trove of letters—long believed destroyed—sheds new light on it.
A newly discovered document almost certainly written by the young Abraham Lincoln shows him dismantling a shifty political rival with ruthless wit and logic
At the dawn of this century a new form of residential architecture rose from the American heartland, ruled by the total integration of space, site, and structure
Last year two scholars working separately uncovered a pair of previously unknown portraits of Abraham Lincoln. One of them—which seems to put us in the very presence of the man—turned out to be the first ever painted.
Clues uncovered during the recent restoration of his house at Springfield help humanize the Lincoln portrait
You probably haven’t seen it, but it’s out by the tracks of the Chicago & North Western
The first settlers marked the borders of their lives with simple fences that grew ever more elaborate over the centuries
From Poverty and Persecution to Prosperity and Power
The tragedy of Black Hawk, who became the eponym of a war he tried to avoid
An artist recalls his Midwestern home town and the poet who made it famous