Digitized Book of the Week

http://hdl.handle.net/10111/UIUCOCA:hissecretlifeasr00abra
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While the majority of Illinoisans supported the war against the secession of the southern states and opposed the enslavement of African-Americans, those sentiments were far from universal in the state, particularly in south central and southern Illinois whose residents were more likely to have migrated from the south. The Copperheads were a loosely organized group of Midwestern Democrats who vehemently opposed the war and the administration of President Abraham Lincoln. The reasons for Copperhead opposition were numerous but focused primarily on the negative economic impact of the Civil War particularly in agriculture and banking; Lincoln's declaration of martial law and suspension of habeas corpus in 1863; and, for some, the Emancipation Proclamation. Abraham Africanus I is a rare Copperhead political pamphlet from 1864 that satirically depicts Abraham Lincoln making a pact with the Devil to become the monarchical ruler of the United States. To read more about the Copperheads, see Illinois Copperheads and the American Civil War.

http://www.archive.org/details/historyoftraveliv2dunb
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While contemporary reviewers of Seymour Dunbar's four volume history of transportation in early America criticized his anecdotal narrative and limited understanding of the relationship of transportation to the United States' economic development, all credit him nonetheless for bringing together 400 early drawings, illustrations, and engravings on the subject. From the canoes of the early native Americans through stage-coaches and steamboats to the completion of the transcontinental railroad, the pictorial offerings in Dunbar's work contain many not found elsewhere.

http://hdl.handle.net/10111/UIUCOCA:lostcitydramaoff00luze
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The great Chicago Fire of October 1871 killed 200-300 persons and left homeless over a third of the residents of the city whose population at the time was around 300,000. Five square miles of the city were destroyed, along with 25,000 buildings (including the original Palmer House Hotel and Chicago Tribune Building) and 1.6 million bushels of grain stored in the city's grain elevators. As the fire raged, Chicagoans sought refuge on the lake front and in Lincoln Park and city cemeteries. Frank Luzerne's account of the disaster is quite sensational, detailing horrible deaths, miraculous escapes, and heroic rescues, along with a very detailed tour of the Chicago morgue in the days following the fire. With its mostly wooden structures, Chicago at the time was a conflagration waiting to happen. Rebuilding of the city began almost immediately and triggered Chicago's development into one of the largest and most economically important American cities. Some years after the fire, the good name of Irish Catholic immigrant Catherine O'Leary, whose cow supposedly kicked over the lantern that started the blaze, was cleared when Chicago Tribune reporter Michael Ahern boasted about having fabricated the colorful tale, which exploited the anti-immigrant feelings prevalent at the time.

http://www.archive.org/details/newpiasachautauq00pias

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The chautaugua movement was a popular educational movement in the late 19th century that continued into the 1920s, when radio and other forms of popular entertainment led to its demise. The Piasa Chautaugua--"the pioneer chautaugua of the Mississippi Valley" in southern Illinois not far from St. Louis was "in a beautiful valley between high, massive bluffs, with the Mississippi at its front and an almost unexplored forest at its back, one of Nature's most picturesque spots and dear to all those who have enjoyed its beauties, its clear, pure air, delightfully cool nights and beautiful scenery." For a few weeks each summer, residents of St. Louis and other nearby communities would gather for a program featuring educational speakers, workshops, musicians, artists, and physical recreation. This week's featured book is the program for the summer of 1912. Filled with wonderful photographs.

http://www.archive.org/details/lesaventuresdeh00twai
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A fitting selection for the launch of the American Library Association's annual Banned Books Week (http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/bannedbooksweek.htm) is this first French edition of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from UIUC's Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. Ranking fifth on ALA's list of The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2001, Twain's timeless telling of the adventures of Tom Sawyer's best friend Huckleberry Finn and Jim, a runaway slave, has been the target of censors since it was first published in 1884. In 1885, it was banned from the shelves of the Public Library of Concord, Massachusetts, when the board decided Twain's book lacked gentility, contained coarse language, and its hero, Huck, challenged his elders and told lies. Objections to the book in the last 40 or so years has focused on perceptions of racism and insensitivity due to the use of the term "nigger" in reference to Jim. However, as Pulitzer Prize-winner Russell Baker pointed out in the New York Times in 1982, "The people whom Huck and Jim encounter on the Mississippi are drunkards, murderers, bullies, swindlers, lynchers, thieves, liars, frauds, child abusers, numskulls, hypocrites, windbags and traders in human flesh. All are white. The one man of honor in this phantasmagoria is 'Nigger Jim,' as Twain called him to emphasize the irony of a society in which the only true gentleman was held beneath contempt."