Digitized Book of the Week

http://www.uiuc.edu/goto/illinoiscentral
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You don't have to be a railroad buff to find yourself spending hours paging through UIUC's recently digitized volumes of the Illinois Central Employees' Magazine for the years 1914-1924, which by the way, average 1500 pages each. Its profusely illustrated pages offer a fascinating cultural history of the railroad in American life and the place of the Illinois Central Railroad in the family life of its employees. Each issue featured an extensive article on a town along the ICR route, a column for homemakers, a column on railroad humor, and advice for employees on financial planning. Interwoven with these articles of parochial interest are features on railroad engineering, legal issues (train accidents abounded in the early days!), industries that relied heavily on the railroad, and politics. You can even read about General John "Black Jack" Pershing's visit to Urbana in 1922! A treasure trove of information for genealogists!

http://www.archive.org/details/undergroundrailr00stil
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"William Still's book on the Underground Railroad was an important addition to the literature of the antislavery movement. One of the small number of postwar accounts written or compiled by Negro authors, it provided a much-needed corrective to the memoirs of white abolitionists. Still recognized the many contributions of white abolitionists, but he also pictured the fugitives themselves as courageous individuals, struggling for their own freedom, rather than as helpless or passive passengers on a white Underground Railroad. His journals were the only day-to-day record of vigilance committee activity covering a prolonged period. In addition to the accounts of the fugitives, he included excerpts from newspapers. legal documents, letters from abolitionists and former slaves, and biographical sketches." From William Still Underground RR Foundation Inc.

http://hdl.handle.net/10111/UIUCOCA:fightingtraffici00bell
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In the early years of the 20th century, a moral panic broke out in urban America after Illinois-born George Kibbe Turner, a reporter and muckraker, wrote a sensational article in McClure's Magazine about white women being forced into prostitution by Asian and southern European immigrants. Turner's article fed on racial fears in post-emancipation America and led to a vigorous anti-prostitution movement in the 1910s. In 1910 Congress passed the White Slave Traffic Act, also known as the Mann Act after James Mann, U.S. representative from Illinois who introduced it. Hiroyuki Matsubara, in The 1910s Anti-Prostitution Movement and the Transformation of American Political Culture, observed that "the forced sex labor of white women appeared to be the worst nightmare, or the reality, in the post-emancipation era. As if replacing black slaves, white women were dragged down by un-American intruders to a filthy corner of a city crowded with poor workers and immigrants. After the formal end of black slavery, Americans were now afraid of being confronted with white slavery." See also The Social Evil in Chicago (1911), The Social Menace of the Orient (1921), and Chicago's Black Traffic in White Women (1911).