Chicago is as famous for its art as it is for its industry. Both made this town into the quintessential nineteenth-century city that did more to shape the United States’ aesthetics, economics, and politics than the nickname “Second City” suggests. Many Americans presume the arts and industry to be at odds with one another when, in fact, they have not only grown in tandem but have been historically intertwined. For example, the architects who crafted Chicago’s iconic architectural style did so through their work on State Street’s retail giants; Chicago businessman Charles Norman Fay drew Theodore Thomas, founder and first conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, from New York to Chicago with the promise of a permanent fully-funded orchestra; and editor Harriet Monroe relied on start-up funds from major industrialists like George A. Hormel for her ground-breaking magazine, Poetry, A Magazine of Verse.
The Spring 2021 Newberry Library Undergraduate Seminar (NLUS) highlights the connections between Chicago’s cultural and industrial past, examining how its creative production arose from its identity as a rail and mail order hub, meat processing center, architectural innovator, site for world’s fairs, and as a flashpoint for racial and labor tension. Students will explore the Newberry’s Chicago holdings to understand how the city became an important center of artistic innovation and production, not in spite of, but because of Chicago’s role as a major center of commerce where laborers fought to change what it meant to work, live, and create in modern America.
Students in the seminar also will examine some of these intersections between art and industry in Chicago together, then pursue their own seminar-related research interests as each produced a substantive, original research paper. In their research projects, students will be encouraged to follow their own intellectual curiosity about the texts and artworks that we discuss together and to delve further into the Newberry’s vast archival collections, including materials pertaining to American literature, Chicago and Midwestern writers, Chicago neighborhoods, Chicago’s labor movement, and other relevant collections pertaining to Chicagoland’s history.
The class is scheduled meet Tuesday and Thursday afternoons 2-5 pm from January 19, 2021 through May 6, 2021. The format and structure of the course may be adjusted due to the ongoing public health situation.