Museum Blog

Michael Saler, editor. The Fin-de-Siècle World. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group (2014). Dozens of writers contribute to this fascinating reconsideration of the “fin-de-siècle before last.” Peter Fritzsche, professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, contributed an overview of urban life in major cities, including Chicago, Berlin, and Tokyo. The global More

Marnie Fogg. The Dress: 100 Ideas that Changed Fashion Forever. London: Goodman (2015). 100 dresses, 100 ideas. The author identifies each innovative idea and follows the reverberations. The dresses date from the nineteenth century to the present. The photographs come from a variety of sources and are, themselves, a tour de force in the exacting More

Jonathan Eig. The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution. New York: W. W. Norton and Company (2014). You will know in advance that Margaret Sanger was the key player and that there must have been a scientist—but the rest will surprise you. This carefully researched book tells the More

Cathy Jean Maloney and Chicago Botanic Garden. Chicago and Its Botanic Garden: The Chicago Horticultural Society at 125. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press (2015). The Chicago Botanic Garden is living proof of how a public-partnership on the Chicago model can produce a world-class asset: entrust an underutilized public resource to a voluntary organization that has More