Calumet Beginnings

Calumet Beginnings PDF

Author: Kenneth J. Schoon

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 9780253342188

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The landscape of the Calumet, an area that sits astride the Indiana-Illinois state line at the southern end of Lake Michigan was shaped by the glaciers that withdrew toward the end of the last ice age--about 45,000 years ago. In the years since, many natural forces, including wind, running water, and the waves of Lake Michigan, have continued to shape the land. The lake's modern and ancient shorelines have served as Indian trails, stagecoach routes, highways, and sites that have evolved into many of the cities, towns, and villages of the Calumet area. People have also left their mark on the landscape: Indians built mounds; farmers filled in wetlands; governments commissioned ditches and canals to drain marshes and change the direction of rivers; sand was hauled from where it was plentiful to where it was needed for urban and industrial growth. These thousands of years of weather and movements of peoples have given the Calumet region its distinct climate and appeal.

City of Lake and Prairie

City of Lake and Prairie PDF

Author: Kathleen A. Brosnan

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2020-09-08

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 0822987724

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Known as the Windy City and the Hog Butcher to the World, Chicago has earned a more apt sobriquet—City of Lake and Prairie—with this compelling, innovative, and deeply researched environmental history. Sitting at the southwestern tip of Lake Michigan, one of the largest freshwater bodies in the world, and on the eastern edge of the tallgrass prairies that fill much of the North American interior, early residents in the land that Chicago now occupies enjoyed natural advantages, economic opportunities, and global connections over centuries, from the Native Americans who first inhabited the region to the urban dwellers who built a metropolis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As one millennium ended and a new one began, these same features sparked a distinctive Midwestern environmentalism aimed at preserving local ecosystems. Drawing on its contributors’ interdisciplinary talents, this volume reveals a rich but often troubled landscape shaped by communities of color, workers, and activists as well as complex human relations with industry, waterways, animals, and disease.

The Catholic Calumet

The Catholic Calumet PDF

Author: Tracy Neal Leavelle

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2011-11-29

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0812207041

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In 1730 a delegation of Illinois Indians arrived in the French colonial capital of New Orleans. An Illinois leader presented two ceremonial pipes, or calumets, to the governor. One calumet represented the diplomatic alliance between the two men and the other symbolized their shared attachment to Catholicism. The priest who documented this exchange also reported with excitement how the Illinois recited prayers and sang hymns in their Native language, a display that astonished the residents of New Orleans. The "Catholic" calumet and the Native-language prayers and hymns were the product of long encounters between the Illinois and Jesuit missionaries, men who were themselves transformed by these sometimes intense spiritual experiences. The conversions of people, communities, and cultural practices that led to this dramatic episode all occurred in a rapidly evolving and always contested colonial context. In The Catholic Calumet, historian Tracy Neal Leavelle examines interactions between Jesuits and Algonquian-speaking peoples of the upper Great Lakes and Illinois country, including the Illinois and Ottawas, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Leavelle abandons singular definitions of conversion that depend on the idealized elevation of colonial subjects from "savages" to "Christians" for more dynamic concepts that explain the changes that all participants experienced. A series of thematic chapters on topics such as myth and historical memory, understandings of human nature, the creation of colonial landscapes, translation of religious texts into Native languages, and the influence of gender and generational differences demonstrates that these encounters resulted in the emergence of complicated and unstable cross-cultural religious practices that opened new spaces for cultural creativity and mutual adaptation.

Who We Are Is Where We Are

Who We Are Is Where We Are PDF

Author: Amanda McMillan Lequieu

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2024-05-28

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 0231552793

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Half a century ago, deindustrialization gutted blue-collar jobs in the American Midwest. But today, these places are not ghost towns. People still call these communities home, even as they struggle with unemployment, poverty, and other social and economic crises. Why do people remain in declining areas through difficult circumstances? What do their choices tell us about rootedness in a time of flux? Through the cases of the former steel manufacturing hub of southeast Chicago and a shuttered mining community in Iron County, Wisconsin, Amanda McMillan Lequieu traces the power and shifting meanings of the notion of home for people who live in troubled places. Building from on-the-ground observations of community life, archival research, and interviews with long-term residents, she shows how inhabitants of deindustrialized communities balance material constraints with deeply felt identities. McMillan Lequieu maps how the concept of home has been constructed and the ways it has been reshaped as these communities have changed. She considers how long-term residents navigate the tensions around belonging and making ends meet long after the departure of their community’s founding industry. Who We Are Is Where We Are links the past and the present, rural and urban, to shed new light on life in postindustrial communities. Beyond a story of Midwestern deindustrialization, this timely book provides broader insight into the capacious idea of home—how and where it is made, threatened, and renegotiated in a world fraught with change.

Shifting Sands

Shifting Sands PDF

Author: Kenneth J. Schoon

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2016-10-10

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 0253023408

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The location of one of the most diverse national parks in the United States, Northwest Indiana's Calumet area is home to what was at one time widely known as the most polluted river in the entire country. Calumet's advantageous location at the southern tip of Lake Michigan encouraged broadscale conversion of Indiana wilderness into an industrial base that once included the world's largest steel mill, largest cement works, and largest oil refinery. Thousands of tons of hazardous waste were dumped in and around the rivers with no thought for how it would affect the region's water, land, and air. However, a remarkable change of attitude has resulted in the rejuvenation of an area once rich in natural diversity and the creation of a National Park that brings in more than two million visitors a year, contains beautiful greenways and blueways, and provides safe recreation for nearby residents. A community-wide effort, the cleanup of this area is nothing short of remarkable. In this Indiana bicentennial book, Ken Schoon introduces the reader to the Calumet area's unique history and the residents who banded together to save it.

Hammond

Hammond PDF

Author: Curtis Vosti

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2023-02-27

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 146710941X

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The resilient city of Hammond is the place of Flick's triple dog dare, where John Dillinger never robbed a bank because of busy railroad crossings, and where an original National Football League team started in 1920. This city of 78,000 extends down from Lake Michigan in the shadow of neighboring Chicago along the state line. Hammond began in the late 19th century as a railroad town, industrial center, and commercial crossroads and remains famous through humorist Jean Shepherd's tales of Ralphie's quest for a BB gun in A Christmas Story. It has also been home to the secret behind Dairy Queen, groundbreaking CBS sportscaster Irv Cross, the Doublemint Twins, and, most deliciously, Phil Smidt's frog legs. Having shaken off the Rust Belt moniker in the 21st century, the Idaho-shaped city rests on storied foundations such as the First Baptist Church, the Ophelia Steen Center, the Hammond Public Library, a Purdue campus, and those darn railroads that still whistle through the Calumet Region nights.

Wobar and the Quest for the Magic Calumet

Wobar and the Quest for the Magic Calumet PDF

Author: Henry Homeyer

Publisher: Bunker Hill Publishing Company

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781593731083

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Wobar, a boy who can speak with animals, runs away from a new school with Roxie, a cougar. They encounter the ghost of a Revolutionary War soldier who was given, then lost, a magic, peace-dealing calumet (peace-pipe) and set off to find it.

The Women of the Copper Country

The Women of the Copper Country PDF

Author: Mary Doria Russell

Publisher: Atria Books

Published: 2019-08-06

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1982109580

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From the bestselling and award-winning author of The Sparrow comes an inspiring historical novel about “America’s Joan of Arc” Annie Clements—the courageous woman who started a rebellion by leading a strike against the largest copper mining company in the world. In July 1913, twenty-five-year-old Annie Clements had seen enough of the world to know that it was unfair. She’s spent her whole life in the copper-mining town of Calumet, Michigan where men risk their lives for meager salaries—and had barely enough to put food on the table and clothes on their backs. The women labor in the houses of the elite, and send their husbands and sons deep underground each day, dreading the fateful call of the company man telling them their loved ones aren’t coming home. When Annie decides to stand up for herself, and the entire town of Calumet, nearly everyone believes she may have taken on more than she is prepared to handle. In Annie’s hands lie the miners’ fortunes and their health, her husband’s wrath over her growing independence, and her own reputation as she faces the threat of prison and discovers a forbidden love. On her fierce quest for justice, Annie will discover just how much she is willing to sacrifice for her own independence and the families of Calumet. From one of the most versatile writers in contemporary fiction, this novel is an authentic and moving historical portrait of the lives of the men and women of the early 20th century labor movement, and of a turbulent, violent political landscape that may feel startlingly relevant to today.