News Progress

•February 21, 2018•

By Myke Feinman
Of The Paper (Dwight, Illinois)

The Keeley Cure initially had gold in it, but the real gold was in the number of satisfied alcohol or other drug-addicted customers who were cured and the social support system from the community of Dwight.

Lynn Neville brought the history of the Keeley Institute to life for those attending a recent meeting of Dwight Historical Society at the Prairie Creek Public Library in Dwight.

The location was appropriate because the building itself is the former clubhouse utilized by patients at the Keeley Institute, located adjacent to the Country Mansion restaurant, also a former Keeley building.

Dr. Leslie E. Keeley, the son of a country doctor, was born in 1832 in New York. He headed West as a young man, graduating from Rush Presbyterian Medical College in Chicago. In 1864, he enlisted and served in the Union Army during the Civil War.

“As an assistant field surgeon, he knew opiates were used as anesthesia, as well as alcohol, and the opiates, alcohol and tobacco were also often used in excess by the soldiers ... and they became addicted,” Neville said. Read More

•February 14, 2018•

By The Chicago Defender
IP Bicentennial Series

On May 5, 1905, Robert Sengstacke Abbott founded the Chicago Defender newspaper in a small kitchen in his landlord’s apartment, with an initial investment of 25 cents and a press run of 300 copies.

The Chicago Defender’s first issues were in the form of four-page, six-column handbills, filled with local news items gathered by Abbott and clippings from other newspapers. Five years later, the Chicago Defender began to attract a national audience.

By the start of World War I, the Chicago Defender was the nation’s most influential Black weekly newspaper, with more than two thirds of its readership base located outside of Chicago.

During World War I, the paper utilized its influence to wage a successful campaign in support of The Great Migration. It published blazing editorials, articles and cartoons lauding the benefits of the North, posted job listings and train schedules to facilitate relocation, and declared on May 15, 1917, as the date of the “Great Northern Drive.” The Chicago Defender’s support of The Great Migration encouraged Southern readers to migrate to the North in record numbers. Between 1916 and 1918, at least 110,000 people migrated to Chicago, nearly tripling the city’s Black population. Read More

•February 7, 2018•

By Susan Sarkauskas and Diane Dungey
Of the Daily Herald

Centuries ago Illinois was home to the largest and most influential city in what would become the United States, rivaling the size of European cities at the time.

As many as 20,000 people ­­— double that if surrounding communities are included — lived about 1,000 years ago in the elaborate planned city that now lies within the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site.

Cahokia, east of St. Louis, includes woodhenges — large sun calendars that were built of red cedar posts — and at least 120 mounds and pyramids used to support important buildings and for burials.

Yet, Cahokia is only part of Illinois’ rich American Indian heritage. Read More

•January 31, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

Politics is played out on the surface of life. It reacts slowly to the tectonic shifts of culture, economics and behavior that roil the vast deep below, sometimes forcing fissures to the surface.

I travel in remarkably wide circles. From “workingmen’s” pubs and diners in my rural area (between the once-booming, metal-bending Quad-Cities and Peoria), to the cloistered settings of the Union League Club of Chicago and manor houses on the glittering North Shore of Lake Michigan above the city.

This past week, for illustration, I dropped in at a diner near my hometown. I couldn’t help but be struck by the couple dozen customers who, rather languidly or so it seemed, downed their gargantuan breakfasts of eggs, cakes, sausages, biscuits and gravy.

All middle age, men and some wives, the customers had a grey cast, overweight, sloppy of dress; they appeared dejected, down on themselves, defeated, in little hurry to move on. It was depressing to be among them. On the North Shore, you see the exact opposite. Read More

•January 24, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

A reader asked, “How did you become a writer?” I don’t think of myself as a “writer,” yet I do lots of it: this column; feature and news stories for my hometown county-seat weekly I re-started 15 years ago; several books.

If you will indulge me, I will use my experience to offer varied lessons learned about writing.

My beginnings were inauspicious.

As a freshman at the University of Illinois in 1959, I was put in a lower-level writing course (the only one I have ever taken).

One of our first assignments was to write an essay about something of importance to us. I wrote about my little town.

The instructor had us read each other’s papers; my effort generated some criticism among class members and the instructor. One student, however, noted that she felt herself a part of my home town after reading it. Read More