Black Life in West Central Illinois / Western Springs, Illinois / Japanese Americans in Chicago / Palatine, Illinois / Chicago's Southeast Side Revisited

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 2003 by Valk, Anne M

Black Life in West Central Illinois. By Felix L. Armfield (Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 2001. Pp. 128. Paper, $19.99).

Western Springs, Illinois. By Betsey J. Green (Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 2002. Pp. 128. Paper, $19.99).

Japanese Americans in Chicago. By Alice Murata (Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 2002. Pp. 128. Paper, $19.99).

Palatine, Illinois. By the Palatine Historical Society (Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 2002. Pp. 96. Paper, $19.99).

Chicago's Southeast Side Revisited. By Rod Sellers (Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 2001. Pp. 128. Paper, $19.99).

In 1994 Arcadia Publishing published the first books in its Images of America series. The series intended to "make history accessible and meaningful through the publication of high-quality books on the heritage of America's people and places." Begun with an emphasis on the history of New England communities, Arcadia now publishes hundreds of titles covering nearly every state in the United States. The five books considered here represent three of the press's series - Images of America (Sellers, Murata, and Green), Black America Series (Armfield), and Then & Now (Palatine Historical Society). Although coming from different publication series, each book contains a similar format. An introductory essay briefly describes the community's history, followed by nearly two hundred black and white images, typically photographs but also maps and written documents, accompanied by descriptive captions. The extent of the history that each publication tells varies: the Palatine and Green books focus on a singular town; Armfield and Sellers cover a geographic region; and Armfield and Murata concentrate on a racial or ethnic community.

These publications provide new ways to present the history of Illinois communities but also offer significant methodological and interpretive challenges. For those involved in researching local history, the publications offer new collection and distribution opportunities. Such local historians, "insiders" in the words of Alice Murata, can participate in locating and researching extant visual images and making the selected images accessible (and thereby preserving them) through publication. Accordingly, each book acknowledges those whose cooperation supported the publication, including librarians and staff at libraries and historical societies, and residents knowledgeable about regional history. Bringing together community members to donate photographs for publication, to share research, or to discuss historical events, the books become a vehicle for a collective conceptualization of the important moments in a community's past. Thus the publications provide a form of community-building among those with a shared interest in the past, as well as a way to promote and preserve a community's history.

In addition to opening up opportunities for community residents to explore their interest in history, the Arcadia books expand the types of local history that is told, especially through the integration of the diverse populations residing in each community. Murata's history of Japanese Americans in Chicago, for example, incorporates material from native Chicagoans, as well as World War II-era migrants from Peru and former WWII internees. Sellers's account of Chicago's southeastern communities provides images of the many ethnic groups occupying the area in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Mexican, Polish, Croatian, Italian, and German residents (although not the more recent Puerto Rican, Middle Eastern, Haitian, or Ethiopian immigrant populations). In areas with less ethnic diversity than Chicago, the publications nonetheless aim to represent the community's varied population. The Palatine Historical Society book, for example, includes a range of residences, businesses, and institutions representing the town's diverse denominations, and social and economic classes. Betsey Green's book acknowledges the role of both landowners and tenant farmers in the agricultural life of Western Springs. Incorporating places and events associated with the economic, political, and social elite, as well as workers, immigrants, and those people no longer identifiable, these books broaden the conceptualization of who and what is important in a community's history.

Although the Arcadia publications promise new incentives to collect and preserve community history, new definitions of historical importance, and new venues to disseminate that history, the books make obvious interpretive and evidentiary challenges to the history practice. At their worst, the community history books perpetuate a form of history that privileges information over interpretation. At the same time that images and accompanying descriptions are accumulated, there is little critical inquiry into context, chronology, or causes of change. To put it another way, the information in the publications piles up but seldom adds up to an understanding of the forces that shaped the past and made the past different from the present. The Palatine book, for example, ostensibly focuses on change, comparing "then" and "now," as the series title makes clear. Between the 1830s and the present, Palatine grew from a rural farming community to a small town to a bedroom community in suburban Chicago. This transformation becomes apparent in photographs that show modern commercial buildings or condominiums now occupying land that, as late as the 1950s, held farms and farmhouses. Palatine, Illinois acknowledges this change but makes no effort to explain it or to consider Palatine's transformation within the context of suburbanization or the decline of small farms and family-owned businesses. In contrast, the best of these books actually consider how a particular community's past fits into larger patterns. Sellers's history of Chicago's southeast side, for example, uses the area to exemplify the "major themes of American urban history," including "ecological diversity ... ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity, (and) industrialization, urbanization, immigration, unionization, and Americanization." (Sellers, 7)