A people's history of Chicago

Select an Action

Title:

A people's history of Chicago

Author:

Coval, Kevin, author.

ISBN:

9781608466719

Personal Author:

Coval, Kevin, author.

Physical Description:

x, 135 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Series:

Breakbeat poets series

Breakbeat poets series.

Abstract:

Coval's poems celebrate the history of Chicago from the perspective of those on the margins, those whose stories often go untold. In doing so he honors the everyday lives and enduring resistance of the city's workers, poor people, and people of color, whose cultural and political revolutions continue to shape the social landscape.

Added Author:

Chance the Rapper

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Call Number	Status	Item Holds
Searching... Sugar Grove - Todd Library	Book	PS3603 .O88825 P46 2017	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Known variously as "'the Windy City,"' "'the City of Big Shoulders,"' or "'Chi-Raq,"' Chicago is one of the most widely celebrated, routinely demonized, and thoroughly contested cities in the world.

Chicago is the city of Gwendolyn Brooks and Chief Keef, Al Capone and Richard Wright, Lucy Parsons and Nelson Algren, Harold Washington and Studs Terkel. It is the city of Fred Hampton, House Music, and the Haymarket Martyrs. Writing in the tradition of Howard Zinn, Kevin Coval's A People's History of Chicago celebrates the history of this great American city from the perspective of those on the margins, whose stories often go untold. These seventy-seven poems (for the city's seventy-seven neighborhoods) honor the everyday lives and enduring resistance of the city's workers, poor people, and people of color, whose cultural and political revolutions continue to shape the social landscape.

Kevin Coval is the poet/author/editor of seven books including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and the play, This Iis Modern Art , co-written with Idris Goodwin. Founder of Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival and the Artistic Director of Young Chicago Authors, Coval teaches hip-hop aesthetics at the University of Illinois--Chicago. The Chicago Tribune has named him "the voice of the new Chicago" and the Boston Globe calls him "the city's unofficial poet laureate."

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Coval, poet, educator, and coeditor of The Breakbeat Poets, composes a heartfelt song for his hometown and a trenchant account of its injustices. The collection's 77 poems, one for each of Chicago's neighborhoods, are organized chronologically. Coval begins precolonization, "before the steel plow/ & the leveling. before manicured lawns/ & forced removal," and ends with the "shitty/ pizza & arctic weather" of the modern era. The cancers of racial discrimination, segregation, and poverty feature prominently in the story Coval tells, but Coval himself does not, instead focusing on heroic Chicagoans: Jean duSable, the city's mixed-race founder, American socialist and union leader Eugene Debs, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Such poems can feel too dutiful, and at times the book threatens to become (to borrow the name of the mural from which Coval draws the title of his ode to graffiti) a "Wall of Respect." But his evocations of his idols and the city's plight are often stellar, full of rich riffs and smart wordplay-the el is a "working/ class/ spaceship," and capitalism leaves "neighborhoods gutted. chest/ opened by a butcher/ block/ by block." "I witness until the world does," Coval writes in the voice of Ida B. Wells, and indeed, at its best, the book haunts readers "with the forgotten, those left out/ to/ hang/ like ghosts." (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Chicago is under indictment for gun violence, police brutality, and racial segregation, but it is also a city of poets Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks most famously, and now Coval (Schtick, 2013) adds his clarion hip-hop voice to the chorus. Inspired by Howard Zinn's paradigm-changing A People's History of the United States (1980), Coval begins with the fertile land's indigenous humans and the ruthless invaders who forced them from it. Struggles over land continued during the Great Migration and waves of immigration as racism, greed, corruption, and tyranny corralled people of color in enclaves without jobs or adequately funded schools: neighborhoods demarcated / sound nothing like democracy. In fast-breaking poems that bristle with vivid details and spiky truths, Coval praises social-justice movements and the arts, calling out such trailblazers as Jane Addams, Ida B. Wells, Nelson Algren, Lorraine Hansberry, Muddy Waters, Harold Washington, and Frankie Knuckles, while also celebrating the wonders of dynamic urban life. Agile, wryly funny, righteous, and passionate, Coval declares: Chicago / you have my heart / split in two / like the city. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist

Chance the Rapper

Foreword	p. ix
Shikaakwa	p. 1
Iasalle Wrote It Down Wrong	p. 2
The Father Is a Black Man	p. 4
The Treaty of Chicago	p. 6
Hog Butcher for the World	p. 7
Albert Parsons Can Hang	p. 9
How to Be Down	p. 10
The L Gets Open	p. 11
The white City	p. 12
Eugene Debs Reads Marx in Prison	p. 13
Reversing the Flow of the Chicago River	p. 14
The Great Migration	p. 15
The Eastland Disaster	p. 16
The Murder of Eugene Williams	p. 18
Society for Human Rights (America's First Gay Rights Organization)	p. 19
Thomas Dorsey, Gospel's Daddy	p. 21
Gwendolyn Brooks Stands in the Mecca	p. 23
Hansberry vs. Lee	p. 26
Muddy Waters Goes Electric	p. 28
Nelson Algren Meets Simone de Beauvoir at the Palmer House	p. 29
Pickle with a Peppermint Stick	p. 31
Sun Ra Becomes a Synthesizer	p. 33
Hugh hefner, a Play Boy	p. 34
Mamie Till Bears the Movement	p. 35
King daley Unfurls His burnham Plan	p. 36
The Division Street Riots	p. 37
Martin Luther King Prays in Marquette Park	p. 38
Studs Terkel Drops a Mixtape	p. 40
Carl Sandburg Village (Where My Parents Met)	p. 41
Wall of Respect	p. 43
AfriCOBRA	p. 44
The Assassination of Chairman Fred Hampton	p. 46
Don L. Lee Becomes Haki Madhubuti	p. 48
The Chicago 21 Plan	p. 49
Leaving Aldine	p. 50
Ode to Steppin	p. 51
Disco Demolition	p. 52
Mayor byrne Moves Into & Out of Cabrini Green	p. 54
Ron Hardy Plays the Record Backwards	p. 56
The Assassination of Rudy Lozano	p. 58
Marc Smith Invents the Poetry Slam	p. 59
Collateral Damage	p. 61
The Day Harold Died	p. 63
Patronage	p. 64
Fresh to Death	p. 66
Molemen Beat Tapes	p. 67
Graffiti Blasters: An Erasure (A Buff)	p. 69
The Violent Crime Control & Law Enforcement Act	p. 70
The Etymology of Chicago Joe	p. 71
Common's Resurrection	p. 73
The Supreme Court Makes Color Illegal	p. 74
Erasing the Green	p. 75
Ida B. Wells Testifies in the Ghost Town	p. 77
How to Teach Poetry in Chicago Public Schools	p. 79
Lenard Clark Pedals for Air	p. 81
Baby Come On: An Ode to Footwork	p. 83
A Moratorium on the Death Penalty	p. 85
Praise the House Party	p. 87
Día de las Madres	p. 89
Kanye Says What's on Everybody's Mind	p. 91
I Wasn't in Grant Park when Obama Was Elected	p. 93
Republic Windows Workers Sit In	p. 94
The Night the Modern Wing Was Bombed	p. 95
When King Louie First Heard the Word Chiraq	p. 97
An Elegy for Dr. Margaret Burroughs	p. 100
A Dedication to the Inaugural Poet	p. 103
Memoir of the Red X	p. 105
Chief Keef's Epiphany at Lollapalooza	p. 107
Teachers' Strike in the Chicago Tradition	p. 108
During Ramadan the Gates of Heaven Are Open	p. 110
Ms. Devine Explains the Meaning of Modern Art: A Found Poem	p. 112
Two Cities Celebrate Independence Day	p. 113
We Charge Genocide	p. 115
Atoning for the Neo-liberal in All or rahm emanuel as the Chicken on Kapparot	p. 116
400 Days	p. 119
The Night the Cubs Win the World Series	p. 122
Chicago Has My Heart	p. 124
Notes	p. 129
Illustration Credits	p. 131
Acknowledgments	p. 133

Available:*

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Summary

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Booklist Review

Table of Contents