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| Crucible of Free Speech: A Night in Bohemia
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| While strikes and street demonstrations captured the headlines, a quieter phenomenon reshaped the possibilities for free expression in Chicago. The modern city spawned neighborhoods that became home to nonconformists and outcasts—artists, radicals, and sexual minorities—from the farms and small towns of the Midwest, as well as from Chicago’s tightly knit working-class communities.
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Like the impoverished and unconventional artists who became familiar characters in nineteenth-century European literature, these nonconformists were known as “bohemians,” a mistaken reference to gypsies, who were once thought to come from the Eastern European region of Bohemia. Chicago’s bohemians, like those in New York City’s Greenwich Village, were at the forefront of many artistic, literary, and cultural trends.
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