This seminar applies the techniques of micro-history – the intense exploration of a tightly-focused time or place – to a tiny slice of twentieth century Chicago. It starts on the Fourth of July 1961 on the 6100 block of W. Eddy Street, out in the north side’s bungalow belt. From there it spins backward to explore class, race, immigration, assimilation, opportunity, mobility, war, and peace as they were experienced by one the block’s thirty-six families. In the process the seminar tries to show how revealing and compelling it can be to go looking for history in very small places.
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