Patrick T. Reardon

‘Lincoln’s Lieutenants’ a masterful look at courage and gutlessness in Civil War

May 9, 2019 at 11:32 p.m.

In May 1864, during the Battle of the Wilderness, when Ulysses S. Grant was new in command of the Northern troops facing the Confederate forces of Robert E. Lee, an...

Ring Lardner’s journalism back in print

May 9, 2019 at 11:26 p.m.

Near the end of "The Lost Journalism of Ring Lardner," in a section called "Buried Treasure," editor Ron Rapoport includes this tidbit from a Lardner column about diet and exercise:...

Deputy Sheriff Mike Russell, left, and J. Z. Gabriel, right, escort Adolfo Dominguez, Mexico's acting consul, from the cell to which he was assigned a few hours earlier by Judge Thomas Green, on July 7, 1931.

The Chicago judge who jailed the Mexican consul — and sparked an international incident

May 11, 2019 at 8:46 a.m.

In the realm of world affairs, experienced diplomats know how quickly even the slightest misunderstanding can spark a crisis between nations. Such was nearly the case on July 7, 1931,...

"Chicago May" Duignan made her way in the 1890s from small-town Ireland to Chicago, where, according to a Tribune report, she became a groundbreaking scoundrel by "introducing the camera into the art of blackmail."

‘Chicago May’: Globe-trotting celebrity crook

May 11, 2019 at 8:43 a.m.

During the first three decades of the 20th century, Chicago's newspapers, including the Tribune, couldn't get enough of an Irish woman who became a celebrity criminal on four continents. She...

The scene at the Tribune dock on April 27, 1940, after the steamship Outarde, left, and the New York Daily News had docked with the first paper cargoes of the season. The Tribune Tower is on the left in the background.

Tribune Tower wasn’t the newspaper’s first home

May 11, 2019 at 8:34 a.m.

Tribune Tower on Michigan Avenue has been the Chicago Tribune's home for 91 years, but it wasn't the newspaper's first home — and it likely won't be the last. The...

Fort Dearborn, the Army post erected in 1803 by soliders under Capt. John Whistler, was named for Secretary of War Henry Dearborn. It stood on the right bank of the Chicago River where the river makes a turn just south of the Michigan Avenue bridge.

Chicago’s trail of tears: Potawatomi warriors’ 1835 dance marked eviction

May 11, 2019 at 8:33 a.m.

In London during the summer of 1835, demonstration trains began giving free rides along a newly completed section of the London and Greenwich Railway, the first railway of any sort...

Ulysses S. Grant’s Memoirs: an appreciation

May 9, 2019 at 11:17 p.m.

There is a famous photograph of Ulysses S. Grant, sitting on the porch of his home in upstate New York on an obviously very cold day in 1885, writing his...

Carter Henry Harrison Jr. served as the 30th mayor of Chicago from 1897 to 1905 and 1911 to 1915. One of Harrison's biggest enemies was Charles Tyson Yerkes, whose plans to monopolize Chicago's streetcar lines were vigorously attacked.

How Chicago’s reformers were talking mob violence more than a century before Trump

May 11, 2019 at 8:32 a.m.

Donald Trump's loose talk about the Second Amendment has gotten a lot of people worrying that he was not so subtly calling for armed violence, or even assassination. More than...

‘Cartographic Grounds,’ ‘Mind the Map’ expand horizons for what maps can be

May 9, 2019 at 11:12 p.m.

The stark white-on-black image on the cover of "Cartographic Grounds," edited by Jill Desimini and Charles Waldheim, is beautiful and mysterious. Is this Antarctica? Or somewhere within the Arctic Circle?...

Donald Trump speaks during a rally in Eugene, Ore., on May 7, 2016.

Trumpy McTrumpface: A joke that’s now no laughing matter

May 11, 2019 at 8:21 a.m.

You've probably heard about how, in the United Kingdom, a joke got out of hand. The very prim and proper British Natural Environment Research Council came up with a stunt...

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