Many of the EU's 370 million eligible voters from 27 countries went to the voting booths between 6 and 9 June 2024 in order to cast their votes for the European Parliament.

In this episode, Andrew Sola and our resident EU expert Günter Danner discuss the EU Parliament, its powers, its role in the constellation of EU institutions, and its inner workings. Furthermore, they discuss the results of the election and their significance for France, Germany, and Europe as a whole.

This episode is part of the ChicagoHamburg30 podcast series, which celebrates the 30th anniversary of the Chicago-Hamburg Sister-City Partnership.

Happy Pride Month!

We celebrate with an episode about Queer Chicago featuring two historians of Queer History, Owen Keehnen and Timothy Stewart-Winter.

Topics include the following:
-The difficulties of accessing Queer history since it was repressed and marginalized for so long
-The recovery and reclamation of Queer history
-Early Gay cultures in the Levy District
-The Society for Human Rights, which was the first Gay rights organization in the US, founded in Chicago by Henry Gerber in 1924
-The influence of the German writer and thinker Magnus Hirschfeld on Gay culture in Chicago
-The special historical role of Chicago as the Midwestern Queer city, which differentiates it from the more well-known Gay cities of New York and San Francisco
-The repeal of anti-sodomy laws by the Illinois in 1961, the first state to do so
-Chicago's Human Rights Ordinance of 1988, which formally protected the Queer community from discrimination
-Black Queer Chicago
-Lesbian Chicago
-The AIDS crisis
-The Belmont Rocks and the AIDS Garden

Check out Owen's Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/owenkeehnen/

This episode is part of the Amerikazentrum's ChicagoHamburg30 series, celebrating the 30-year anniversary of the Chicago-Hamburg Sister-City partnership.

Happy Jewish American Heritage Month! In this episode, we explore the rich and complex history of Jewish Chicago, from the 1850s to the present.

Topics include the following:

-the first Jewish settlers and politicians in Chicago
-the influence of German high-culture and Enlightenment philosophy on German Jews in Chicago
-the formation of Jewish regimental companies in the Civil War
-the second wave of Jewish immigrants and the tensions between establishment Jews and the new arrivals
-World War I and the Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924
-Prohibition and the rise of the Jewish gangster
-the role of Word War II and the Holocaust in unifying the disparate Jewish communities
-protests against the German American Bund
-the transformation of the suburb of Lawndale into German Jewish "Deutschland"
-further immigration trends from the post-Soviet nations as well as Israel

Throughout, you will learn about famous Jewish Chicagoans, such as Henry Greenebaum, Dankmar Adler, Edward Solomon, Hannah Shapiro, Joseph Schaffner, and Julius Rosenwald.

Our expert guests are Dr. Tobias Brinkmann (Penn State University) and Dr. Joe Kraus (University of Scranton).

This episode is part of the ChicagoHamburg30 podcast series, celebrating the 30-year anniversary of the Chicago-Hamburg Sister-City partnership.

In this episode, Dominic Pacyga (Emeritus Professor of History, Columbia College Chicago) and Tobias Brinkmann (Malvin and Lea Bank Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History, Penn State) discuss the immigration of Poles, Czechs, Ukrainians and Lithuanians to Chicago via the Hamburg-America Line.

Topics include the following:
-the first Eastern European immigrants in the 1850s
-the self-definition of these groups through language, religion, and ethnicity
-the concept of spatial integration and social segregation in Chicago
-the role of railroads in opening up Eastern Europe to the port of Hamburg
-the turmoil in Europe that caused different waves of immigration
-the importance of foreign-language, ethnic newspapers in Chicago
-the new roles available to immigrant women in Chicago
-the inter-ethnic conflict in Chicago caused by World War I
-the effect of immigration restrictions on Eastern Europeans due to the Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924
-the inter-ethnic conflict between German Chicagoans (the German-American Bund) and other groups before and during World War II
-the softening of immigration restrictions after WWII with the Displaced Persons Act of 1948
-the differences among Polish, Czech, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian experiences during the Cold War

If you are interested in learning more about Polish Chicago, check out Back Home: Polish Chicago at the Chicago History Museum through June 8, 2024. https://www.chicagohistory.org/

This episode is part of the ChicagoHamburg30 podcast series, celebrating the 30-year anniversary of the Chicago-Hamburg Sister-City partnership.

Learn more about the history and culture of Black Chicago with award-winning scholar Dr. Mary Pattillo, Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and Black Studies at Northwestern University.

Topics include the difficulties in defining Black Chicago, which is neither a static nor homogenous concept; the two waves of the Great Migration of Black people from the rural South to the cities of the North in the early 1900s; the important differences between the concepts of the Black Ghetto and the Black Metropolis; and the history of important Black political figures in Chicago from Ida B. Wells and President Barack Obama to Mayors Harold Washington, Lori Lightfoot, and Brandon Johnson. Throughout, Pattillo highlights the resilience and complexity of Black Chicago.

In the final episode of 2023, Sola and Danner look ahead to 2024. They discuss three issues that will influence a number of elections in 2024: the immigration crisis, the war in Ukraine, and the macroeconomic situation.

They then use these issues as a lens to analyze five upcoming elections: the Russian presidential elections in March; the EU parliamentary elections in June; the east German state elections in Brandenburg, Thuringia, and Saxony in September; the expected parliamentary elections in the UK; and the mother of all presidential elections in the USA in November.

In our wrap-up of political developments in the EU in 2023, Sola and Danner discuss the results of the five big European elections this year in Italy, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain. Are we seeing the entrenchment of the far-right across Europe? Or are centrist politicians regaining the advantage? The second topic is the European Council Summit that took place last week and that yielded some mixed results for Ukraine, due to the obstinance of Viktor Orban, PM of Hungary. Lastly, we evaluate the performance of the German coalition government, which had a rough and tumble 2023.

In the second of our two-episode series about Jane Addams, we continue telling the story of Hull House and Addams' impact on the development of the the city of Chicago. Addams was a keen advocate for worker's rights and helped mediate the labor unrest that had been shaking the city since the Haymarket Affair of 1886. We survey the long list of projects she supported from juvenile justice reform to children's music education and from housing reform to the building of playgrounds and libraries. We also meet her partners in her projects, including Ellen Gates Starr, Eleanor Sophia Smith, John Dewey, Lillian Wald, and Johnny the Greek.

The models of community improvement she created in Chicago began to spread around the US and the world as Addams herself began to set her sights on international issues, namely imperialism, militarization, and war. Her concerns about armed conflict led her to become Chair of the Woman's Peace Party and President of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. We also outline the criticism she endured as a result of her peace activism.

As her health began to fade, she maintained her interest in issues of racial justice and community involvement at Hull House.

"The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life." Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (1910)

In the first of our two episodes on the life of Jane Addams, we learn about her formative years in a small farming village outside of Chicago, her education, and her relationship with her progressive Republican father, from whom she developed some guiding principles for her life, namely the ideas of Christian stewardship and community engagement. We also learn about her first visits to Europe, where she began to develop her conviction that human beings are not helpless and subject to the unfathomable forces of history, but that we have agency and can change the world in positive ways. Lastly, we explore the origins of her belief in mediation and dialogue, the idea that we can never solve the problems facing society without understanding one another and speaking to one another. All of these ideas coalesced with the founding of the first settlement house in Chicago by Addams in 1889, Hull House, a place where immigrants and Americans, rich and poor, black and white, young and old, men and women could come together in order to address the problems facing the fastest-growing city on the planet.

Our two expert guests are Rima Lunin Schultz and Ann Durkin Keating.

Rima is a Jane Addams scholar.  She co-edited "Women Building Chicago: A Biographical Dictionary” and most recently co-authored "Eleanor Smith's Hull-House Songs: Music of Protest and Hope in Jane Addams Chicago".   

Ann is professor of history at North Central College in Naperville, IL, and the co-editor of the "Encyclopedia of Chicago".

Poet and scholar Lindsay Tuggle is Stefanie Schaefer’s guest in this
episode. They talk about "solastalgia," the feeling of loss that occurs
when you are "home" but your home is destroyed. This concept has acquired a new global relevance in the Anthropocene as a climate-related mental health concept. They also discuss solastalgia’s meanings as pathology and as a strategy for resilience. Lastly, they assess the impact of Walt Whitman’s Civil War poetry on Tuggle's own poetic engagement with her lost home in Mayfield, KY, which was wiped out by a tornado and a flood in 2021.