Beneath the ivy-covered facades and forgotten fossils of Illinois lies a story-rich terrain where intellectual ambition, accidental innovation, and civic experiment collide. This collection traces the region’s educational and scientific heritage—from Abraham Lincoln's formative teachers to McDonald's Hamburger University, from the anatomical labs of Rush Medical College to frontier visionaries like Alta May Hulett and Anna Pierce Hobbs Bixby.
Here, academia isn’t reserved for ivory towers—it pulses through Hobo College lectures, hot dog patent wars, and the ghostly aftermath of radium poisoning. You’ll meet inventors, reformers, and stubborn minds who raised city streets out of mud and moved state borders with glacial force.
This is a compendium of Illinois curiosities that challenges sanitized textbook history, offering instead the marvelous, the peculiar, and the quietly revolutionary. Science, innovation, and education weren’t always born in laboratories—they often emerged from taverns, tenements, and trial transcripts. Let’s dig in.
ACADEMIA
THE SCIENCES
INNOVATION
