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Review of Chicago History Museum, Digital Collection : Costume and Textile Collection. 2012.

Review of Chicago History Museum, Digital Collection : Costume and Textile Collection.2012.

As policymakers reckon with how the United States became a global leader in imprisonment after World War II, scholars have suggested that the roots of this phenomenon are in conservative backlash to postwar crime or in federal intervention in American cities during the urban crisis. However, historians and social scientists have overlooked the role of jails in the origins story of mass incarceration. Through a close historical examination of Cook County Jail in Chicago, my research addresses how policymakers used reform claims to rationalize the growth of large urban jails from the 1950s through the 1990s. As a massive state building project, mass incarceration was contingent upon branding urban jails as providers of social services and rehabilitation, even though there was proof that jails failed to provide such services and as jail policymakers built bigger and more brutal jails. While activists, lawyers, and prisoners challenged dehumanizing conditions and state violence, jailers responded to public scrutiny by assuring the public that Cook County Jail was in the process of becoming a space that was beneficial to people awaiting trial there. This project locates the emergence of the contemporary carceral crisis in the battle to transform America’s jails. / History

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / As historians have expanded their interests from focusing on great men and groundbreaking events to perspectives that explore everyday experiences or ordinary people, odor emerges as an important interpretative lens. Understanding the olfactory history of communities, especially what types of odors were present and how people perceived and reacted to them, enlarges historians’ understanding of the life experiences and behaviors of people in the past. The historical study of odor provides insights into how quality of life and standards of living have changed over time. Understanding how people of different times reacted to odors suggests how they perceived the sensory world around them, including people living close by. In this thesis, I examine the olfactory conditions of the neighborhood surrounding the Union Stockyards and associated meat processing facilities on Chicago’s south side in the first decade of the twentieth century. During this period, an overpowering combination of putrid odors characterized this neighborhood, known as Back of the Yards. Various factors contributed to this malodorous “smellscape,” and it impacted the quality of life of the predominantly immigrant communities that made up the workforce and residents of that neighborhood.

The Chicago Area Transportation Study (CATS) set the standard for urban transportation planning during its original 1955-61 genesis years. This study examined CATS' planning methodology during these years and its 1962 regional transportation plan for the Chicago metropolis which had a planning target year of 1980. The subject focus of this study was on expressway planning while the temporal focus was from the late 1950's to circa 1980. The findings of this study revealed four key reasons why CATS' 1962 expressway plan was largely never implemented. These reasons include the inconsistency of some of CATS' 1962 projections for 1980 versus actual 1980 data, the apolitical orientation of CATS, increased urban environmentalism, and rising expressway infrastructure costs. Yet despite the lack of plan implementation, the literature supports the conclusion that CATS did set the standard, at least in its methodology or planning approach. / Department of Urban Planning