Illinois

Name: The Chicago Cub Shot For Love
Brand: Jack Bales
SKU: 9781467148481
Price: 16.49 USD
Availability: InStock

Illinois history exceeds the capacity of the Sears Catalog for categorization and the World’s Fair for spectacle. And no matter what the self-appointed tour guide at the local diner might say, the heritage of the land of Lincoln doesn’t end with Capone’s demise. Like the Chicago Loop, the Prairie State’s past seems to defy straightforward chronology—Cahokia offered a version of urban sprawl more than a thousand years before the first Windy City skyscraper. From Park Forest to Cave-in-Rock, scan our shelf of Illinois history books with the unflagging enthusiasm of a Wrigley Field hot dog vendor. [View all Illinois books]

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The Chicago Cub Shot For Love

$21.99 $16.49 Save 25%

Murder & Mayhem in Rockford, Illinois

$21.99 $16.49 Save 25%

The Ruthless Northlake Bank Robbers

$21.99 $16.49 Save 25%

Chicago to Springfield

$24.99 $18.74 Save 25%

Joliet Prison Blues

$21.99 $16.49 Save 25%

Wicked Northern Illinois

$23.99 $17.99 Save 25%

Wicked Springfield

$21.99 $16.49 Save 25%

The Chicago Cub Shot For Love

9781467148481

$21.99 $16.49 Save 25%

In the summer of 1932, with the Cubs in the thick of the pennant race, Billy Jurges broke off his relationship with Violet Popovich to focus on baseball. The famously beautiful showgirl took it poorly, marching into his hotel room with a revolver in her purse. Both were wounded in the ensuing struggle, but Jurges refused to press charges. Even without their star shortstop, Chicago made it to the World Series, only to be on the wrong end of Babe Ruth's legendary Called Shot. Using hundreds of original sources, Jack Bales profiles the lives of the ill-fated couple and traces the ripple effects of the shooting on the Cubs' tumultuous season.

Murder & Mayhem in Rockford, Illinois

9781467119153

$21.99 $16.49 Save 25%

Rockford rightly prizes its prosperous heritage, earned by manufacturing concerns like the Rockford Watch Factory and the Manny Reaper Company. But the town once named Midway also harbors a history of crime and calamity.

Gunfire broke out in the streets when networks of Prohibition informants slid sideways. In 1893, John Hart forced his own sisters to drink poison. Three years later, James French shot down his wife in the street. Over the years, a courthouse collapsed, a factory exploded and trains collided. Join local historian Kathi Kresol as she explores the mayhem milling about in Rockford's past.

The Ruthless Northlake Bank Robbers

9781467119382

$21.99 $16.49 Save 25%

Automatic gunfire hammered police arriving at Northlake Bank in response to a silent alarm on the morning of October 27, 1967. The shootout killed two officers and injured two others. One of the robbers lay wounded as the other two fled in a getaway car. The ensuing manhunt tore across state lines and thrust the quiet Illinois community into a national debate over rehabilitated prisoners—two of the men were fresh out of jail for bank robbery. Local author Edgar Gamboa Návar traces this violent midwestern crime saga from the initial grocery store holdup in Ohio before the bank job to the capture of the murderous gang in Indiana, as well as the conviction and imprisonment.

Chicago to Springfield

9780738583730

$24.99 $18.74 Save 25%

The story of Chicago gangsters in the 1920s is legendary. Less talked about is the tale of the politicians who allowed those gangsters to thrive. During the heyday of organized crime in the Prohibition era, Chicago mayor "Big Bill" Thompson and Gov. Len Small were the two most powerful political figures in Illinois. Thompson campaigned on making Chicago "a wide open town" for bootleggers. Small sold thousands of pardons and paroles to criminals, embezzled $1 million, and was then acquitted after mobsters bribed the jury. This book is the story of those Jazz Age politicians whose careers in government thrived on and endorsed corruption and racketeering, from Chicago to Springfield. It complements author Jim Ridings's groundbreaking biography, Len Small: Governors and Gangsters, which was praised by critics and situated Ridings as a trailblazer among Chicago crime authors.

Joliet Prison Blues

9781467147354

$21.99 $16.49 Save 25%

Named warden of the Illinois State Penitentiary in 1913, Edmund Allen arrived with a glamorous new wife and ambitious plans of reform that did away with years of striped uniforms and humiliating practices. Two years later, his wife was found murdered in her bed, shocking the country and throwing the prison into chaos. Over the past century, life behind bars at Joliet has often been a national spectacle. Infamous inmates like Leopold and Loeb, John Wayne Gacy, Baby Face Nelson and James Earl Ray drew headlines, and iconic scenes in movies like The Blues Brothers ensured that the prison walls themselves were instantly recognizable. From overlooked prisoner profiles to the kind of dramatic incidents that incited riots or inspired Hollywood, Amy Steidinger's stories cover the modern era of Old Joliet Prison.

Wicked Northern Illinois

9781596292789

$23.99 $17.99 Save 25%

From the secrets of Joliet Penitentiary to the ferocious gunfights between the Ku Klux Klan and the Shelton Gang, Troy Taylor takes the measure of the dishonest sweat and innocent blood poured into the prairies of Northern Illinois. Meet the "fallen angels" of Decatur's red-light district, the Springfield counterfeiters who bungled stealing Lincoln's bones and the Aurora man who propped up his porch with the heads of his wife and brother-in-law. And if you dare, eavesdrop on the chilling confession of a man who left a dancer's corpse to the mercy of the railroad tracks: "So, I pat them on the cheek, call them sweet names, and kill them."

Wicked Springfield

9781596299016

$21.99 $16.49 Save 25%

In the twenty-four years that Abraham Lincoln lived in Springfield, the city saw its share of crime, corruption and scandal, much of it at the hands of Lincoln's law clients and acquaintances. Erika Holst sheds light on these shady characters, from the man being sued for divorce who claimed that he caught his venereal disease from an outhouse to Governor William Bissell, whose near duel with Jefferson Davis almost made him ineligible to hold office. Learn what prompted a congressional candidate- in an election clerked by Lincoln- to shout down his accuser as some 'spindle-shanked, toad-eating, man-granny, who feeds the depraved appetites of his patrons with gossip and slander.' Read the true stories that fed those depraved appetites, drawn from the newspapers Lincoln read and the docket where he practiced law. In these pages, discover the wicked side of Lincoln's Springfield.