Isabella Garnett was born in Evanston in 1872 and received a nursing degree from Provident Hospital and Nurses Training School in 1895. She later graduated with a medical degree from the College of Physicians and Surgeons (now the University of Illinois College of Medicine) in 1901, making her one of the first female African American physicians in Illinois.
The Illinois Woman Suffrage Association (IWSA) was founded in 1869 and in the early 20th century changed its name to Illinois Equal Suffrage Association (IESA). After more than 40 years of active campaigning, Illinois women gained the right to vote in many statewide races in 1913.
Illinois-based Kroehler Manufacturing Company was one of the largest upholstered furniture manufacturers in the world for 80 years. It had major influence on the buying habits of the American public. The Naperville company sponsored a traveling exhibit of twelve miniature rooms, “Four Generations of Furniture Fashion.” Commissioned by Kroehler and E.I. DuPont de Nemours in the mid 1960s, the exhibit traveled widely through the late 1970s to stores and shopping centers that carried Kroehler furniture.
Glass artists Frances and Michael Higgins met at the Chicago Institute for Design and married in 1948. Together, they founded The Higgins Studio in their Chicago apartment, using kilns positioned behind their sofa to create decorative and everyday items using their signature fused glass technique. They quickly attracted orders from major retailers such as Marshall Field’s and Georg Jensen.
Between May 1 and October 31, 1893, more than 12 million people visited the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which celebrated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America. More than 65,000 exhibits covered 600 acres on the city’s South Side, illuminated at night by hundreds of thousands of light bulbs. Visitors looked at new inventions, listened to lectures, saw art exhibits and sporting events, watched movies, rode the original Ferris Wheel, and tasted new foods such as shredded wheat and Juicy Fruit gum.
During the depths of the Great Depression in 1933-34, Chicago staged its second world fair, A Century of Progress International Exposition, to celebrate its centennial anniversary. Its purpose was to celebrate the amazing advances in technology during the period 1833-1933 and to inspire fairgoers with the promise of the happier future that scientific innovation promised.
This bowl was painted with a bird of paradise design by Swedish immigrant Ingeborg Klein for the Pickard China Company. Klein worked for Pickard from 1920 until about 1925, when she returned to Sweden.
The Chicago Academy of Sciences (now housed at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum) offers many outdoor opportunities, including classes like those conducted by Frank Woodruff (1867-1926). This image depicts Woodruff's bird identification class in Lincoln Park, possibly near the Chicago Academy of Sciences’ Laflin Building at Armitage and Clark.
Until the beginning of the twentieth century, animal specimens were traditionally preserved as study skins or as crudely stuffed mounts. Then, in the early 1910s, a man named Carl Akeley pioneered new specimen preparation techniques that enabled him to create more realistic displays. The Chicago Academy of Sciences also began to experiment with these ideas and devised large, meticulously-detailed dioramas as a new way to represent local species and natural areas.
The Chicago Academy of Sciences/Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum’s scientific collections include several study skins of extinct Passenger Pigeons (Ectopistes migratorius). These four Passenger Pigeon specimens were collected between 1880-1890 in northern Illinois (Evanston and Waukegan).
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