Wing. Livingston. Seven miles northeast of Fairbury. Founded in 1883 by a man named Byrd. According to a local story, there was already a Byrd in Illinois so there ought […]
The New York Review of Books praises “The Lincoln-Douglas Debates”
The October 23, 2008, issue of The New York Review of Books includes a dual review of Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America by Allen Guelzo and The […]
Illinois Place Name of the Day – Oct. 8, 2008
My hometown! Park Forest. Cook, Will. Founded in 1946 as a residential community for returning veterans of World War II by Carroll F. Sweet and American Community Builders. The name […]
David Wagoner featured on The Writer’s Almanac
“A Woman Feeding Gulls,” a poem from David Wagoner’s book Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems, was featured on the October 5, 2008, edition of Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. David […]
Pilot program for e-textbooks
The University of Texas at Austin, in coordination with John Wiley & Sons, is testing an e-textbook program, reports today’s Inside Higher Ed. “Many observers, both in academe and in the publishing […]
Illinois Place Name of the Day – Oct. 7, 2008
Foosland [FOOS luhnd]. Champaign. Village (1959) seven miles southwest of Gibson City. Founded in 1874 and named for William Foos, an absentee landlord who owned some 3,500 acres in Champaign […]
Laughter by Loyal Jones
When I received an advance copy of my book, I first thought of James “Goober” Buchanan, who had written me recently at age 100 to say he hoped to live to […]
Illinois Place Name of the Day – Oct. 6, 2008
Bug Tussle. Franklin. According to a local story, the community was named when a revival meeting attracted more june bugs than attendees, and the congregation spent most of the evening […]
But I wanted that sentence to read ambiguously
In honor of Carol Betts’s retirement, I offer up a glowing example of how authors really do value their copy editors (via the New York Times): What My Copy Editor […]
Illinois Place Name of the Day – Oct. 3, 2008
Elizabeth. Jo Daviess. Village (1887) Twelve miles east-southeast of Galena. According to an Illinois state historical marker, in June 1832, at the height of the Black Hawk War, a group […]
Nobody wants to take the last one
All summer long several of our colleagues have shared lovely produce, most especially sweet grape tomatoes. So much produce was shared that some of it has sat for days abandoned […]
Taking the monograph online
The Chronicle of Higher Education investigates two new digital models for academic presses. “Scholarly publishers are well aware that more and more readers and libraries want to get hold of monographs […]