History Lessons in Chicago, IL

Chicago is a great city for biking. The amazing lakefront and parks, the rich history, and spectacular architecture provides for a great experience. Add to that Bike and Roll’s friendly tour guides, and what you have is your best day in Chicago!  Please arrive 10-15 minutes prior to departure time.  All tours return to start location....

Get out of the tourist district and get the insider's scoop on what Chicago is really about! Explore the quiet, tree-lined streets and local businesses of the luxurious Gold Coast, stately Old Town, and trendy Lincoln Park neighborhoods. Top sights include Lincoln Park, amazing architecture, the original Playboy Mansion, Oz Park, and historic Wrigley...

Get out of the tourist district and get the insider's scoop on what Chicago is really about! Explore the quiet, tree-lined streets and local businesses of the luxurious Gold Coast, stately Old Town, and trendy Lincoln Park neighborhoods. Top sights include Lincoln Park, amazing architecture, the original Playboy Mansion, Oz Park, and historic Wrigley...

History Happy Hour!  Raise your glass to the past, and come discover the odd and fascinating things people thought and did in the Middle Ages and beyond.  Professor of History will offer a short presentation, and then open the floor to animated conversation over drinks!  No previous knowledge required.  Each week something...

With its earliest history seated in the ancient practice of Alchemy, the art of Distillation was created by those same early chemists trying to turn lead into gold. Though they did not succeed in creating that precious metal, they did succeed in transforming grain into spirit, and those after them turned that spirit into something magical.  ...

Does history have a direction, a purpose, or an end goal? Can we deduce general historical patterns from studying the past? Is it naïve to hope and work for a better future? From the Enlightenment to the twenty-first century, liberal, Marxist, positivist, and post-structuralist thinkers have offered radically different responses to these fundamental...

The Protestant Reformation: Theology, History, and Modernity In 1517, the Augustinian monk Martin Luther nailed a set of 95 Theses protesting the corruption of the Catholic Church to the door of his local church in Wittenberg, Germany, starting the Protestant Reformation that would radically transform the religious and political landscape of Europe....

In the early 20th century, a new generation of thinkers came to believe that European philosophy had reached a dead end. Reacting to what they held was the obfuscatory language and non-sensical direction of post-Kantian philosophy, Cambridge philosophers Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore set out to revolutionize philosophy through a fundamental rethinking...

Theories of Photography: Representation, Communication, and Aesthetics The photographic image is seen as a means of communication, a recorder of events, a powerful form of surveillance, and a poignant tool for creative practice. In this course, we will consider—and occasionally undermine—such views by delving into a critical analysis of the photographic...

Explore the history of photography, beginning in 1827 with the first photograph, through the age of daguerreotype portraits, the photograph’s early development as an art form, the invention of Kodak’s Box Brownie, to contemporary photography. Discover great photographers and examine how this relatively new medium has affected our culture. This...