Podcast
Inside the Blanket Fort
Hosted by Amy Etcheson, Mandi Jourdan · EN
Inside the Blanket Fort features special segments. You can meet the producers, get previews and reviews of episodes, and get a special glimpse behind the blankets. SIU Press and WSIU present Blanket Fort Radio Theater, a project highlighting works published by SIU Press. This series includes work from students in the SIUC Creative Writing Program, who have taken SIU Press books and brought them to life. Join us each Thursday for a new installment of Blanket Fort Radio Theater.
36episodes
Episodes
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Inside The Blanket Fort - Episode 197
Nov 8, 202400:05:28Tap to summarize(SIU Press / SIU Press)Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we catch up with author Larry A. McClellan, and his book Onward to Chicago: Freedom Seekers and the Underground Railroad in Northeastern Illinois. Released in 2023, Onward to Chicago won the Underground Railroad Free Press Hortense Simmons Memorial Prize for the Advancement of Knowledge in the same year. Dr. McClellan has appeared on Inside the Blanket Fort before, but we talked with him again at Printers Row Lit Fest about new developments since his last appearance.Decades before the Civil War, Illinois’s status as a free state beckoned enslaved people, particularly those in Kentucky and Missouri, to cross porous river borders and travel toward new lives. While traditional histories of the Underground Railroad in Illinois start in 1839, and focus largely on the romanticized tales of white men, McClellan re-frames the story, not only introducing readers to earlier freedom seekers, but also illustrating that those who bravely aided them were Black and white, men and women.
Transcribe →Inside The Blanket Fort - Episode 196
Oct 31, 202400:05:41Tap to summarize(SIU Press / SIU Press)Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we continue our discussion with author Richard C. Lindberg, who wrote 2020’s Tales of Forgotten Chicago.This book contains twenty-one fascinating, little-known stories that reveal lost historical events and hidden gems from Chicago’s past. From the Civil War through the 1960s, this volume showcases forgotten crimes, punishments, and consequences, as well as the haunting of a wealthy Gilded Age manufacturer’s mansion and the identity of the telephone’s rightful inventor, among many other tales that range from intriguing to touching, like one about the sinking of Chicago's beloved Christmas tree ship.
Transcribe →Inside The Blanket Fort - Episode 195
Oct 24, 202400:05:45Tap to summarize(SIU Press / SIU Press)Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we talk with another SIU Press author: Richard C. Lindberg, who wrote 2020’s Tales of Forgotten Chicago.This book contains twenty-one fascinating, little-known stories about a great city and its people. Lindberg has dug deeply to reveal lost historical events and hidden gems from Chicago’s past. Spanning the Civil War through the 1960s, the volume showcases forgotten crimes, punishments, and consequences: poisoned soup that nearly killed three hundred leading citizens, politicians, and business and religious leaders; a woman in showbiz and her street-thug husband whose checkered lives inspired a 1955 James Cagney movie; and the first police woman in Chicago, hired as a result of the senseless killing of a young factory girl in a racially tinged case of the 1880s.
Transcribe →Inside The Blanket Fort - Episode 194
Oct 17, 202400:05:22Tap to summarize(SIU Press / SIU Press)Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we continue our conversation with Greg Borzo, author of Chicago’s Fabulous Fountains, which was conducted at the Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago. This week, we’ll be talking more about this beautiful book, which also features photographs by Julia Thiel. Chicago’s Fabulous Fountains was a 2018 IPPY Award Silver Medalist for Great Lakes Nonfiction and a winner of an Illinois State Historical Society Award for Other Publications in 2018.
Transcribe →Inside The Blanket Fort - Episode 193
Oct 10, 202400:05:48Tap to summarize(SIU Press / SIU Press)Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we continue our interviews with SIU Press authors from this year's Printers Row Lit Fest. This Week we talk with Greg Borzo, author of Chicago’s Fabulous Fountains.Most people don’t realize it, but Chicago is home to many diverse, artistic, fascinating, and architecturally and historically important fountains. In this attractive volume, Borzo reveals more than one hundred outdoor public fountains of Chicago with noteworthy, amusing, or surprising stories about these gems.
Transcribe →Inside The Blanket Fort - Episode 192
Oct 3, 202400:05:55Tap to summarize(SIU Press / SIU Press)Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we continue our interviews conducted with SIU Press authors at this year’s Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago. This week, we’re featuring Patrick T. Reardon, author of The Loop: The “L” Tracks that Shaped and Saved Chicago.Every day, Chicagoans rely on the loop of elevated train tracks to get to their jobs, classrooms, or homes in the city’s downtown. But how much do they know about the single most important structure in the history of the Windy City? This fascinating exploration of how one human-built structure reshaped the social and economic landscape of Chicago is the definitive book on Chicago’s elevated Loop.
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