Perry R. Duis
Born: August 18, 1943 in Sterling, Illinois
Died: December 18, 2019, in Naperville, Illinois Pen Name: None Connection to Illinois: Duis was born and raised in Sterling. He attended Northwestern in Evenston and lived the majority of his adult life in Naperville. Biography: Perry R Duis graduated from Northwestern in 1965 and earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago. He taught American history and the history of Chicago at UIC for forty-two years, until his retirement in 2010. He was honored twice, in 1976 and 2007, with UIC‘s Silver Circle Award in recognition of his teaching. Perry wrote four books about Chicago—Chicago: Creating New Traditions(1976); The Saloon: Public Drinking in Chicago and Boston(1983); We’ve Got a Job to Do: Chicagoans and World War II (1992); and Challenging Chicago: Coping with Everyday Life, 1837-1920 (1998).Perry felt privileged to make a career of pursuing his interests and sharing them with others. He spent his life connecting Chicagoans to their history.
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Selected Titles
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Challenging Chicago: Coping with Everyday Life, 1837-1920 ISBN: 0252074157 OCLC: 37820146 University of Illinois Press, Urbana : ©1998. Risky city. This was Chicago during an unprecedented period of rapid growth: a burgeoning metropolis that quickly became a concentration of risk. The many thousands of immigrants and rural Americans who streamed into the city during these years found it far more congested, crowded, dangerous, unpleasant, immoral, and unhealthy than they had anticipated. Challenging Chicago reveals the survival strategies to which the many people who flocked to the city resorted, especially those of the lower and middle classes for whom urban life was a new experience. |
| Chicago—Chicago: Creating New Tradition ISBN: 0913820032 OCLC: Chicago : Chicago Historical Society Chicago : 1976 |
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The Saloon: Public Drinking in Chicago and Boston ISBN: 0252067819 OCLC: 41425248 University of Illinois Press, Urbana : 1999. Presents evidence that the saloon, played an important role in the working-class community life. Focusing on public drinking in Chicago and Boston, this book offers a discussion of the saloon, as a social institution and a locus of the struggle between middle-class notions of privacy and working-class uses of public space. |
| We've Got a Job to Do:: Chicagoans and World War II (1992) ISBN: 0913820172 OCLC: 25747334 Chicago Historical Society, [Chicago, IL] : 1992. This journey into wartime Chicago provides a portrait of our nation's homefront experience in more than 130 period photos, oral history interviews and text. |