Check out specially created born digital exhibits. Exhibit subjects cover the history of North Central College, Shimer College, and the western Chicago suburbs.
Chicago Collections Consortium’s digital exhibit, Wild in the City: Chicagoland’s Urban Ecology, explores the interaction of urban and natural environments in the Chicago region from the 1850s onward by drawing on the archival collections of the Chicago Academy of Sciences / Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, Chicago Botanic Garden,Lincoln Park Zoo, and North Central College.
2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing women the right to vote. But the history of woman suffrage, as people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries called it, is much longer. At North Central College, it goes back to at least 1888, and involved women prominent on campus and in the town of Naperville. This exhibit tells the story of woman suffrage at North Central through journals, photographs, and newspaper articles, highlighting how it mirrors the larger story of woman suffrage in the United States, with its strengths and successes as well as its challenges and shortcomings.
In 2000, archivist Kimberly Jacobsen Butler wrote an article for the North Central College alumni magazine about buildings on campus that no longer existed. She called it “Lost North Central” after the book Lost Chicago. 21 years later, the campus has changed further, and it seems only fitting to revisit Butler’s concept of “Lost North Central." Learn the stories of the campus museum, the college’s first coffee house, and a much-loved student dormitory, all of which had to make way as the campus grew and changed.
