For the last three days, Chicago Public Television WTTW11 has been showing a PBS American Experience series on the history of Chicago. Totally first rate and quite informative. Since the series ended tonight, would recommend checking out the Internet site as it has some interesting facts about this gwonderful city I call home. Below is a description of the series from the PBS site:

Chicago: City of the Century offers insights into topics in American history including the settling of the prairies; contact between fur traders, speculators, and Native Americans; infrastructure topics like the building of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, water management projects including sewers and drinking supply, the growth of the railroads, and the creation of the vertical skyscraper city and mass transit; the mechanization of American businesses including farming and animal butchery; the immigrant experience and the diversity of urban populations; the birth of modern commercial methods; the Chicago Fire and urban responses to natural disasters; conflicts between capital and labor including strikes for improved working conditions, Pullman’s industrial utopia, anarchy, and the Haymarket Affair; ward politics and corruption; urban squalor, vice and the crusades for reform; social services for the working class; Jane Addams and the settlement house movement; and the rise of cultural institutions in late 19th century America.