Illinois is home to one of the world’s great cities and a vast agricultural heartland. This archive tracks environmental wins, community health advances, economic progress, and civic innovations across the state.
Lori Lightfoot, a political newcomer, was elected the first black female mayor of Chicago. Lightfoot, who will also become the first openly gay mayor of the third-largest U.S. city, appealed to voters who are tired of politics as usual.
The Illinois Senate has approved a bill that requires public schools to teach “the role and contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in the history of this country and this State.”
In 1900, Clara Abbott took a seat on the board of Abbott Laboratories, making her the earliest known female director among today’s Fortune 250 companies. A 2012 survey found the typical firm in that group didn’t appoint its first woman until 1985 — 85 years later. Her quiet precedent shows how slowly corporate doors opened.
John Deere’s steel plow, built in 1837, cracked open one of American farming’s most stubborn problems: the sticky Illinois clay that clogged every cast-iron blade. A Vermont blacksmith working in Grand Detour, Deere polished steel until the soil slid right off. By 1855, his Moline factory was selling over 10,000 plows a year.
