With a selection of fine historic images from his best-selling book Historic Photos of Chicago Crime: The Capone Era, John Russick provides a valuable and revealing historical retrospective on Chicago’s gangster era.
Perhaps no city has a more fabled past than Chicago, home of legendary Al Capone. But that fabled past is often portrayed separate from the surrounding web of social realities, without which no event, no period in time can be understood. Remembering Chicago: Crime in the Capone Era addresses this problem by opening with a compelling look at Chicago’s cityscape to include a broad range of cultural phenomena—from suffrage to jazz—essential to the contextualization of crime in the 1920s and 1930s. The history then proceeds as its title suggests—to a riveting overview of crime in Chicago, chock-full of images documenting notorious gangsters and gruesome gangland wars. Al Capone, John Torrio, Earl "Hymie" Weiss, George "Bugs" Moran, and a host of others are all here. Complete with insightful captions by historian John Russick, these photos offer a unique view into Chicago and its nefarious past.