Ashbaugh, Carolyn. Lucy Parsons: American Revolutionary. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1976
Blight, David. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2001.
Bogart, Ernest Ludlow. The Centennial History of Illinois: Industrial State, 1971-1893. Springfield: Illinois Centennial Commission, 1920.
Cole, Arthur Charles. The Centennial History of Illinois: The Era of the Civil War, 1848-1870. Springfield: Illinois Centennial Commission, 1919.
Elshtain, Jean B. Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
German Workers in Industrial Chicago, 1850-1910: A Comparative Perspective. Hartmut Keil and John B. Jentz, editors. DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983.
Handlin, Oscar. The Uprooted. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.
Hendricks, Wanda. Gender, Race, and Politics in the Midwest : Black Club Women in Illinois. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.
Howard, Robert P. Illinois: A History of the Prairie State. Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1972.
Jensen, Richard J. Illinois: A History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.
McMurry, Linda. To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells. New York : Oxford University Press, 1998.
Reed, Christopher. All the World is Here!: the Black Presence at White City. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.
Richardson, Heather C. The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Schechter, Patricia A. Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880-1930. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.