Bughouse Square Debates
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Bughouse Square Debates
The Bughouse Square Debates are an annual event sponsored by the Newberry Library in Chicago. The debates take place across from the Newberry, in Washington Square Park. Soapboxes located throughout the park give a series of scheduled speakers platforms from which they may share their opinions on a variety of issues related to education, labor, sports, religion, technology, national security, and other topics. Every year, a panel of judges presents the champion soapboxer with the Dill Pickle Award, a nod to the Dill Pickle Club, a bohemian gathering place located near the park in the early twentieth century. The first debates organized by the Newberry were in 1986. Washington Square Park served as a raucous public forum for many of the political radicals and intellectuals who frequented the Dill Pickle Club. "Bughouse" being popular slang for mental health facilities at the time, the word gave the park its nickname and described the fringe viewpoints and the free-flowing discourse o ...
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Bughouse Square, Studs Terkel, Date Unknown O3
Bughouse can refer to: * A psychiatric hospital * Bughouse chess * ''Operation Bughouse'', an alternate name for the fictional Battle of Klendathu in Robert A. Heinlein's novel ''Starship Troopers ''Starship Troopers'' is a military science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein. Written in a few weeks in reaction to the US suspending nuclear tests, the story was first published as a two-part serial in ''The Magazine of F ...'' * Bughouse (band). * Bughouse Bay on the north side of Drury Inlet in the Central Coast of British Columbia, Canada ** Bughouse Lake, immediately behind and north of Bughouse Bay See also * Bug-out (other) {{disambig ...
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Newberry Library
The Newberry Library is an independent research library, specializing in the humanities and located on Washington Square in Chicago, Illinois. It has been free and open to the public since 1887. Its collections encompass a variety of topics related to the history and cultural production of Western Europe and the Americas over the last six centuries. The Library is named to honor the founding bequest from the estate of philanthropist Walter Loomis Newberry. Core collection strengths support research in several subject areas, including maps, travel, and exploration; music from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century; early contact between Western colonizers and Indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere; the personal papers of twentieth-century American journalists; the history of printing; and genealogy and local history. Although the Newberry is a noncirculating library, it welcomes researchers into the reading rooms who are at least 14 years old or in the ninth grade, ...
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Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name = United States , subdivision_type1 = State , subdivision_type2 = Counties , subdivision_name1 = Illinois , subdivision_name2 = Cook and DuPage , established_title = Settled , established_date = , established_title2 = Incorporated (city) , established_date2 = , founder = Jean Baptiste Point du Sable , government_type = Mayor–council , governing_body = Chicago City Council , leader_title = Mayor , leader_name = Lori Lightfoot ( D) , leader_title1 = City Clerk , leader_name1 = Anna Valencia ( D) , unit_pref = Imperial , area_footnotes = , area_tot ...
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Washington Square Park (Chicago)
Washington Square, also known as Washington Square Park, is a park in Chicago, Illinois. A registered historic landmark that is better known by its nickname Bughouse Square (derived from the slang of bughouse referring to mental health facilities), it was the most celebrated open air free-speech center in the country as well as a popular Chicago tourist attraction. It is located across Walton Street from Newberry Library at 901 N. Clark Street in the Near North Side community area of Chicago, Illinois, USA.Rosemont, Franklin ''Bughouse Square'', Eds. Grossman, James R., Keating, Ann Durkin, and Reiff, Janice L., 2004 ''The Encyclopedia of Chicago'', pp. 99. The University of Chicago Press, It is Chicago's oldest existing small park.Pacyga, Dominic A., ''Playgrounds and Small Parks'', Eds. Grossman, James R., Keating, Ann Durkin, and Reiff, Janice L., 2004 ''The Encyclopedia of Chicago'', pp. 622. The University of Chicago Press, It is one of four Chicago Park District parks na ...
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Dil Pickle Club
The Dil Pickle Club or Dill Pickle Club was once a popular Bohemian club in Chicago, Illinois between 1917 and 1935. The Dil Pickle was known as a speakeasy, cabaret and theatre and was influential during the "Chicago Renaissance" as it allowed a forum for free thinkers. It was founded and owned by ''Wobbly'' John "Jack" Jones and was frequented by popular American authors, activists and speakers. The club's legacy has seen several reincarnations, including Chicago Dil Pickle Club, the Dill Pickle Food Co-op, Dil Pickle Press, and the Dill Pickle Club of Portland, OR, "an experimental forum for critiquing contemporary culture, politics and humanities." History In 1914, John "Jack" Jones, a former organizer for the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) had started several weekly forums at the Radical Book Shop on North Clark Street in Chicago. The forums discussed labor issues along with social concerns of the day. Soon, in early 1915, Jones needed a new venue as the ...
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Industrial Workers Of The World
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), members of which are commonly termed "Wobblies", is an international labor union that was founded in Chicago in 1905. The origin of the nickname "Wobblies" is uncertain. IWW ideology combines general unionism with industrial unionism, as it is a general union, subdivided between the various industries which employ its members. The philosophy and tactics of the IWW are described as "revolutionary industrial unionism", with ties to socialist, syndicalist, and anarchist labor movements. In the 1910s and early 1920s, the IWW achieved many of their short-term goals, particularly in the American West, and cut across traditional guild and union lines to organize workers in a variety of trades and industries. At their peak in August 1917, IWW membership was estimated at more than 150,000, with active wings in the United States, the UK, Canada, and Australia. The extremely high rate of IWW membership turnover during this era (estimated ...
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Lucy Parsons
Lucy Eldine Gonzalez Parsons (born Lucia Carter; 1851 – March 7, 1942) was an American labor organizer, radical socialist and anarcho-communist. She is remembered as a powerful orator. Parsons entered the radical movement following her marriage to newspaper editor Albert Parsons and moved with him from Texas to Chicago, where she contributed to the newspaper he famously edited, ''The Alarm.'' Following her husband's 1887 execution in conjunction with the Haymarket affair, Parsons remained a leading American radical activist, as a founder of the Industrial Workers of the World and member of other political organizations. Biography Early life Lucy Parsons was born Lucia Carter in Virginia in 1851. Her mother, Charlotte, was an African-American woman enslaved by a white man named Tolliver, who may have been Lucy's father. In 1863, during the Civil War, Tolliver relocated to Waco, Texas with his slaves, dodging the enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation that set January ...
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Ben Reitman
__NOTOC__ Ben Lewis Reitman M.D. (1879–1943) was an American anarchist and physician to the poor ("the hobo doctor"). He is best remembered today as one of radical Emma Goldman's lovers. Reitman was a flamboyant, eccentric character. Emma Goldman conveys a sense of this when she describes first meeting Reitman in her autobiography, ''Living My Life'': His eyes were brown, large, and dreamy. His lips, disclosing beautiful teeth when he smiled, were full and passionate. He looked a handsome brute. His hands, narrow and white, exerted a peculiar fascination. His finger-nails, like his hair, seemed to be on strike against soap and brush. I could not take my eyes off his hands. A strange charm seemed to emanate from them, caressing and stirring...Emma Goldman, ''Living My Life'', Volume 1. Biography Reitman was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to poor Russian Jewish immigrants in 1879, and grew up in Chicago. At the age of ten, he became a hobo, but returned to Chicago and worked in ...
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Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth (1905–1982) was an American poet, translator, and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement. Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was dubbed the "Father of the Beats" by ''Time'' magazine. Largely self-educated, Rexroth learned several languages and translated poems from Chinese, French, Spanish, and Japanese. Early life Rexroth was born Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth in South Bend, Indiana, the son of Charles Rexroth, a pharmaceuticals salesman, and Delia Reed. His childhood was troubled by his father's alcoholism and his mother's chronic illness. His mother died in 1916 and his father in 1919, after which he went to live with his aunt in Chicago and enrolled in the Art Institute of Chicago. At age nineteen, he hitchhiked across the country, taking odd jobs and working a stint as a Forest Service trail cr ...
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Jack Sheridan (poet)
Jack Sheridan (1905–1967) was an American poet and soapbox orator particularly known for his participation in the Bughouse Square Debates, the Dil Pickle Club and the College of Complexes. He was an activist in the Industrial Workers of the World. Jack was attracted to hobohemia whilst still at school. He soon became a regular attendee at the Dil Pickle Club. In 1928 he went to Europe via New York City staying primarily in Paris. In 1931 he returned to the USA, spending time in Lower Manhattan Lower Manhattan (also known as Downtown Manhattan or Downtown New York) is the southernmost part of Manhattan, the central borough for business, culture, and government in New York City, which is the most populated city in the United States with .... Here he acquired such nicknames as the "King of the Hobohemians" and the "Byron of the Soapboxes". He married his wife Ruth in 1944 and became active in a literary group called the Druids in Chicago's Near North Side. References 1 ...
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First Amendment To The United States Constitution
The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution prevents the government from making laws that regulate an establishment of religion, or that prohibit the free exercise of religion, or abridge the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, or the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. It was adopted on December 15, 1791, as one of the ten amendments that constitute the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights was proposed to assuage Anti-Federalist opposition to Constitutional ratification. Initially, the First Amendment applied only to laws enacted by the Congress, and many of its provisions were interpreted more narrowly than they are today. Beginning with ''Gitlow v. New York'' (1925), the Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to states—a process known as incorporation—through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In '' Everson v. Board of Education'' (1947), the Court drew on Thomas ...
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Wendy Kaminer
Wendy Kaminer (born December 28, 1949) is an American lawyer and writer. She has written several books on contemporary social issues, including ''A Fearful Freedom: Women's Flight From Equality'', about the conflict between egalitarian and protectionist feminism; '' I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions'', about the self-help movement; and ''Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety''. Early life Kaminer graduated from Smith College in 1971. She earned her J.D. degree from Boston University Law School and practiced law as a staff attorney for the Legal Aid Society and in the office of the Mayor of New York City. Activism Anti-pornography movement and anti-censorship movements In the late 1970s, Kaminer worked with Women Against Pornography, where she advocated private consciousness-raising efforts and opposed legal efforts to censor pornography. She contributed a chapter to the anti-porno ...
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