Johnson County, Illinois
Johnson County is a county located in the U. S. state of Illinois. According to the 2010 census, it has a population of 12,582, its county seat is Vienna. It is located in the southern portion of Illinois known locally as "Little Egypt". Johnson County was organized in 1812 out of Randolph County, it was named for Richard M. Johnson, a U. S. Congressman from Kentucky. In 1813, Johnson commanded a Kentucky regiment at the Battle of the Thames, after which he claimed to have killed Tecumseh in hand-to-hand combat. Johnson went on to be Vice President of the United States. According to the U. S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 349 square miles, of which 344 square miles is land and 4.9 square miles is water. In recent years, average temperatures in the county seat of Vienna have ranged from a low of 25 °F in January to a high of 90 °F in July, although a record low of −20 °F was recorded in January 1977 and a record high of 103 °F was recorded in August 2007. Average monthly precipitation ranged from 3.16 inches in October to 5.16 inches in May.
Interstate 24 Interstate 57 U. S. Route 45 Illinois Route 37 Illinois Route 146 Illinois Route 147 Illinois Route 166 Williamson County - north Saline County - northeast Pope County - east Massac County - southeast Pulaski County - southwest Union County - west Cypress Creek National Wildlife Refuge Shawnee National Forest Whereas, according to the 2010 U. S. Census Bureau: 89.0% White 8.0% Black 0.2% Native American 0.2% Asian 0.0% Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander 1.0% Two or more races 1.6% Other races 3.0% Hispanic or Latino As of the 2010 United States Census, there were 12,582 people, 4,584 households, 3,270 families residing in the county. The population density was 36.6 inhabitants per square mile. There were 5,598 housing units at an average density of 16.3 per square mile. The racial makeup of the county was 89.0% white, 8.0% black or African American, 0.2% Asian, 0.2% American Indian, 1.6% from other races, 1.0% from two or more races. Those of Hispanic or Latino origin made up 3.0% of the population.
In terms of ancestry, 17.6% were German, 11.5% were Irish, 10.9% were English, 6.5% were American. Of the 4,584 households, 28.8% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 59.2% were married couples living together, 8.3% had a female householder with no husband present, 28.7% were non-families, 25.3% of all households were made up of individuals. The average household size was 2.41 and the average family size was 2.85. The median age was 42.2 years. The median income for a household in the county was $41,619 and the median income for a family was $47,423. Males had a median income of $48,047 versus $30,904 for females; the per capita income for the county was $16,402, the lowest of all 102 counties in Illinois and 57th in the U. S.. About 11.1% of families and 13.6% of the population were below the poverty line, including 19.0% of those under age 18 and 10.7% of those age 65 or over. Vienna Belknap Buncombe Cypress Goreville New Burnside Simpson In its early days Johnson County, being Southern in its culture, was fiercely Democratic.
In fact, in the 1860 Presidential election the county gave Illinois native and Northern Democrat Stephen A. Douglas a higher proportion of its votes than any other county in the United States. However, during the Civil War, under the influence of Congressman John Logan, this region of dubious initial loyalty was to provide a number of Union soldiers rivalled on a per capita basis only by a few fiercely Unionist counties in Appalachia; this level of Union service has meant that despite its historic hostility towards Yankee culture, Johnson County has been powerfully Republican since the Civil War. Douglas in 1860 remains the last Democrat to win a majority of the county’s vote: the solitary Democratic victory since was by Bill Clinton in 1992 and was due to Ross Perot taking many votes from Republican incumbent George Bush senior. In 2016, as was typical of the rural Upland South, Hillary Clinton fared badly in Johnson County: despite the long-time Republican traditions of the county, her vote percentage was the lowest by any Democrat in the county’s history, but was typical of her performance in the region due to opposition to the Democratic Party’s liberal views on social issues like homosexuality.
National Register of Historic Places listings in Johnson County, Illinois P. T. Chapman, A History of Johnson County, Illinois. Herrin, IL: Press of the Herrin News, 1925
Lynching in the United States
Lynching is the practice of murder by a group of people by extrajudicial action. Lynchings in the United States rose in number after the American Civil War in the late 1800s, following the emancipation of slaves. Most lynchings were of African-American men in the South, but women were lynched, white lynchings of blacks occurred in Midwestern and border states during the 20th-century Great Migration of blacks out of the South; the purpose was to intimidate blacks through racial terrorism. On a per capita basis lynchings were common in California and the Old West of Latinos, although they represented less than 10% of the national total. Native Americans and Asian Americans were lynched. Other ethnicities, including Finnish-Americans, Jewish-Americans, German-Americans and Italian-Americans were lynched occasionally; the stereotype of a lynching is a hanging, because hangings are what crowds of people saw, are easy to photograph. Some hangings were professionally photographed and sold as postcards, which were popular souvenirs in some parts of the U.
S. Victims were killed by mobs in a variety of other ways: shot burned alive, forced to jump off a bridge, dragged behind cars, the like. Sometimes they were tortured as well, with body parts sometimes sold as souvenirs. Lynchings were not fatal. A "mock" lynching, putting the rope around the neck of someone suspected of concealing information, might be used to compel "confessions". According to the Tuskegee Institute, 4,743 people were lynched between 1882 and 1968 in the United States, including 3,446 African Americans and 1,297 whites. More than 73 percent of lynchings in the post-Civil War period occurred in the Southern states. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, 4,084 African-Americans were lynched between 1877 and 1950 in the South. Lynchings were most frequent from 1890 to the 1920s, with a peak in 1892. Lynchings were large mob actions, attended by hundreds or thousands of watchers; as in the case of Ell Parsons, they were sometimes announced in advance in newspapers and in one instance with a special train.
However, in the 20th century lynchings became more secretive, were conducted by smaller groups of people. According to Michael Pfeifer, the prevalence of lynching in postbellum America reflects lack of confidence in the "due process" judicial system, he links the decline in lynching in the early twentieth century with "the advent of the modern death penalty": "legislators renovated the death penalty...out of direct concern for the alternative of mob violence". He cites "the modern, racialized excesses of urban police forces in the twentieth century and after" as having characteristics of lynching. "More black people killed by cops in 2015 than were lynched in the worst year of Jim Crow."On April 26, 2018, in Montgomery, The National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened. Founded by the Equal Justice Initiative of that city, it is the first large memorial to document lynchings of African Americans in the United States. After the Reconstruction era, most of the South was politically dominated by white Democrats.
Lynchings were used to intimidate blacks by racial terrorism. The rate of lynchings in the South has been associated with economic strains, although the causal nature of this link is unclear. Low cotton prices and economic stress are associated with higher frequencies of lynching; the granting of U. S. Constitutional rights to freedmen after the American Civil War the vote, was resisted by many white Southerners; some blamed the freedmen for their own wartime hardships, post-war economic losses, loss of social and political privilege. During Reconstruction and white people working for civil rights were attacked and sometimes lynched. Black voting was suppressed by violence as well as by poll taxes and literacy tests. White Democrats regained control of state legislatures in 1876, a national compromise resulted in the removal of federal troops from the South in 1877. In decades, violence continued around elections until blacks were disfranchised by the states from 1885 to 1908 through constitutional changes and laws that created barriers to voter registration across the South.
White Democrats enacted Jim Crow laws to enforce blacks' second-class status. During this period that spanned the late 19th and early 20th centuries, lynchings reached a peak in the South. Florida led the nation in lynchings per capita from 1900 to 1930. Georgia led the nation in lynchings from 1900 to 1931 with 302 incidents, according to The Tuskegee Institute. Lynchings peaked in many areas when it was time for landowners to settle accounts with sharecroppers. There is no count of recorded lynchings which claims to be precise, the numbers vary depending on the sources, the years considered, the definition used to define an incident; the Tuskegee Institute has recorded 3,446 blacks and 1,297 whites being lynched between 1882 and 1968, with the annual peak occurring in the 1890s, at a time of economic stress in the South and increasing political suppression of blacks. A five-year study published in 2015 by the Equal Justice Initiative found that nearly 3,959 black men and children were lynched in the twelve Southern states between 1877 and 1950.
Over this period Georgia's 586 lynchings led all states. African Americans mounted resistance to lynchings in numerous ways. Intellectuals and journalists encouraged public education protesting and lobbying against lynch mob violence and gover
Interstate 57
Interstate 57 is an Interstate Highway in Missouri and Illinois that parallels the old Illinois Central rail line for much of its route. It goes from Sikeston, Missouri, at Interstate 55 to Chicago, Illinois, at Interstate 94. I-57 serves as a shortcut route for travelers headed between the south and Chicago, bypassing St. Louis, Missouri. Between the junction of I-55 and I-57 in Sikeston and the junction of I-55 and I-90/94 in Chicago, I-55 travels for 436 miles, while the combination of I-57 and I-94 is only 396 miles long between the same two points. In fact, both the control cities on the overhead signs, as well as destination mileage signs, reference Memphis along southbound I-57 as far north as its northern origin at I-94 in Chicago. At its southern end, Chicago is the control city listed for I-57 on signs on northbound I-55 south of Sikeston, Missouri though I-55 goes to Chicago; as of 2015, I-57 are any planned for the near future. At a length of just over 386 miles, it is the second longest two-digit Interstate Highway without an auxiliary route, behind I-49.
I-57 has one business loop in Missouri. In the state of Missouri, Interstate 57 runs northbound from Sikeston to the Cairo I-57 Bridge over the Mississippi River south of Cairo, Illinois. After ending southbound at Interstate 55, the highway continues as U. S. Route 60, which meets U. S. Route 67 at Poplar Bluff and from there U. S. Route 67 goes south to Arkansas. From the start of I-57 northbound, the US 60 concurrency goes about 12 miles. In the state of Illinois, Interstate 57 runs from the bridge over the Mississippi River north to Chicago. I-57 is the longest Interstate Highway in Illinois, its route follows the earlier route of US 51 in southernmost Illinois before taking a northeastward diagonal to Illinois 37, which remains intact as a town-to-town through route, past its interchange with Interstate 24 near Pulleys Mill and a short duplex with Interstate 64 near Mount Vernon north to Effingham, where it has a short concurrence with Interstate 70. It follows US 45 bypassing cities of Champaign and Urbana, heads north to Onarga whereafter it follows the duplex path of US 45 and old US 54 to Kankakee.
At Kankakee it heads northward parallel to the now decommissioned route of old US 54 into the Chicago area, meeting Interstate 80 in Hazel Crest, Interstate 294 in Blue Island, feeding Interstate 94 on Chicago's South Side. Although I-57 serves as a long-distance bypass of St. Louis, the section between Mount Vernon and Pulleys Mill contains the most direct Interstate route between St. Louis and cities to the southeast of St. Louis, it serves as the northwestern terminus of Interstate 24 that leads southeastward to those cities and as the eastern terminus of Interstate 72 near Champaign. The route is an easy way for Chicagoans to reach Shawnee National Forest in the southern tip of the state, it serves as a major artery for college students in the state, running near Shawnee Community College in Ullin, the main campus of Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, John A. Logan College in Carterville, Morthland College in West Frankfort, Rend Lake College in Ina, Lake Land College in Mattoon, Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Parkland College in Champaign, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in Urbana–Champaign, Kankakee Community College in Kankakee, Olivet Nazarene University in Bourbonnais, Governors State University in University Park.
Interstate 57 and Interstate 294 did not have an intersection for a long time, though phase one opened on October 25, 2014. It was one of only a few examples where Interstates cross but didn't have interchanges with each other. Vehicles were directed to use Interstate 80 to access Interstate 294 instead, though U. S. Route 6 was another option. I-57 remains the only Chicago expressway that does not have a used name, its Chicago-area portion was known as the Dan Ryan Expressway–West Leg. I-57 was named the Ken Gray Expressway in southern Illinois after former U. S. Congressman Ken Gray for his work on getting the route planned through southern Illinois. A 20-mile segment from Wentworth to Sauk Trail has been designated the Tuskegee Airmen Memorial Trail but this is not intended as a navigational name; the portion between the Route 121/US 45 exit and the Watson–Mason exit was completed and opened prior to July 1965, linking I-57 to I-70, running in tandem with I-70 for several miles, with access to Indianapolis to the east, St. Louis to the west.
A 21.5-mile section of I-57 in Jefferson County from Bonnie to Route 161 opened on December 9, 1969. The final section of I-57 in Illinois opened in December 1971 at Paxton; the portion of Interstate 43 from Milwaukee to Green Bay was numbered as Interstate 57. The number was changed due to the existence of I-57 in Illinois. I-57 was widened to six lanes in Effingham from 2011 until 2016. I-57 is slated to be extended west along US 60 to Poplar Bluff and south along the US 67 corridor to North Little Rock, ending at I-40. In April 2016, a provision designating US 67 from North Little Rock to Walnut Ridge, Arkansas, as "Future I-57" was added into the federal fiscal year 2017 Transportati
United States Census Bureau
The United States Census Bureau is a principal agency of the U. S. Federal Statistical System, responsible for producing data about the American people and economy; the Census Bureau is part of the U. S. Department of Commerce and its director is appointed by the President of the United States; the Census Bureau's primary mission is conducting the U. S. Census every ten years, which allocates the seats of the U. S. House of Representatives to the states based on their population; the Bureau's various censuses and surveys help allocate over $400 billion in federal funds every year and it helps states, local communities, businesses make informed decisions. The information provided by the census informs decisions on where to build and maintain schools, transportation infrastructure, police and fire departments. In addition to the decennial census, the Census Bureau continually conducts dozens of other censuses and surveys, including the American Community Survey, the U. S. Economic Census, the Current Population Survey.
Furthermore and foreign trade indicators released by the federal government contain data produced by the Census Bureau. Article One of the United States Constitution directs the population be enumerated at least once every ten years and the resulting counts used to set the number of members from each state in the House of Representatives and, by extension, in the Electoral College; the Census Bureau now conducts a full population count every 10 years in years ending with a zero and uses the term "decennial" to describe the operation. Between censuses, the Census Bureau makes population projections. In addition, Census data directly affects how more than $400 billion per year in federal and state funding is allocated to communities for neighborhood improvements, public health, education and more; the Census Bureau is mandated with fulfilling these obligations: the collecting of statistics about the nation, its people, economy. The Census Bureau's legal authority is codified in Title 13 of the United States Code.
The Census Bureau conducts surveys on behalf of various federal government and local government agencies on topics such as employment, health, consumer expenditures, housing. Within the bureau, these are known as "demographic surveys" and are conducted perpetually between and during decennial population counts; the Census Bureau conducts economic surveys of manufacturing, retail and other establishments and of domestic governments. Between 1790 and 1840, the census was taken by marshals of the judicial districts; the Census Act of 1840 established a central office. Several acts followed that revised and authorized new censuses at the 10-year intervals. In 1902, the temporary Census Office was moved under the Department of Interior, in 1903 it was renamed the Census Bureau under the new Department of Commerce and Labor; the department was intended to consolidate overlapping statistical agencies, but Census Bureau officials were hindered by their subordinate role in the department. An act in 1920 changed the date and authorized manufacturing censuses every two years and agriculture censuses every 10 years.
In 1929, a bill was passed mandating the House of Representatives be reapportioned based on the results of the 1930 Census. In 1954, various acts were codified into Title 13 of the US Code. By law, the Census Bureau must count everyone and submit state population totals to the U. S. President by December 31 of any year ending in a zero. States within the Union receive the results in the spring of the following year; the United States Census Bureau defines four statistical regions, with nine divisions. The Census Bureau regions are "widely used...for data collection and analysis". The Census Bureau definition is pervasive. Regional divisions used by the United States Census Bureau: Region 1: Northeast Division 1: New England Division 2: Mid-Atlantic Region 2: Midwest Division 3: East North Central Division 4: West North Central Region 3: South Division 5: South Atlantic Division 6: East South Central Division 7: West South Central Region 4: West Division 8: Mountain Division 9: Pacific Many federal, state and tribal governments use census data to: Decide the location of new housing and public facilities, Examine the demographic characteristics of communities and the US, Plan transportation systems and roadways, Determine quotas and creation of police and fire precincts, Create localized areas for elections, utilities, etc.
Gathers population information every 10 years The United States Census Bureau is committed to confidentiality, guarantees non-disclosure of any addresses or personal information related to individuals or establishments. Title 13 of the U. S. Code establishes penalties for the disclosure of this information. All Census employees must sign an affidavit of non-disclosure prior to employment; the Bureau cannot share responses, addresses or personal information with anyone including United States or foreign government
Alexander County Courthouse (Illinois)
The Alexander County Courthouse is a government building in central Cairo, the county seat of Alexander County, United States. Built in the 1960s, it is the latest in a series of courthouses erected in four different towns across Alexander County. Alexander County was created out of Union County in March 1819, it was named for one William M. Alexander, an early settler who served in the House of Representatives from 1820 to 1824 and was chosen Speaker in 1822; the law creating the county ordered that the courts meet at Alexander's home in the community of America until a county seat should be chosen, America was designated the seat in April 1819. Alexander oversaw the construction of a brick courthouse. However, America's prosperity was short-lived: an epidemic prompted most of the residents to flee, while its location along the Ohio River was convenient for flatboats, nearby sandbars prevented newly developed steamboats from landing, by 1821 the town was languishing. A new settlement, was founded midway between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in 1833, legislation was passed to enable the seat to move there.
County officials ordered the construction of a log courthouse in 1835, but this building burned in 1842, the victim of a fire set by a pair of escaping prisoners. Because Unity sat in the middle of Alexander County, the creation of Pulaski County from the county's eastern half left it in an inconvenient location, in 1843 the seat was removed to Thebes, a Mississippi River town. Here, a new courthouse was built in 1848 for $4,400. While towns farther north rotated the honor of county seat, the site of Fort Defiance at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi had been growing into a significant town; the General Assembly chartered a company to found a town there in 1837 under the name of "Cairo, Illinois", by 1841 Cairo had two thousand residents. Nearly all the residents abandoned the town following an 1842 flood, but a newly constructed levee protected the site during the Great Flood of 1844, Cairo began to prosper in the early 1850s. By 1860, it was rich enough to mount a successful challenge to Thebes for the status of county seat, although a new courthouse was not built until 1865, the Civil War having dominated life in Cairo during the intervening years.
The new building was a two-story structure in the Neoclassical style with pedimented gables and colonnade over the main entrance. Although large, this building deteriorated comparatively rapidly; the old building remained in use until 1963, when it was destroyed and replaced by the present building. Located on Washington Avenue, the current courthouse is a modernist building and just one story tall. Much of the facade is brick with numerous windows, although the right end of the facade is concrete with no doors or windows. Alexander County website Photographs of previous courthouses
Mississippi County, Missouri
Mississippi County is a county located in the Bootheel of the U. S. state with its eastern border formed by the Mississippi River. As of the 2010 census, the population was 14,358; the largest city and county seat is Charleston. The county was organized on February 14, 1845, was named after the Mississippi River. Mississippi County is located in what was known as "Tywappity Bottom," a vast floodplain area bordered by the Scott County Hills on the north, St. James Bayou on the south, the Mississippi River on the east, Little River on the west. In 1540, the Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto penetrated to the Arkansas River and well into present-day southeastern Missouri, populated by various Native American tribes, including the Osage. Under pressure from a advancing white settlement, the Native Americans retreated westward; the area of southeastern Missouri was noted for its level swampy lowlands, subject to the seasonal flooding of the Mississippi River, which had resulted in fertile soil. By 1820 American pioneers, many migrating from the southern states, had settled most of the present counties of southeastern Missouri.
The settlers were farmers who came from Illinois and the states of the Upper South: Virginia and Tennessee. They were drawn by the fertile and cheap lands found in the area of present-day Charleston, Missouri. Cotton was cultivated through the 19th century, the planters depended on enslaved African-American workers before the Civil War and freedmen afterward. There were marked adjustments as people adjusted to the free labor market; the first American settlers reached what became Charleston in 1830. Seven years Thankful Randol sold Joseph Moore 22½ acres of land. Moore used it to lay out a plan for the city of Charleston, its original boundary was 12 blocks square - four north and south, three east and west. The Original Plat was filed on May 20, 1837; the General Assembly passed an act to incorporate the city of Charleston on March 25, 1872. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, violence increased against black Americans as the state disfranchised minority voters and enforce the Jim Crow segregation laws.
Four African Americans were lynched in Mississippi county, the second-highest number in the state and tied with Callaway County. Three of these murders took place in the county seat of Charleston; the fourth man was killed in Belmont, Missouri in 1905. Sam Fields and Robert Coleman were lynched in Charleston on July 3, 1910 for committing murder and robbery; the joint lynching was witnessed by a crowd of about 1,000. Roosevelt Grigsby was lynched in Charleston in December 1924 by a mob of 200, who accused him of attempting to rape a woman. At the turn of the 20th century, the virgin forests attracted timber barons. Following the clearing of the timber, the state assisted in the construction of levees, forming drainage districts to redevelop the land; as hundreds of miles of levees and dikes were constructed within the Little River Drainage District, thousands of acres of land were drained and "reclaimed" for agricultural use. The reclaimed land fertile due to centuries of flooding from the Mississippi River, was cultivated for cotton and wheat.
Since the late 20th century and rice have been important commodity crops and are grown on an industrial scale. According to the U. S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 429 square miles, of which 412 square miles is land and 17 square miles is water. Alexander County, Illinois Ballard County, Kentucky Carlisle County, Kentucky Hickman County, Kentucky Fulton County, Kentucky New Madrid County Scott County Mississippi County has borders across the river with four Kentucky counties, but it has no direct highway connection between any of them due to the mile-wide barrier of the river in this area. None of the four Kentucky counties that border Missouri has any direct highway connection with Missouri. Kentucky and Missouri are the only two U. S. states to border each other across a major river, without a direct highway connection between them. This reflects the low populations among the river counties on both sides, which are rural in character. In early 2016, Mississippi County was declared as the poorest county in Missouri.
Interstate 57 U. S. Route 60 U. S. Route 62 Route 77 Route 80 Route 105 The rural county was at its peak of population in 1940. With changes in agriculture and mechanization requiring fewer workers, the number of jobs have declined, as has county population; as of the census of 2000, there were 13,427 people, 5,383 households, 3,671 families residing in the county. The population density was 32 people per square mile. There were 5,840 housing units at an average density of 14 per square mile; the racial makeup of the county was 77.93% White, 20.53% Black or African American, 0.25% Native American, 0.11% Asian, 0.01% Pacific Islander, 0.29% from other races, 0.89% from two or more races. 0.96% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. There were 5,383 households out of which 31.20% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 47.70% were married couples living together, 17.30% had a female householder with no husband present, 31.80% were non-families. 28.50% of all households were made up of individuals and 14.40% had someone living alone, 65 years of age or older.
The average household size was 2.44 and the average family size was 2.98. In the county, the population was spread out with 26.30% under the age of 18, 8.80% from 18 to 24, 25.40% from 2
Illinois
Illinois is a state in the Midwestern and Great Lakes region of the United States. It has the fifth largest gross domestic product, the sixth largest population, the 25th largest land area of all U. S. states. Illinois is noted as a microcosm of the entire United States. With Chicago in northeastern Illinois, small industrial cities and immense agricultural productivity in the north and center of the state, natural resources such as coal and petroleum in the south, Illinois has a diverse economic base, is a major transportation hub. Chicagoland, Chicago's metropolitan area, encompasses over 65% of the state's population; the Port of Chicago connects the state to international ports via two main routes: from the Great Lakes, via the Saint Lawrence Seaway, to the Atlantic Ocean and from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River, via the Illinois Waterway to the Illinois River. The Mississippi River, the Ohio River, the Wabash River form parts of the boundaries of Illinois. For decades, Chicago's O'Hare International Airport has been ranked as one of the world's busiest airports.
Illinois has long had a reputation as a bellwether both in social and cultural terms and, through the 1980s, in politics. The capital of Illinois is Springfield, located in the central part of the state. Although today's Illinois' largest population center is in its northeast, the state's European population grew first in the west as the French settled the vast Mississippi of the Illinois Country of New France. Following the American Revolutionary War, American settlers began arriving from Kentucky in the 1780s via the Ohio River, the population grew from south to north. In 1818, Illinois achieved statehood. Following increased commercial activity in the Great Lakes after the construction of the Erie Canal, Chicago was founded in the 1830s on the banks of the Chicago River at one of the few natural harbors on the southern section of Lake Michigan. John Deere's invention of the self-scouring steel plow turned Illinois's rich prairie into some of the world's most productive and valuable farmland, attracting immigrant farmers from Germany and Sweden.
The Illinois and Michigan Canal made transportation between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River valley faster and cheaper, new railroads carried immigrants to new homes in the country's west and shipped commodity crops to the nation's east. The state became a transportation hub for the nation. By 1900, the growth of industrial jobs in the northern cities and coal mining in the central and southern areas attracted immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Illinois was an important manufacturing center during both world wars; the Great Migration from the South established a large community of African Americans in the state, including Chicago, who founded the city's famous jazz and blues cultures. Chicago, the center of the Chicago Metropolitan Area, is now recognized as a global alpha-level city. Three U. S. presidents have been elected while living in Illinois: Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Barack Obama. Additionally, Ronald Reagan, whose political career was based in California, was born and raised in the state.
Today, Illinois honors Lincoln with its official state slogan Land of Lincoln, displayed on its license plates since 1954. The state is the site of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield and the future home of the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. "Illinois" is the modern spelling for the early French Catholic missionaries and explorers' name for the Illinois Native Americans, a name, spelled in many different ways in the early records. American scholars thought the name "Illinois" meant "man" or "men" in the Miami-Illinois language, with the original iliniwek transformed via French into Illinois; this etymology is not supported by the Illinois language, as the word for "man" is ireniwa, plural of "man" is ireniwaki. The name Illiniwek has been said to mean "tribe of superior men", a false etymology; the name "Illinois" derives from the Miami-Illinois verb irenwe·wa - "he speaks the regular way". This was taken into the Ojibwe language in the Ottawa dialect, modified into ilinwe·.
The French borrowed these forms, changing the /we/ ending to spell it as -ois, a transliteration for its pronunciation in French of that time. The current spelling form, began to appear in the early 1670s, when French colonists had settled in the western area; the Illinois's name for themselves, as attested in all three of the French missionary-period dictionaries of Illinois, was Inoka, of unknown meaning and unrelated to the other terms. American Indians of successive cultures lived along the waterways of the Illinois area for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans; the Koster Site demonstrates 7,000 years of continuous habitation. Cahokia, the largest regional chiefdom and urban center of the Pre-Columbian Mississippian culture, was located near present-day Collinsville, Illinois, they built an urban complex of more than 100 platform and burial mounds, a 50-acre plaza larger than 35 football fields, a woodhenge of sacred cedar, all in a planned design expressing the culture's cosmology.
Monks Mound, the center of the site, is the largest Pre-Columbian structure north of the Valley of Mexico. It is 100 feet high, 951 feet long, 836 feet wide, covers 13.8 acres. It contains about 814,000 cubic yards of earth, it was topped by a structure thought to have measured about 105 feet in length and 48 feet in width, covered an area 5,000 square feet, been as much as 50 feet high, making its peak 150 feet above the level of the pl
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Alexander County, Illinois
