Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we dive into the first of our interviews from this year’s Printers Row Lit Fest in Chicago: James A. Edstrom, author of Avenues of Transformation: Illinois’s Path from Territory to State.
The winner of the 2023 Illinois State Historical Society Russell P. Strange Book of the Year Award, Avenues of Transformation traces the surprising path, marked by shame, ambition, and will, that led to Illinois’s admission to the Union in 1818. Historian James A. Edstrom guides the reader through this story by associating each stage of the narrative—the original statehood campaign, the passage of Illinois’s statehood-enabling act by Congress, and Illinois’s first constitutional convention—with the primary leaders in each of those episodes.
