Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we continue our author interviews from the 40th Annual Printers Row Lit fest in Chicago talking with James A. Edstrom, author of Avenues of Transformation: Illinois's Path from Territory to State, 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. The lives of these men—Daniel Pope Cook, Nathaniel Pope, and Elias Kent Kane—reflect the momentous tangle of politics, slavery, and geography. This history maps the drive for statehood in the conflict between nation and state, in the perpetuation of slavery, and in the sweep of water and commerce. It underscores the ways in which the Prairie State is uniquely intertwined—economically, socially, and politically—with every region of the Union: North, South, East, and West—and captures the compelling moment when Illinois statehood stood ready to more perfectly unify the nation.
