4 new books from Chicago

The University of Chicago Press, either as publisher or distributor, has four books out that look relevant to various parts of Midwestern family history. I haven't seen any of them -- yet!

The Frontier in Alaska and the Matanuska Colony, by historian Orlando Wilson, on a 1930s government-encouraged migration of farm families from the cutover regions of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota to a new frontier. The book includes "several case studies of these original families, dispelling many frontier myths and describing the reality of pioneering in Alaska."

My Kind of Midwest: Omaha to Ohio, by John Jakle, longtime professor of geography and landscape architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Includes "Some Family History of My Own." This is on my must-read list, based on my acquaintance with his Common Houses in America's Small Towns: the Atlantic Seaboard to the Mississippi Valley.

My Kind of County: Door County, Wisconsin, by geographer John Fraser Hart. Yes, these are two in a series from the Center for American Places, now a department of Columbia College Chicago. Hart is what every county needs: a knowledgeable outsider with an insider's feel for the place. Includes "A Historical Tale."

Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940-1955, by University of Chicago historian Adam Green. How commerce helped create a common African-American culture around midcentury.