Throwback Thursday: Abraham Lincoln’s lyceum address

• Springfield
• history
• Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln gave a speech titled “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions” to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield on Jan. 27, 1838. Lincoln talked about the dangers of slavery in the United States because its existence could corrupt the federal government.

During this time, Lincoln was unmarried and in his late 20s serving as a novice lawyer and a state representative. Historians believe the speech delivered by Abraham Lincoln was inspired by an event that roused and divided the nation on the topic of slavery. In the fall of 1837, Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist newspaper editor, was murdered by a pro-slavery mob while trying to defend himself and his printing press near Alton. The arguments for and against slavery were being made in the time of Lincoln, and he was far from shy when it came to expressing his misgivings of its continuance in the United States.

In this speech, he warned against mob behavior and urged Americans to keep their faith in law. He believed that the injuries of slavery could not be contained within select states.

Read more …

Did You Know? Famed author and Nobel Prize winner Ernest Hemingway was born in Illinois.

Ernest Hemingway was born July 21, 1899, in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park. His father, Clarence, was a physician and his mother was a former opera performer. Growing up, he spent many summers at his family’s home on the banks of Walloon Lake in Michigan. He attended high school in the Oak Park public school system.

He began writing while in high school and upon graduating, he moved to Kansas City to be a reporter for the Star. Less than a year later, he began serving in World War I with the American Red Cross as an ambulance driver. During his service, he was injured on the Austro-Italian front.

Read more …

In the news: Illinois school districts are meeting internet goals

• Children
• Growth
• technology

Internet access is an invaluable resource. Without it many of our students are unprepared for the future that awaits them in college classrooms, professional careers and everyday life. In decades prior, access to online information was not as widespread or important as it is now.

The EducationSuperHighway 2016 State of States Annual Report found that 83 percent of Illinois School districts representing 1,099,120 students met connectivity goals. The progress made last year tops the 71 percent of school districts with acceptable internet in 2015. The schools and libraries universal service support program, also known as the E-rate program, helps schools and libraries  get affordable broadband.

Read more …

Illinois film industry a nearly half-billion dollar enterprise

The Illinois FILM Office released numbers that show Illinois’s film industry continues to grow, with estimated spending in 2016 reaching $499 million. Working with 345 different projects supporting over 13,000 jobs, spending by the film industry was up 51 percent from last year.

Illinois has become a center of film and television thanks to various factors from the tax incentives available to the wide-ranging talent. That talent has grown so much that Chicago has been named one of the top 10 cities for the third consecutive year to live as a filmmaker.

NBC currently has three shows in its lineup with more coming this spring that are filmed on location in Chicago; “Chicago Med”, “Chicago PD” and “Chicago Fire”. “Chicago Justice”, which dramatizes the people of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, airs in March.

Fox’s Emmy-nominated “Empire” is set in New York but filmed in Chicago.

The film industry in Illinois is not just confined to traditional cable networks either. Netflix and Amazon film shows in Chicago with Netflix filming “Easy” and “Sense8” and Amazon filming “Patriot”.

A large part of the growth can be attributed to Illinois’s 30 percent tax credit on all film expenditures. The tax credit is only one in the nation that sets a diversity standard in an attempt to generate opportunity in economically disadvantaged areas.

For more information about the Illinois Film Tax Credit and all Illinois has to offer to the film industry, you can visit the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity’s film office.