Illinois

A prairie state that became the hinge of the American interior, and the place where the argument over slavery in the territories was staged. Illinois was French before it was British or American, with settlements at Kaskaskia and Cahokia near the vastly older mound city whose earthworks are the largest pre-Columbian construction north of Mexico. Statehood came in 1818, and the state's northern boundary was pushed sixty miles up to include Chicago's future site, deliberately, to tie it to the Great Lakes and the north. The Black Hawk War of 1832 ended Native presence. The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 were fought here over popular sovereignty and made Lincoln nationally known. Chicago's growth was the fastest of any large city in history: a village in 1833, over a million by 1890, rebuilt after the fire of 1871 with the world's first steel-framed skyscrapers and fed by a rail network that made it the country's freight centre. The Haymarket affair of 1886 and the Pullman strike of 1894 both began there. Its stockyards produced Sinclair's The Jungle and federal food regulation. The Great Migration brought half a million Black southerners north. Springfield is the capital. Chicago is the third largest city in the country. Cahokia's Monks Mound covers a larger base area than the Great Pyramid. The state's nickname, Land of Lincoln, refers to a president born in Kentucky. Its prairie soil makes it a leading corn and soybean producer. Four of its governors have gone to prison. The state sits on the New Madrid fault zone at its southern tip.

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