Illinois Public Media News

Tristan Ahtone is a member of the Kiowa Tribe and editor-at-large at Grist. His award-winning investigation, “Land-Grab Universities,” revealed how the 1862 Morrill Act turned nearly 11 million acres of Indigenous land into seed money for land-grant universities — including the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Allen C. Guelzo has written many books about the life and legacy of Abraham Lincoln. The most recent is “Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment,” which explores Lincoln’s ideas about democracy and how they led America through the Civil War.

Guelzo is scheduled to deliver the keynote address at the Abraham Lincoln Association’s annual banquet this Thursday in Springfield, Illinois. He's also scheduled to talk with fellow Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame on Friday.
 

Another conversation with a candidate for the U.S. Senate: R. Cary Capparelli is seeking the Republican nomination. He works in marketing, teaches geography, and is the son of a longtime Illinois Democratic state legislator.

He's previously run (unsuccessfully) for offices ranging from the Illinois House to the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District — as both a Democrat and a Republican. We'll talk with him about domestic policy, foreign affairs, and what it's like running as a legacy in Illinois politics.

In 2023, researchers from the Middle West Review asked 11,000 people from 22 states their perceptions of Midwestern identity.

Almost 94 percent of Illinoisans who responded said yes, they live in the Midwest. But Midwestern identity stretches farther than that. For example, more than half of the people from Wyoming who responded said yes, they too live in the Midwest and consider themselves to be Midwesterners.

In the spring of 2025, Chase Bandolik ran 416 miles from Cairo, Illinois north to Beloit, Wisconsin (near the northern Illinois border). We talk with him about the journey.