Planning your visit and hoping to brush up on Chicago lore? Try the Chicago History Museum’s Encyclopedia of Chicago. You can search for information on a huge variety of topics related to the history and culture of the city. Or you can just browse through hundreds of entries on subjects as diverse as the Great Chicago Fire, the evolution of Chicago Blues and the locations of the artifacts of the World’s Columbian Exhibition in 1893.

Here’s the link to spend some time browsing through Chicago’s past: http://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/.

– Andrea Garren