Highlights

Passionate about auto racing since his go-kart days as a kid, Chip Ganassi has emerged as a dominant force on most of the sport’s major racetracks. After more than 30 years in car racing, Chip Ganassi boasts an impressive resume. The team he owns has won the Indianapolis 500, Daytona 500, Brickyard 400, Rolex 24 at Daytona, 12 Hours of Sebring and 24 Hours of Le Mans. The 64-year-old is owner and CEO of Chip Ganassi Racing, which operates teams in the IndyCar Series, WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, FIA World Endurance Championship and Extreme-E off-road racing. The enterprise has corporate offices …

I am writing this the morning after Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees hit his 62nd home run of the season, breaking Roger Maris’ American League record of 61, which he set 61 years ago. I immediately thought of my dad, his youth, my life as his son and our relationship with the American pastime. Anthony Quilico was born in 1901 in the coal mining Italian enclave of Seatonville in Bureau County, Illinois. His dad worked the mines until 1909, when the mine fire in nearby Cherry, Illinois, convinced him to take a job with the railroads. Many miners …

Embracing the Great American Songbook while fellow high schoolers were dancing to ’70s rock, Denise Tomasello has emerged as Chicago’s quintessential chanteuse. Known as “Chicago’s Queen of Cabaret,” Denise Tomasello has been entertaining audiences in many of the area’s finest venues for decades. After a nearly three-year hiatus from show business, this acclaimed chanteuse is once again taking to the stage with her stirring interpretations of the Great American Songbook. Tomasello is a native of Melrose Park, where she attended Proviso East High School. Her mother worked at Amling’s Flowerland, and her father was a delivery driver for the old …

Lifting himself out of poverty by his own bootstraps, Tom Dreesen made it to the very pinnacle of standup comedy by staying in touch with his humble roots. Tom Dreesen grew up in a shack with no hot water, started working at age 10 and, as a young comedian, slept in a car for three weeks. In that very same lifetime, he appeared on “The Tonight Show” more than 60 times and spent 13 years riding in private jets and limousines as the opening act for Frank Sinatra. Like the Sinatra song “My Way,” Dreesen — who is half Irish and …

Between 1893 and 1940, hundreds of Italians from Sassano, a small commune in the region of Campania in Southern Italy, settled on Armour Avenue (now known as Federal Street) between 47th and 51st streets in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. My sojourn began in 2002 when my oldest daughter, Elizabeth, received an assignment from her eighth grade social studies teacher, Dan Wall, to “Find out which ancestors came to America, when and why.” My father’s sister, Rosemary Cavallone, and her husband, Rosario di Miele, told the tale of Francesco “Thethen Cheek” Cavallone and Rosa Libretti, who were among the first …

Between July 1, 1847, and July 14, 2021, 5,614 U.S. stamps were issued. Among them, eight Italians and 21 Italian Americans were depicted. Thirty showed Christopher Columbus. He initially appeared on two stamps in 1869. In 1893, a set of 16 stamps commemorating the discovery of America was released, 12 of which portrayed Columbus. In 1992, the Postal Service issued a modified version of one of the 1869 stamps; reissued the set of 16 with the date changed from 1892 to 1992; and released a new set of four stamps for the quincentennial of Columbus’ first voyage. The first Italian …

Christopher Columbus is a hard guy to get to know. After all, he lived more than 500 years ago, and much of his story has been told by or through others. In the end, everything depends on who’s doing the telling, what they’ve decided to say or leave out, and why. Much of the debate nowadays is dominated by polar extremes, with vehement detractors embracing an often-false narrative in order to vilify Columbus and passionate apologists frequently downplaying the darker aspects of his legacy to paint a rosier picture. I found myself in the apologists’ camp early on in my …

Conquest and subjugation were the order of the day in the 15th century. Most societies back then were ruled by monarchs who had absolute power over their people, controlling every aspect of their lives and brooking no dissent. Many of those monarchs were intent on extending their dominion to adjacent and distant lands, or on taking back lands previously seized from them. And though methods varied, none were particularly benign. During that fractious century, the French expelled British occupiers from their soil, Spain did the same to the Muslims, Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, the Mali Empire was laid …

Columbus’ detractors would have us believe that he was a genocidal slave trader who tyrannized natives and settlers alike and stopped at nothing to turn a profit and subjugate the islands. If you read the source material closely, though, all that dissolves into inaccuracy. The worst offenders were Howard Zinn, author of “A People’s History of the United States,” and James W. Loewen, who penned “Lies My Teacher Told Me.” Playing fast and loose with the truth at almost every turn, they offered no real proof for many of their assertions, often serving up quotes that were taken wildly out …

My quest for the truth about Christopher Columbus has led me to more discoveries than I could possibly have imagined. I knew a few things before I embarked, of course: that Columbus set the gold standard for perseverance and courage, that his first voyage was an act of navigational brilliance and that the world was forever changed by it. I also knew the countless misdeeds attributed to him couldn’t all be true. Until I dug much deeper, though, I had no idea how wrong the naysayers were. The Columbus I’ve come to know was a staunch advocate for native rights …