Sin in the Second City
Sin in the Second City
Section ONE: Studying the history of a big, fascinating and historic city like Chicago is a worthy pursuit for a student no matter what the topic might be simply because Chicago is American through and through and its flaws and foibles reflect America's past. The subject might be Al Capone and his grip on the criminal genre in Chicago, it might be baseball and the Black Sox scandal that kept Shoeless Joe Jackson out of the big leagues – or it might be the Chicago of Mayor Richard Daley that hosted the 1968 Democratic National Convention during which there was a police riot against antiwar demonstrators. Studying the life and times of Chicago at the turn of the century when the Everleigh sisters opened up a classy brothel in the red light district – and played host to such iconic names as actor John Barrymore and heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson – is certainly worthy of a student's time. In this book an alert student learns, among myriad other interesting things, that the Everleigh Club welcomed participants to the July 1900 auto show, and each official exhibitor only needed to flash "an official exhibitor's badge" to be served a "lavish feast…a bottle of wine, and a trip up the mahogany staircase" for some sensual pleasure (Abbott, 2007, p. 73).
Human resources management practices and principles
If what is learned in an important college or university course is not put to use in some pragmatic way – or understood in the larger social context – then that learning may be viewed as meaningless time spent. No doubt there is a percentage of students that are simply going through the process of education, working for a degree that will open doors and lead, hopefully, to the good life. But for many others, learning – in this case about human resources, management, employee / employer dynamics, and ethical considerations therein – means being stimulated to grasp the links to the world that are discovered through serious attention to course work.