A reader wondered how Chicago’s coastline has changed over the decades. We look at the earliest maps of Chicago to get us closer to an answer.

In the first map shown below, Chicago--and the rest of Cook County--is one of only four counties in a large swath of the Midwest that do not have a majority white population. The data comes from U ...

Not many people outside of Chicago know that the city doesn't actually have an officially sanctioned list of neighborhoods like, say, New York. Instead, the city has 77 community areas—which ...