Happy Pride Month! June is a month-long celebration of LGBTQIA+ culture and their contributions throughout history. Illinois has a notable history of celebrating pride, particularly in Chicago.

A year after the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York, inspired by what occurred there, activists in Chicago put on the first ever major pride event in the city. A lot of Pride events, including the ones in Chicago, initially started out as protests with LGBTQIA+ people fighting for equality. The pride events in Chicago have grown over the years, going from hundreds of attendees to hundreds of thousands of attendees.

Sophia Byrd, a senior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been nominated for two Grammy Awards.

Byrd had the opportunity to sing in a professional oratorio as a college freshman and is now studying lyric theatre. She was one of six vocalists who performed in “Place,” a 2018 work that explores the effects of gentrification in a Brooklyn neighborhood. “Place” is nominated for best chamber music/small ensemble performance and best contemporary classical composition.

The most famous road in America, traveled on by generations, is a symbol of unlimited mobility and freedom of the road. Route 66 is iconic for America’s highway culture – and it starts right here in Illinois.

It was created in 1926 as part of the numbered highway network and became the preferred road west.  It quickly gained fame as the shortest route between the Midwest and the west coast as it passed through the American Southwest.

Chicago is known for its location right on Lake Michigan, but have you ever wondered how its lakeshore became such an important aspect of the city? Architect Daniel Burnham is to thank for that.

Burnham was born in Henderson, New York in 1846 and moved to Chicago when he was 8 years old. While he was never good at school, he always had a knack for drawing. At age 18, he moved back east for his studies but failed to pass admissions exams for Harvard and Yale, pushing him to move back to Chicago at age 21. It was there where he started his career as an architect at the Loring & Jenney architectural firm.

This past week, former Notre Dame and University of Illinois basketball player Brian Randle of Peoria was hired as an assistant coach for the NBA’s Phoenix Suns. Last year, at the age of 35, Randle was promoted to development coach for the Minnesota Timberwolves, and will now work with NBA’s recently named top coach Monty Williams at the Suns.