Exciting news for baseball fans in Illinois and across the country! The Women’s Professional Baseball League plans to play its inaugural season in Springfield. Four teams from major cities across the U.S. – New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Boston – will be playing their 2026 season at Springfield’s very own Robin Roberts Stadium.

Illinois has played a central role in women’s baseball since the sport’s earliest days. Springfield’s connection goes back 150 years. In 1875, two women’s baseball clubs, the Blondes and the Brunettes, played a ticketed game, becoming one of the first women’s baseball events to have paying customers where players were paid.

Beloved stage and screen icon Dick Van Dyke is being honored by his hometown of Danvillein celebration of his upcoming 100^th birthday.

Van Dyke, who was raised in Danville and started his career in the town as a local radio DJ on WDAN, became a household name for starring in the CBS sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show in the early 1960s, and went on to great acclaim in movie musicals Mary Poppins, Bye Bye Birdie, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Throughout his illustrious career, Van Dyke has been received a Grammy Award, six Emmy Awards, a Tony Award, a Disney Legends Award, and the Kennedy Center Honors.  

Long before Illinois became a state it was home to many Native American tribes whose cultures and communities shaped the region’s history.

The land was primarily inhabited by the Illiniwek Confederation, a group of tribes that included the Kaskaskia, Peoria, Cahokia, Michigamea, and Tamaroa.

The word “Illinois” itself comes from “Illiniwek,” meaning “the people.” These tribes built villages along rivers, hunted game on the prairies, and developed extensive trade networks that reached across the continent.

Illinois has made investments into education through its schools and teachers and that has been evident recently as Northwestern is now home to a Nobel Prize winner.

Northwestern University’s very own Professor Joel Mokyr has earned the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. He has earned this award along with Phillippe Aghion of the Collège de France, Peter Howitt from Brown University, as they all collaborated in creating a mathematical model for a theory regarding sustained growth amidst creative destruction.

Mokyr’s works such as “A Culture of Growth: Origins of the Modern Economy,” and “The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress,” aims at learning what factors drove the Industrial Revolution to be what it was and how it impacted world history from an economic standpoint.  His works also explain how developing nations can attain and developed nations maintain creativity within the technological sector of their economies to keep up with the evolving times that we are in.

Professor Mokyr curated his knowledge through his undergraduate education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1968, majoring in economics and history. He also went on to get a master’s degree in economics from Yale in 1972 and a PhD from Yale in 1974.

Professor Mokyr is known by fellow colleagues at Northwestern as deeply impactful and visionary with his views on where our modern and future economy could look like.

The Nobel Prize in Economics is the one of several awards for the storied professor, the most recent being in 2018 when he won the Elinor Ostrom Prize for his written piece “Cognitive Rules, Institutions and Economic Growth: Douglass North and Beyond.” He has also won the 2006 Heineken Award for History and the International Balzan Prize for his innovative research regarding the history of Europe and the origins of technological change.

The Smashing Pumpkins stand as one of Chicago’s most important musical exports, blending alternative rock, dream-pop textures, and heavy guitar layers into a sound that came to define the 1990s. 

Originally formed in 1988 by Billy Corgan, James Iha, D’arcy Wretzky, and Jimmy Chamberlin, the band developed its roots in the vibrant Chicago music scene. Unlike the grunge explosion happening in Seattle at the time, the Smashing Pumpkins carved out a distinctive Midwestern identity by fusing aggression with a lush, almost orchestral sense of melody. Chicago’s diverse underground scene, ranging from punk clubs to blues bars, gave the group both a testing ground and a cultural backdrop that shaped their music’s emotional intensity.