The Calumet Region Bibliography
Northwest Indiana nicknamed "The Region '' after the Calumet Region, comprises Lake, Porter, LaPorte, Newton, Jasper, and Starke counties in Indiana and is part of the Chicago metropolitan area.
Naomi Anderson was an important and well-known leader in the fight for women’s and African Americans’ rights in the 19th Century. The Celebrating Naomi Anderson project received support from a Preserving Women’s Legacy Grant, a program of the Indiana Women’s Suffrage Centennial presented by Indiana Humanities and the Indiana Office of Community and Rural Affairs through funding from the state of Indiana.
Library of American Civilization
The Library of American Civilization (LAC) is a collection of microforms relating to all aspects of American life and literature from their beginnings to the outbreak of World War One. There are 9,553 titles in the collection, 9,392 books, 151 serials, 10 music scores, pamphlets, periodicals, biographies and autobiographies, fictional works, poetry, materials of foreign origin relating to America, and many rare books are included. This index provides links to all the known open-source books available in the collection.
The ACME Steel collection of archives (including employee documents, production records, photographs and slides, blueprints, photographs and ephemera) and artifacts (including signage, tools, clothing, plant models, and other items consequent to everyday life in a production facility) represents the “most significant single site collection to document the economic, environmental, technological, and social life of industry in the Calumet region.”
Voices from the Factory Floor: ACME Steel and the Living Deindustrial
In 2001, the Acme Steel Corporation closed their coking plant, the final facility to shutter. The company sat idle for years as efforts to build a regional steel museum eventually stalled. Volunteers rescued material from the facilities in 2007 and 2008, eventually becoming the Acme Steel Collection housed at Purdue University Northwest since 2022. Since the Acme collection has had an initial finding aid created, an oral history project should be conducted to understand better the significance Acme played in the day-to-day lives of the region to add the human experience to the collection.