Benjamin Sells

Seven muddy miles transformed a region and a nation This fascinating account explores the significance of the Chicago Portage, one of the most important--and neglected--sites in early US history. A seven-mile-long strip of marsh connecting the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers, the portage was...

Benjamin Sells's premise is straight-forward-beauty is a civic necessity. Beauty inspires and sustains community and is essential to politics and governing. Beauty gives rise to love, and without love, there would be no community, no society, and no culture. It is the binding and...

Return to Beauty: Restoring the Ecology of Imagination explores how we have repressed beauty, and how this repression has left us estranged from our proper place in the world. Without the ordering power of beauty, individuals, society, and the environment all suffer. Return to...

The Tunnel under the Lake recounts the gripping story of how the young city of Chicago, under the leadership of an audacious engineer named Ellis Chesbrough, constructed a two-mile tunnel below Lake Michigan in search of clean water. Despite Chicago's location beside the world's...