On March 20, 1974, Edward C. Banfield took the stage at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute. He was there to deliver a lecture, “The City and the Revolutionary Tradition,” which was one of a series of talks to commemorate the upcoming bicentennial of the American Revolution. Banfield was a bespectacled, thin man with stooped shoulders from acute transverse myelitis, an inflammatory spinal cord disease he had contracted earlier in his life. Visiting Chicago was a bit of a homecoming for him…. (Read more)