The eighth annual Chicago Humanities Festival considered how people organize their lives, how they structure time for both work and play, and asked questions about how the work place is changing. How is it incorporating racial integration and equality? How are new technologies influencing the workplace? Have we forgotten how to play? What effect has the industrialization of play – Las Vegas, professional sports, Disney, and theme parks – had on our leisure time? How did the U.S. come from a nation of farmers and laborers to the biggest exporter of entertainment?

Download the 1997 press release.