The first annual Chicago Humanities Festival – only a day long event at two venues! – explored the role that music, art, and literature have played in the preservation and pursuit of liberty over the past three centuries. From the French Revolution to Romanticists, Abolitionists and Imperialists, to Germany between the two World Wars and America in the 1960s, the festival celebrated human expression as the creative force of freedom.

Download the 1990 press release.