I’ve been chasing my great-great-grandfather’s story for eight years.

On October 28, 1893, Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison Sr. was shot dead in his own home — on the eve of the closing of the greatest World's Fair the country had ever seen. Within hours, the city's fiercely partisan newspapers were battling over what should happen next. And the man suddenly thrust into the middle of that chaos was George B. Swift, who became Mayor Pro Tem overnight.

He was also my great-great-grandfather. And for most of the years I spent researching his story, I had no idea what he looked like. Then I found the only known personal photo of him tucked inside my grandmother's baby book. She's the little brunette with the bangs.

That's the kind of thing that happens when you fall down a rabbit hole for eight years. You start with a family name and a footnote in Chicago political history, and you end up buried in microfilm, reading accounts from newspapers that hated each other so much they couldn't even agree on the weather — and yet somehow, in the middle of a genuine constitutional crisis, stumbled into doing the right thing.

"Start the Presses" is the story of how that happened. I'm a former journalist who has worked in political campaigns and government, so I know something about how the press and politics collide — and how messy it gets when the rules break down. I write regularly about Gilded Age Chicago politics on my Substack, Politics and the Press in Gilded Age Chicago, and my work has appeared in the New York Times.