Many cities around the country have become known as the town of _________ (insert ethnic origin here). Often, that's for good reason, given that places like Boston were port cities where large numbers of immigrants landed. But in the overall scheme of things, Chicago has to have one of the most varied and interesting cultural and ethnic backgrounds in America.

For an inland city, it has received its fair share and then some of immigrants from Europe. According to city statistics, Chicago is home to more Polish people than any city in the world, except Warsaw.

There are also large populations of Jews and East Indians, something that has birthed a now annual manic event known as the Indo-Jew bowl, a Thanksgiving Day football game that raises money for charity. The players are all graduates of the Niles North High School, where the student population was largely...you guessed it, Indians and Jews, and the game was established as a way of bringing the cultures together.

All of this in a city founded by a black Haitian, Jean-Baptiste Pointe du Sable, in 1772. Even if his achievement was not officially acknowledged until 1968.

In many ways, while Chicago experienced a tumultuous period of unrest in the 1960s, it still represents the epitome of progress in blending the black and white cultures of America. For it was here in 1893, that the black surgeon Daniel Hale Williams performed the first open heart surgery, in the first interracial hospital in the country.