Hoffman Estates is a northwestern suburb of Chicago in Illinois. The village is located primarily in Cook County with a small section in Kane County, Illinois. As of the 2000 census, the village population was 49,495 and estimated to be 52,520 in 2003. The village was incorporated in 1959.

The village now serves as the headquarters location for the Sears Holdings Corporation, the midwest headquarters for AT&T and the American headquarters for Mori Seiki. It owns the Sears Centre Arena, home site of the Chicago Express of the ECHL ice hockey league, the Chicago Slaughter of the Indoor Football League and the Chicago Bliss of the Lingerie Football League. In 2009, the village hosted the Heartland International Tattoo, one of the largest music and dance festivals of its kind in the Midwest.

Hoffman Estates turned into a major subdivision with Centex Corporation mass-producing houses on adjacent lots, rather than custom-building them on scattered lots. Some of the lots west of Roselle Road had been built on soft earth, marsh, and peat bogs; by the late 1960s, a few foundations had begun to crumble.

Illinois (ⁱ/ˌɪlɨˈnɔɪ/ IL-i-NOY) is the 25th most extensive and the 5th most populous of the 50 United States, and is often noted as a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal, timber, and petroleum in the south, Illinois has a broad economic base. Illinois is a major transportation hub. The Port of Chicago connects the state to other global ports from the Great Lakes, via the Saint Lawrence Seaway, to the Atlantic Ocean; as well as the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River, via the Illinois River. For decades, O'Hare International Airport has ranked as one of the world's busiest airports. Illinois has long had a reputation as a bellwether both in social and cultural terms and politics.

Although the state's largest population centers today are in northern Illinois, originally the state's population grew from south to north, with settlers arriving from Kentucky in the 1810s. In 1818, Illinois achieved statehood. Chicago was founded in the 1830s on the banks of the Chicago River, one of the few natural harbors on southern Lake Michigan. Railroads and John Deere's invention of the self-scouring steel plow turned Illinois' rich prairie into some of the world's most productive and valuable farmlands, attracting immigrant farmers from Germany and Sweden. By 1900, the growth of industrial jobs in the northern cities and coal mining in the central and southern areas attracted immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Illinois was an important manufacturing center during both world wars. The Great Migration established a large community of African Americans in Chicago that created the city's famous jazz and blues cultures.