Innholdsfortegnelse for Autumn 2015 i Wisconsin Magazine of History

Postwar Europe was no place for children. Major roads and cities lay in ruins, farm fields had been stripped by retreating German soldiers, and millions of its citizens had been killed or wounded. Food production and distribution was nearly impossible. In his October 11, 1947, “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column, popular syndicated columnist Drew Pearson, best known as a muckraker attacking politicians he felt worked against the public good, proposed sending a gift of food from the people of the United States to the children of war-ravaged Europe. The United States was already supplying foreign aid that was delivered “efficiently and unostentatiously” at the docks at Le Havre, France. Pearson noted in contrast that comparably small amounts of Russian wheat came into Marseilles harbor, but arrived “with flags flying, bands playing .…

This wood bicycle, nicknamed the “Crabtree Special,” sports a frame fashioned from the crotch of a crabapple tree. According to an undated interview that appeared in the Milwaukee Journal in the 1940s, Walter Atkinson of Bunker Hill, Wisconsin, made the bicycle in 1891, when he was eighteen years old. He sold it to Platteville bike dealer, Edward Grindell, for $7.50. Grindell, in turn, sold it to William Park of Madison, who then sold it to D.D. Warner in 1893. The Wisconsin Historical Society’s documents state only that an anonymous builder rode the wood bicycle to Madison where he visited the office of D.D. Warner, owner of the Warner Cycle Co. Warner exchanged a new, factory-made bicycle for the wooden one and gave the man a job in his factory. The…

In the 1840s and 1850s, oxen brought settlers to the opening frontiers of the upper Midwest. Many farmers arrived in wagons with their livestock. A milk cow might be tied behind the wagon, with pigs and chickens in crates bouncing along inside, but in front, pulling it all, were the oxen. They led the way into Wisconsin as they had on other frontiers throughout history. Pioneers uprooted themselves and their families and relocated to undeveloped areas and other countries throughout all of recorded history. Ever since their domestication some 9,000 years ago, cattle have provided power for humans and have always been found on any frontier.1 They provided meat and milk and played an integral part in the development of farming. Oxen are not a separate breed of cattle but…

Wisconsin residents appreciate their environmentalist heritage. They proudly trace it back from Gaylord Nelson’s Earth Day through Aldo Leopold’s sand county to John Muir’s boyhood and youth. Some even celebrate Increase Lapham, who warned in 1867 about the disastrous effects of destroying the northern forests. But few people know that a seventeenth-century priest stationed on Lake Superior created the first book on our plants and wildlife. He penned almost 200 pages and drew 180 sketches describing more than 350 plants and animals. It’s not only the first book about North America’s flora and fauna—it also shows how strangely our ancestors thought about nature.1 Father Louis Nicolas, 1634 to ca. 1701 The book’s author, Father Louis Nicolas, was born in 1634 in the south of France and began training as a…