Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2015 - 2016 i Wisconsin Magazine of History

On February 25, 1982, Wisconsin became the first US state to protect lesbians and gay men from discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations. In the 1981–1982 legislative session, the nondiscrimination bill passed both houses of the state legislature with bipartisan support. When Republican governor Lee Sherman Dreyfus added his signature to the bill, it became Wisconsin law and added sexual orientation to the list of existing nondiscrimination categories including political or religious opinion or affiliation, age, sex, handicap, race, color, national origin, and ancestry.1 Until Massachusetts passed a similar bill in 1989, the Badger State remained the only state with a nondiscrimination law for gay men and women.2 As of August 2015, only twenty-one states and the District of Columbia have followed suit. In July 2015, several US senators…

The maiden voyage of the Lusitania. President-elect Warren G. Harding’s trip to Kingston, Jamaica. “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s visit to LaCrosse, Wisconsin. What is the common thread that connects these disparate events? Each is documented by a menu in the collections of the Wisconsin Historical Society. By exploring these menus, we can get a sense of what people used to eat and drink, who might have been present at historic events, and what those events might have been like to attend. Due to the breadth of the Society’s collections, menus document a surprisingly broad range of activity, offer insight into social history, and provide a sense of the past through that most familiar and ordinary of activities: eating. Broad-based changes such as more concentrated urban populations, new methods of food preservation…

Educated at Howard University, where she was schooled in African American history, Vel Phillips (1924–present) has taken every opportunity during her long career in the public eye to advocate for social justice and civil rights for Milwaukee’s African Americans. “America,” she said in a 1955 speech, “is not the land of opportunity it is purported to be—not while discrimination and segregation exist, and where those belonging to the Negro race can secure only second class citizenship with definite limitations.”1 Always outspoken, favoring the limelight, young Phillips had charisma and an astuteness that propelled her into a long career in civic life with a desire “to make a difference.” Her election to the Milwaukee Common Council in 1956 made history. Vel Phillips was a star from the start of her adult…

While some describe the collections of the Wisconsin Historical Society as “out of this world,” they usually aren’t speaking literally. One researcher, however, recently had a close encounter with the moon in the basement of the Society headquarters building in Madison. On a December 1972 lunar expedition, the last manned moon landing to date, Apollo 17 astronauts Harrison “Jack” Schmitt and Gene Cernan collected 243 pounds of material from the lunar surface. One rock, a 6.5-pound chunk labeled “Lunar Basalt 70017,” was broken up into “goodwill Moon rocks” and given to each of the fifty states and several foreign countries. Wisconsin’s piece was given to Governor Pat Lucey in 1973. It stayed with the Executive Office for twenty-eight years until Governor Scott McCallum turned it over to the Wisconsin Historical…