Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2017 i Wisconsin Magazine of History

To celebrate our centennial year, we asked several Wisconsin writers to describe a person or event that exemplifies Wisconsin history. From Jerry Apps on the shift from wheat to dairy, to Joe Kapler on the iconic images of Wisconsin, this issue celebrates much of what we think of as Wisconsin history. Woven together, these stories form a patchwork that resembles John Steuart Curry’s 1939 painting, Wisconsin Landscape, which graces our cover. In Curry’s rendering, bands of light fall on the fields, shining out from between majestic, gathering storm clouds. Similarly, our state’s history is a mix of shadow and light—a nuanced story we try to honor every time we go to print. In this issue, Christy Clark-Pujara examines failed attempts to achieve black male suffrage; Nancy Unger profiles a female…

The Weekly Wisconsin called it “the sport of diplomats” in 1895, played by officials brokering deals. For those in Wisconsin “who must live within four walls for six months of the year,” it was seen as a healthful, necessary sport.1 Milwaukee may not yet have become America’s bowling capital, but by the time the twentieth century rolled in, Wisconsinites were already in love with bowling. Ninepin bowling was particularly popular with Germans and had become the standard game in Wisconsin by the mid-nineteenth century. Although many wealthy men—and a few women—bowled in private clubs or estate lanes, bowling was most closely tied to working-class immigrants, chiefly men.2 Wisconsin’s German immigrants organized teams and leagues in the late nineteenth century. As in most parts of the nation, bowling in Wisconsin went hand-in-hand with bars.…

In 1894, forty-two-year-old Milwaukee socialite Adda F. Howie seemed a very unlikely candidate to become one of the most famous women in America. And yet by 1925, Howie, the first woman to serve on the Wisconsin State Board of Agriculture, had long been “recognized universally as the most successful woman farmer in America.”1 Howie’s rise to fame came at a time when the widely accepted ideas about gender were divided into the “man’s world” of business, power, and money, and the “woman’s world” devoted to family and home. Yet Howie, rather than being vilified for succeeding in the male sphere, was publicly praised for her skill in bringing traditional female values into the barns and pastures of Wisconsin. Instead of facing ridicule for her unconventional, ostentatiously feminine innovations, she was…

Hmong refugee Youa Lor embroidered her family’s story of fleeing Laos and their long trek to Madison, Wisconsin, in 1995. Her tale began shortly after the US military pulled out of Laos in 1974, abandoning the Hmong, who had been American allies, to retaliation by their communist foes. Many Hmong, including Lor, escaped across the treacherous Mekong River to the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp in northeastern Thailand. Missionaries at the camp encouraged talented needleworkers like Lor to make money by selling their products to a Western market. To help ease the trauma of their situation, the missionaries also urged these women, who were usually illiterate, to capture their memories of Laos in story cloths. Some embroidered Hmong folk tales, others pictured everyday life, and a handful told the story of…

“In the beginning there was John Muir, who begat Aldo Leopold, who begat Gaylord Nelson, who begat Earth Day.” So says the Sierra Club website, tongue-in-cheek. This lineage has also been cited by Wisconsin residents as proudly as Mayflower descendants tout Pilgrim ancestors. But is there actually any hard evidence that connects them all into a Wisconsin environmental tradition?1 Aldo Leopold could see his breath as he walked downhill to the University of Wisconsin campus early on Wednesday, April 14, 1948. The day had dawned gray, chilly, and raw, and sixty-one-year-old Leopold had been sick much of the past year with painful neuralgia, heart problems, and memory lapses. In December, he’d commented uncharacteristically to friends, “You know, we’re not around here forever.” Reaching his office before anyone else, he was…

When readers opened the first Wisconsin Magazine of History one hundred years ago, a photograph of Wisconsin’s intellectual heavyweight Increase Lapham greeted them from the frontispiece, followed by an extensive biographical sketch written by the first editor, Milo M. Quaife. The first issue included just three images spread throughout 117 pages, and for decades the magazine contained few visual depictions, usually portraits of important men and women featured in articles. Words, thoughtfully composed and carefully edited, served as the primary means to present history in the Society’s endeavor “to make the magazine as interesting as may be to the ordinary reader.”1 By 1917, though, the Society had amassed a significant collection of images, works of art, and visual materials, along with traditional resources such as books, records, correspondence, journals, and…

Hmong refugee Youa Lor embroidered her family’s story of fleeing Laos and their long trek to Madison, Wisconsin, in 1995. Her tale began shortly after the US military pulled out of Laos in 1974, abandoning the Hmong, who had been American allies, to retaliation by their communist foes. Many Hmong, including Lor, escaped across the treacherous Mekong River to the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp in northeastern Thailand. Missionaries at the camp encouraged talented needleworkers like Lor to make money by selling their products to a Western market. To help ease the trauma of their situation, the missionaries also urged these women, who were usually illiterate, to capture their memories of Laos in story cloths. Some embroidered Hmong folk tales, others pictured everyday life, and a handful told the story of…