Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2018-2019 i Wisconsin Magazine of History

Their resemblance is uncanny. On this issue’s cover, a World War I munitions worker from a United War Work Campaign poster; below, a real-life auto worker standing outside the Four Wheel Drive Company in Clintonville, Wisconsin. Both wear coveralls with rolled cuffs and oversized pockets, their forearms bare as if they are ready to return to the factory floor. Their gazes are direct and their stances confident, at ease. Both the poster and photograph date from 1918, when women filled 20 percent of all manufacturing jobs in the United States, and when, on November 11, peace was declared. By war’s end, the workers at Four Wheel Drive had produced 14,473 trucks for the war effort, and women had gained an unexpected foothold in the sphere of what had previously been…

WHEN AN AGED AND AILING Henry Sink left De Pere for the Wisconsin Veterans Home at King, Wisconsin, in 1904, the Brown County Democrat noted the departure of the well-known African American resident and his wife: “Mr. and Mrs. Henry Sink left Tuesday for Waupaca, where Mr. Sink will enter the Soldiers’ home hospital. His condition has been serious for some time.”1 Sink’s residence in northeast Wisconsin had begun decades earlier. Born into slavery in Batesville, Arkansas, in the 1830s, he moved with his young family to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, in the early 1860s. Though the history of African American settlement in nineteenth-century northeast Wisconsin is largely forgotten today, Sink was one individual in the region’s small but steadily growing African American population during the second half of the nineteenth century. Henry…

The following excerpt comes from The Misunderstood Mission of Jean Nicolet: Uncovering the Story of the 1634 Journey, published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press in fall 2018. This excerpt examines the evolving geographic knowledge and diplomatic work of Nicolet’s superior Samuel de Champlain, which proved crucial for discerning the goals of Nicolet’s later mission and correcting the fallacy that Champlain directed Nicolet to seek a passage to China as late as 1634. Champlain spent the winter of 1615–1616 recuperating in Huronia and learned more about the regional geography, particularly from the Nipissings, who promised Champlain they would take him northward toward Hudson Bay. However, an Algonquin chief dissuaded them, citing the need to have the Nipissings present at a council to moderate a dispute between the Algonquins and Hurons. Upon…

At four feet high and three feet wide, this hand-drawn Civil War roster from Oconto County’s Company F, 12th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry is already impressive in size. But this is just one of the fascinating qualities of the “River Sackers” roster. Years before large-format printing was common for anything other than newsprint, the roster was “executed with a steel pen” by S.W. Martin’s Writing Academy of Madison, as stated at the bottom of the left column. The creators of the roster penned the names of each member of the company in four columns, from the captain and lieutenants to privates, musicians, and even the captain’s boy at bottom right. Each name is accompanied by a small albumen portrait, common for soldiers entering the war. The original, now held at the…

At four feet high and three feet wide, this hand-drawn Civil War roster from Oconto County’s Company F, 12th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry is already impressive in size. But this is just one of the fascinating qualities of the “River Sackers” roster. Years before large-format printing was common for anything other than newsprint, the roster was “executed with a steel pen” by S.W. Martin’s Writing Academy of Madison, as stated at the bottom of the left column. The creators of the roster penned the names of each member of the company in four columns, from the captain and lieutenants to privates, musicians, and even the captain’s boy at bottom right. Each name is accompanied by a small albumen portrait, common for soldiers entering the war. The original, now held at the…