Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2019 i Wisconsin Magazine of History

JOHN WAYLES JEFFERSON OF MADISON was a man of considerable repute. After moving to the city in 1852 with his father Eston and the rest of his family, he made a name for himself, becoming the operator of a popular restaurant and the city’s oldest hotel, the American House.1 When the Civil War began, John earned a commission as an officer of the Eighth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment. At the height of the war, John stumbled across a childhood acquaintance. The two had known each other in Ohio, where Jefferson had lived for almost fifteen years until his family relocated to Madison. Rather than appreciate the serendipity of the moment, John responded to the chance encounter with apparent alarm. The officer quickly pulled the man aside and begged him not to…

While today the mandolin is mostly known as a folk or bluegrass instrument, in the late 1800s, dapper Victorian dandies in suits with high collars toured the countryside with their mandolins, in open sleighs and decorated trains, playing classical music as well as the popular songs of the day. From 1880 until the outbreak of World War I, the nation was in the midst of a musical phenomenon that can rightly be called the golden age of the mandolin, as the instrument rose to an unprecedented level of popularity. While orchestras and soloists, teachers and publishers worked to pluck out a living in a “musical culture somewhere between the elite and the popular,” as music historian Jeffrey J. Noonan writes, college campuses around the country, especially in the Northeast and…

In 1781, France and the United States joined forces to defeat the British at Yorktown, Virginia, a victory that secured independence for the former British colonies in America. Peace among the warring nations grew slowly after the War of 1812, and since 1815, there has been no armed conflict between the United States, Britain, and France. By 1917, the First World War found the three nations united against the Central Powers, an alliance that would, in President Woodrow Wilson’s words, “make the world safe for democracy.” Speaking in December of that year, French Ambassador Jean Jusserand declared it “a noble consummation that at the conclusion of a hundred years of unbroken peace among them, these once-warring Powers should be firmly united in an alliance for waging the world’s latest and…

On Saturday, June 23, 1888, a new steel ship slid off the ways into the water in Saint Louis Bay at the western end of Lake Superior. Its builder and owner, Captain Alexander McDougall, watched with great satisfaction as his brainchild floated gently in the water to great applause from the crowd. At the same time, McDougall’s wife, Emmaline, standing a short distance away, turned to her sister-in-law and remarked: “There goes our last dollar.”1 Her words, recorded in McDougall’s autobiography, reveal the hopes and fears placed on this new ship.2 Simply named the 101, the vessel, called a “whaleback” for its low, rounded appearance, represented to its builder a new direction in Great Lakes bulk freighters. The unique navigational and meteorological characteristics of the Great Lakes convinced McDougall, an…

Kennedy and Madison: Seven Days in November, 1963 On November 20, 1963, President John F. Kennedy starts his last full day in the White House by sending a Western Union telegram to Madison for UW president Fred Harvey Harrington to read at the dedication of the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Memorial Laboratories, funded in part by a $250,000 grant from the family foundation. The president, whose sister Rosemary suffered a botched lobotomy in 1941 and is currently institutionalized in Jefferson, Wisconsin, salutes lab director Dr. Harry Waisman on his efforts to “conquer the vast field of mental retardation and its attendant problems.” Senator Edward Kennedy and brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, the Peace Corps director, tour the lab, attend a symposium, and hold a dedicatory luncheon at the Memorial Union.1 Around 11:30…

When Wisconsin’s men and women left for Europe to fight in World War I in mid-1917, they didn’t know that it would be a year and a half before hostilities would finally end and they would be released from the horror of the world’s first truly modern war. By the time Armistice was declared on November 11, 1918, 122,000 Wisconsinites had served in the US armed forces, and close to 4,000 had given their lives through disease or battle.1 By early November 1918, rumors started circulating that the German army was weakening and war might cease, which meant that Wisconsin’s soldiers could finally come home. Wisconsin newspapers began reporting that peace might be declared within days, and cities and towns from Osseo to Milwaukee erupted in joy and relief. But…

Dear Editor, I read with great interest Lee Grady’s article “America’s ‘Alien Enemies’” in the Winter 2018 issue. I did not grow up in Wisconsin, I grew up in the Downriver area of Detroit. My paternal great-grandparents came from Pomerania, as did the couple whose experiences were detailed in the article. A great aunt and great uncle of mine were born in Pomerania, all the rest of the children (thirteen in all) were born in the United States and were thus native-born American citizens. When I was nine years old, in 1963, my grandmother, to whom I was very close, sat me down next to her on the sofa and told me very gravely she needed to tell me some things. She had in her hands an old book (which…