Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2019 i Wisconsin Magazine of History

At the Wisconsin Magazine of History, we strive to be open to seeing the past in new ways. This is why, when Doug Welch approached me about new evidence for the Underground Railroad in Wisconsin, I was intrigued. Although abolitionist activity is well-documented throughout the state, UR activity is not. One obvious reason was safety: little if anything was written down about the activity of providing passage and refuge to freedom seekers. Much of the information we do have is based on oral histories gleaned many years later, published in seminal works such as William Still’s 1872 The Underground Railroad and Wilbur H. Siebert’s 1898 The Underground Railroad: From Slavery to Freedom. Still was an African American conductor from Philadelphia who documented hundreds of stories from the people who traveled…

From Madison, Wisconsin, to the Metropolitan Opera, Olivia (Goldenberger) Monona’s life was marked by serendipity and unexpected fame. Her career, first as a chorister and later a comprimaria (second lead singer) with the newly formed Chicago Grand Opera Company (CGOC), and then as a member of the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York, developed in tandem with the rising tide of operatic enthusiasm in the United States at the start of the twentieth century. Her name, however, doesn’t appear in any articles or books about the opera of that time period, despite the unusual nature and duration of her career. Olivia Monona’s papers are held by the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives and Chicago’s Newberry Library, but these collections of scrapbooks, diaries, letters, memoir fragments, newspaper clippings, postcards, and photographs are…

On Nancy C. Unger’s “Belle LaFollette and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage”:“Nancy Unger! Thank you for your scholarship and this amazing article on Belle La Follette and Women’s Suffrage. You are an adopted ‘sister!’ to us Wisconsinites.”Marilyn Townsend, Madison, via Facebook On Eugene R. H. Tesdahl’s “Lead, Slavery, and Black Personhood in Wisconsin”:“The article is excellent, and most importantly identifies and details the experiences of these enslaved people who have previously been little more than a footnote in the state’s history.”Robert Humphries, Dodgeville, via Facebook “Congratulations Gene and student researchers on a great article in the Wisconsin Magazine of History!! Fills in a missing piece of history, well documented.”Bob Taunt, La Crosse, via email On Bobbie Malone’s “Felice Scaduto Bryant: From Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Rocky Top, Tennessee”: “Dane and I just read…

Historical Paper, Junior Division, National History Day Each year, more than 16,000 students across Wisconsin present National History Day (NHD) projects to their classmates, teachers, and judges. NHD is a terrific combination of scholarship, hard work, imaginative problem solving, and fun. Anna Pearce, a eighth grader from Richfield Middle School, entered her paper in the Milwaukee North regional contest and advanced to the Wisconsin state contest, where she competed among 615 Wisconsin students to win the Junior Division historical paper category. In June, she represented Wisconsin at the national NHD contest at the University of Maryland–College Park where she won the American Labor History Award. This is her winning entry. On May 5, 1886, Wisconsin state militia fired on protesters marching in support of the eight-hour workday in Bay View,…

In the wake of the Black Hawk War of 1832, many eastern white settlers traversed the fertile land of southern Wisconsin that French fur traders referred to as “Prairie du Lac” or “Prairie of the Lake.” Soldiers from that war spread word back east about a land replete with lakes, thick prairie grasses, and abundant oak groves in what was then part of the sprawling Michigan Territory.1 Hearing the siren call of that land was Joseph Goodrich, a thirty-eight-year-old Seventh Day Baptist innkeeper and social reformer from western New York. In 1838, Goodrich and two companions boarded a steamship on Lake Erie that carried them to the western shores of Lake Michigan and the port city of Milwaukee. The men walked sixty miles west to where the militia trail of…

Despite their patriotism, many gay Americans in the service remember the years of World War II and the following McCarthy era as particularly dangerous for homosexuals. Ted Pierce, the cultivated African American gay man who lived most of his life on Madison’s Williamson Street, used to compare the period to “the Terror” that gripped France during the waning days of the French Revolution. In an oral history he recorded decades later, Pierce recalled: “There was a point in that period where you didn’t have to have any evidence that you could definitely say anybody was gay. All you had to do was say you felt they were gay to the police, and the police would investigate you extensively right down to the point of asking if you had wet dreams…