Innholdsfortegnelse for Autumn 2021 i Wisconsin Magazine of History

When I was seven or eight, my family took a trip from our home in Edina, Minnesota, to the Wisconsin Dells. I’ve seen pictures from this trip, mostly of camping and canoeing, because these were the days before water parks. Far clearer in my mind’s eye is a visit to the Indian Trading Post, a touristy shop on the edge of town. The myriad of beaded and feathered trinkets, headdresses, and dolls with fringed dresses and braided hair—and the power of the allowance dollars in my pocket—was tantalizing. My childhood was filled with unchallenged yet formative ideas about what it meant to be “Indian”: the Ingalls family’s encounter with a French-speaking chief on the prairie (I now know that the Ingalls were squatting illegally on Osage land); cinematic Westerns running…

Visiting Villa Louis Are you interested in seeing the Wisconsin Historic site that has been featured in the last two issues of WMH? After a year of putting programming on pause, Villa Louis reopened to visitors at the end of August—just in time for some of its most anticipated events! The 40th Villa Louis Carriage Classic will take place on September 10–12, 2021, on the Villa Louis grounds. Come and see the Midwest’s most elegant and lavishly appointed equine sport driving event, featuring top competitors from across the country. This year’s event will host the region’s finest horses, with more than a hundred new and restored carriages competing in a variety of contests, from carriage driving to obstacle courses. Victorian Home for the Holidays will take place the first two…

The year 2021 marks the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the construction of Villa Louis, the Dousman family estate in Prairie du Chien, today one of the Wisconsin Historic Society’s twelve historic sites. The rich interiors of the home, fully restored in the 1990s and early 2000s, get an in-depth look in this image essay from the site’s former curator. February 6, 1990, turned out to be a good day for sleuthing. We had spent a pleasurable afternoon looking through items at the home of one of the heirs of Hercules L. Dousman, whose Prairie du Chien estate, Villa Louis, I worked for as curator. Already we had made several great finds, including the Tiffany Persian flatware and the cellarette, an intricate liquor cabinet that had once graced the Dousmans’…

Hope Is the Perfect Round Roti Lopamudra Basu Hope is the thing that you can roll into a dough, press with your fingers, pummel with your palms, and transform with the addition of dried fungus into a loaf of bread. And yet this simple staple vanished from grocery aisles as most of the country came under shelter-in-place orders. The essential ingredient needed for bread—active dry yeast—also disappeared. This sparked the new quest for breads without yeast, and the sourdough emerged as the favored choice, the result of many hours of nurture from the creation of a fermented starter to the full glory of the boule. However, I found myself traveling an opposite course; instead of perfecting the sourdough, I sought the unleavened humble chapati or roti of my youth in…

I spent my childhood roaming around a small-town newsroom, listening to the clickety-clack of manual typewriters and the incessant ringing of landlines. My siblings and I scooted out of the way as reporters and photographers dashed in and out to cover meetings and accidents. My first paid work was in that office, cutting apart long strips of copy spooled from typesetting machines, pasting together ads, and using a red marker to cover lines on negatives. The New Glarus Post office smelled like cigarettes, wax, and developer. Mom dragged us to school board meetings and took notes in shorthand. I doodled in reporters’ notebooks while town officials droned on about zoning. When I was old enough to operate a Pentax camera, I stood under the basket in the high school gym,…