Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2021 i Wisconsin Magazine of History

On September 12 and 13, 1953, Marshall Erdman’s office and factory on University Avenue on the west side of Madison hosted a home improvement exposition. More than twenty-six local businesses and commercial vendors mounted displays and held demonstrations at this weekend-long “do-it-yourself” (DIY) showcase. Visitors learned how to hang wallpaper, lay flooring, finish a basement, and wield power tools. They also discovered how to assemble kitchen cabinets, build their own furniture, and even erect an entire house.1 At the time of the DIY show, Erdman was an ambitious, if relatively inexperienced, thirty-two-year-old builder seeking to expand his business. Having immigrated from Lithuania to the US at age seventeen, he had several years of homebuilding under his belt when he was hired in 1948 to work under Frank Lloyd Wright’s…

Drumroll, Please! For the first time in Hesseltine history, we have a back-to-back winner! Matt Blessing, who received the award for volume 103, is also the winner for volume 104. His article, “Reading the Landscape: Aldo Leopold’s Use of History,” which appeared in the Winter 2020 issue, is recipient of the fifty-fifth annual William Best Hesseltine Award. In engaging prose, Blessing explores the history-infused writings of Aldo Leopold, spanning Leopold’s career as a forester, professor of wildlife management, and advocate for wilderness preservation. Generations of readers have admired the lyrical quality of Leopold’s writing, but despite a wealth of scholarship about A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold’s study and use of history, which also influenced the essays in that book, has garnered modest attention. In the decades between the world…

IF RED MEANS STOP, THEN YELLOW MEANS … STOP? Why, yes. Yellow stop signs were the national standard from 1924 until the mid-1950s. As automobiles crowded town and city streets in the early twentieth century, municipalities were on their own in trying to impose order and safety. This changed in the early 1920s when Wisconsin state highway engineer John T. Donaghey joined several Midwestern colleagues to develop a unified signage system. Their work, approved by the Mississippi Valley Association of State Highway Departments in 1923, established the octagon as the standard shape for a stop sign. The following year, the American Association of State Highway Officials designated the stop sign color as yellow, considered to be highly visible to motorists, especially at night. Forty-seven of forty-eight states required yellow stop…

When State Senator Frank Panzer, a Republican so old-school that he was born during the presidency of Civil War general Benjamin Harrison, died shortly after Richard Nixon became president in 1969, he left behind a legacy as a former La Follette Progressive who had settled comfortably into the mainstream of the Republican Party and diligently represented the GOP heartlands east of Madison for the better part of four decades. Republican governor Warren Knowles, just reelected as a moderate with a concern for the environment and a willingness to fund social welfare programs, called a special election with every expectation that, before the end of the turbulent year, another orthodox Republican would be elected to occupy the seat for another few decades. Instead, GOP primary voters upended the expectations of party…

Up here in the northland where the air is fresh and light, we only have two seasons. The first season we call winter, which can run from October through May. The second we call road construction, and it can happen any old day that isn’t winter. In 1997, I became a state highway patrolman for Winnebago County. I was assigned to Highway 21, covering the road from Oshkosh out to the Waushara County Line as well as a section of Highway 116 from Omro to Waukau and a two-mile stretch of County Road FF. For all practical purposes, it was my responsibility to assure the traveling public that this section of road would be safe to drive on during our many Wisconsin winter storms. But I’d been on similar beats…

A chance meeting in Paris, a hurried telegram from New York, and a cross-country sprint by the father of Chinese geology helped secure Wisconsin’s role in training a generation of China’s most prominent geologists. The story of Ding Wenjiang and the five young geologists he sent to the University of Wisconsin in the 1920s lays bare the critical role played by the University of Wisconsin in aiding the development of Chinese science in the twentieth century. But the tragic end of Xie Jiarong, the first of the Chinese students to matriculate from the UW’s geology department, also reveals the wobbly tightrope and the yawning chasm below it that Chinese students trained in the United States had to walk after Mao Zedong rose to power. Between China and Science Hall In…

IF RED MEANS STOP, THEN YELLOW MEANS … STOP? Why, yes. Yellow stop signs were the national standard from 1924 until the mid-1950s. As automobiles crowded town and city streets in the early twentieth century, municipalities were on their own in trying to impose order and safety. This changed in the early 1920s when Wisconsin state highway engineer John T. Donaghey joined several Midwestern colleagues to develop a unified signage system. Their work, approved by the Mississippi Valley Association of State Highway Departments in 1923, established the octagon as the standard shape for a stop sign. The following year, the American Association of State Highway Officials designated the stop sign color as yellow, considered to be highly visible to motorists, especially at night. Forty-seven of forty-eight states required yellow stop…