Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2022 i Wisconsin Magazine of History

Gatherings to seek solutions to the climate crisis. A magazine that publishes new work by Wisconsin writers, and juried exhibits that showcase Wisconsin’s visual artists. Talks and events exploring everything from the American Dream to space farming, geology, and epidemiology. There’s a reason it’s hard to write a soundbite that describes today’s Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters. And yet all of its diverse initiatives center on a simple idea: sharing the work of Wisconsin’s intellectuals, creatives, and scientists to enlighten, inspire, and serve the citizens of the state. Most long-lived public institutions can attribute their success to a simple, clear mission within a defined field, like educating students, preserving art, or celebrating heritage. The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters is different. Its original mission, as expressed…

Walt Kelly, a cartoonist who spent his early career at Walt Disney Studios animating Pinocchio and Dumbo, was by 1950 the most recognized cartoonist in America. His visit to Madison in 1952 was captured by Wisconsin State Journal photographer Arthur Vinje, who took this shot of the artist being greeted at the Chicago & Northwestern Depot by someone dressed as Kelly’s most famous creation, Pogo Possum. Kelly spent two days in Madison and made fourteen appearances around the city including at Bascom Hall, Central High, West High, the Sertoma Club, the Memorial Union, the University Co-Op, and the Veterans Hospital—at which he visited all nine floors to accommodate patients who couldn’t leave their rooms. Kelly was also treated to a Wisconsin vs. Marquette football game at Camp Randall before leaving…

The 1988 Republican National Convention (RNC) in New Orleans was, according to several Wisconsin newspaper accounts, more of a celebration than a convention. Then–vice president George H. W. Bush, following Ronald Reagan’s two terms in office, was expected to become his party’s presidential nominee, and delegates from around the country were eager to meet and project an image of political unity and a vision for the future. Diversity was a major focus of the convention, with women and people of color taking significant speaking roles and presenting the party as welcoming and reflective of the broader society. According to delegate Marlene Cummings, a Black Wisconsinite who was the secretary of the state’s Department of Regulation and Licensing and a contributor to the Wisconsin State Journal, “It’s almost as if we,…

A dawn wind stirs on the great marsh. With almost imperceptible slowness, it rolls a bank of fog across the wide morass. Like the white ghost of a glacier, the mists advance riding over phalanxes of tamarack, sliding over bogmeadows heavy with dew. A single silence hangs from horizon to horizon. —Aldo Leopold The great marsh that Aldo Leopold venerates in “Marshland Elegy,” an essay that appears in his classic A Sand County Almanac, is the Horicon Marsh.1 It is indeed a wetland to be venerated, one of the largest freshwater cattail marshes in the world, and host to a spectacular biodiversity of wetland plants and animals. It occupies 31,000 acres, most of it in Dodge County with its northern tip lying in Fond du Lac County. Roughly oval-shaped, it…

From 1905 until 1921, when he was convicted and jailed for practicing medicine without a license, an Austrian immigrant named John Till attracted thousands of patients to his clinics in Wisconsin’s St. Croix Valley. Glowing testimonials from those who claimed to have been cured of everything from corns to cancer, bunions to blindness, brought a steady stream of sufferers to his first establishment in Somerset. Till’s secret “4X” salve and a caustic plaster paste he applied to patients’ backs were credited with having miraculous healing properties. Occasional reports of tragic results from Till’s treatments, such as this item published on April 22, 1908, in the Redwood Gazette of Redwood Falls, Minnesota, also began to appear. Jacob P. Palmer, proprietor of the Ryan hotel at Fairfax, and 20 years ago a…

Walt Kelly, a cartoonist who spent his early career at Walt Disney Studios animating Pinocchio and Dumbo, was by 1950 the most recognized cartoonist in America. His visit to Madison in 1952 was captured by Wisconsin State Journal photographer Arthur Vinje, who took this shot of the artist being greeted at the Chicago & Northwestern Depot by someone dressed as Kelly’s most famous creation, Pogo Possum. Kelly spent two days in Madison and made fourteen appearances around the city including at Bascom Hall, Central High, West High, the Sertoma Club, the Memorial Union, the University Co-Op, and the Veterans Hospital—at which he visited all nine floors to accommodate patients who couldn’t leave their rooms. Kelly was also treated to a Wisconsin vs. Marquette football game at Camp Randall before leaving…