Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2023 i Wisconsin Magazine of History

Kaush-kau-no-nein, the leading orator of the Menominee Nation, stood before the Pennsylvania legislature. The image he presented must have been striking. A contemporary portrait by George Catlin depicts a man wearing strings of wampum steadfastly holding a ceremonial pipe and casting the viewer a wary look. It was late March 1831. Over the course of the previous five months, Kaush-kau-no-nein, or Grizzly Bear, and eleven other Menominee leaders had traveled from Green Bay in the Michigan Territory to Washington, DC. They had met President Andrew Jackson in the executive mansion. Now they were on their way home. Passing through Harrisburg, the group was invited to address the state legislature. As he had on so many other occasions, Grizzly Bear spoke for the Menominee: “We have been to Washington, to see…

In 1941, nineteen-year-old Margaret “Marnie” Danhauser of Racine began working as a book binder at Western Printing and Lithographing—a good, if unglamorous, job with an average salary of about thirty-two dollars a week.1 She was a 1938 graduate of St. Catherine’s High School, where she had played intramural basketball.2 She also had two state championships under her belt as a member of the 1936 and 1937 Pugh Coal Company girls softball team. Danhauser bowled and golfed to round out her athletic pursuits.3 Thousands of women around the country shared Danhauser’s love of sport and participated in athletics for fun, likely never dreaming of doing so professionally. Yet, world events would soon unfold that would alter the lives of a select few, including Danhauser’s, in unprecedented ways. During this same year,…

The following selection is from Obreros Unidos: The Roots and Legacy of the Farmworkers Movement, which will be released this summer by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. As a young man, Jesus Salas and others led a historic march from Wautoma to Madison to demand that lawmakers address rampant violations of Wisconsin’s minimum wage laws and housing codes. Inspired by César Chávez, these young labor leaders founded Obreros Unidos—“Workers United”—to fight for fairness and respect, as well as to provide much-needed services to migrant families. The impetus for this work was Salas’s experiences growing up in a migrant worker family, traveling between Texas and the Midwest yearly to work the harvest. In this excerpt, he describes the brutal working conditions and overcrowded labor camps experienced by the Mexican American and…

Washington Island is a small jewel of nature that lies seven miles out from the tip of the Door Peninsula, in the upper reaches of Lake Michigan. When I was growing up, we simply called it “the Island.” Almost one hundred years ago, when I was born, lush forests covered most of the Island. Five hundred families lived there, but there was no village. Our community was Lutheran, mostly Scandinavian transplants from Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. I was baptized at my grandfather’s home in the early summer of 1924 and given the name Raymond Douglas Hagen. My mother, Agnes Christine Foss Hagen, had hoped for a girl, but she welcomed me, a healthy third boy, into the family. I joined a large clan that included three brothers, uncles and aunts,…