Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2023 i Wisconsin Magazine of History

A light rain was falling in Washington, DC, as the nine members of the US Supreme Court gathered in the old Senate Chamber of the Capitol on the morning of March 19, 1874.1 The justices worked their way through a lengthy docket of business items and cases, including several regarding land ownership. One involved a jointly held land claim in Minnesota; a dispute arose after one landowner assumed ownership over a home on the property and began to charge the other as his “tenant,” later evicting him.2 Another had to do with a tract of land in Bastrop County, Texas, that had been used as collateral to pay the balance on a group of enslaved people during the Civil War. After the war, when the enslaved people gained their freedom,…

Reports of Thomas Edison’s experiments with electric lighting cropped up frequently in newspapers starting around 1878. As a result, gas stock values fell and public anticipation for a cheaper means of illumination grew. On New Year’s Eve 1879, Edison held a public exhibition at his Menlo Park laboratory featuring forty lamps that remained illuminated for four hours—a resounding success. Much attention was paid to Edison’s advances in effective lightbulbs—the visible part of electric lighting that would become ubiquitous. No less important, though, was the means of generating, distributing, and metering power. The dynamo pictured here converted mechanical power to electrical power. The device is five feet tall and weighs about a ton. It was operated by a steam engine connected by a belt (partially visible on the far right of…

My grandfather had always been called Joseph Szedziewski—or so I thought. An immigrant who arrived in the US in 1912, Joseph lived, worked, and worshipped in Milwaukee’s Polish neighborhoods for over four decades. To his American-born descendants, he symbolized pride in Polish culture. Although we had long been Americanized, we celebrated our Polish heritage at gatherings in the living room and around the dining room table of my grandparents. Some of Joseph’s children continued to make their homes in the south side Milwaukee neighborhood where he had lived, and a few were even fluent in Polish. In 1990, nearly thirty-five years after my grandfather’s death, my extended family received a surprise in the form of a letter from the Soviet Union from his last surviving brother, Peter Shedko. He wrote,…

The following selection is from Never Givin’ Up: The Life and Music of Al Jarreau, which will be released this fall by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. From his earliest days singing in the 1940s until his death in 2017, Al Jarreau defied categorization. Growing up as part of a musical family in Milwaukee, he developed what would become a lifelong belief in the healing power of music. He established himself as a working musician during his student years at Ripon College and the University of Iowa and, also, in nightspots in Milwaukee, the Twin Cities, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. After being signed by Warner Bros. Records in 1975, he went on to smash music industry stereotypes as the first artist to win Grammy Awards in three genres: jazz,…

In the fall of 1947, Mary Evelyn Williams and Willie M. Mitchell enrolled in Milwaukee’s Pressley School of Beauty Culture, the only Black beauty school in Wisconsin, which had opened three years prior. After paying their enrollment fees and going to class, Williams and Mitchell received word from the State Board of Health’s Cosmetology Division that unless they provided proof of a tenth-grade education, their enrollment at Pressley would not count toward becoming licensed beauticians. Williams replied to the Cosmetology Division on September 17, 1947, on behalf of herself and Mitchell, requesting an exemption from the state law that required proof of a tenth-grade education to be licensed in the state.1 In Williams’s handwritten letter, she wrote of their commitment to cosmetology, their desire to become licensed, and the financial…

Articles Resonate Years Later From time to time, we receive letters from readers about articles published several issues—or even several years—ago. The examples below remind us of the connections, personal and political, that fuel our interest in history. The letter from Barbara Pellegrini refers to an article she cowrote with five other authors for the Spring 2016 issue about landmark legislation they helped pass in 1973: “The Mothers of Chapter 115: How Wisconsin Mandated Special Education for All Children with Disabilities.” The second, from a Winter 2018 article by Lee Grady about his German-born grandparents’ experience as nonnaturalized “aliens” during the first world war, fills in gaps for a reader thinking about his own family’s immigrant past. It feels especially fitting to run this letter in an issue featuring Michael…