Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2024 i Wisconsin Magazine of History

When we set out to bring a fresh look to WMH, we wanted to create a design that reflects our readers’ curiosity and abiding interest in Wisconsin’s history. As the member survey from late last year shows, whether an issue’s contents reflect your cultural background or help you discover new narratives and new voices, you are all deeply invested in this place and its people. Our main reason for the redesign is to ensure that what we offer is as accessible and visually appealing as it is fascinating. We chose an elegant, easy-to-navigate design with highly readable type, ample white space, and multiple entry points. For the cover, we opted to keep it simple with a refreshed title treatment. Inside, we divided the magazine into features and departments. A redesign…

Although it looks like it could belong in a casino, this device helped people make money much more reliably. Despite its whimsical appearance, it was all about work. The Industrial Revolution moved work into factories where, rather than responding to the natural rhythms of the land and the weather, people labored day and night at the pace required by various machines. For many years, this meant each factory had to employ someone to keep track of the comings and goings of each worker to determine labor and pay. In the interest of more cheaply and easily tracking labor, another machine was invented, the time clock. Willard Le Grand Bundy of Auburn, New York, introduced the first time clock in 1888. Its function was similar to the standard punch clock many…

I met Josie Carter for the first time on Thursday, May 11, 2006. Inside the M&M Club on Milwaukee’s North Water Street, longtime friends were reuniting for a week of remembrance and revelry as the bar’s beloved traditions were coming to an end. Last Call Week was filled with historic lasts—the last Sunday brunch, the last drag show, the last fish fry. Thursday was the last happy hour. After decades of serving up two-for-one cocktails, the M&M Club was hosting one last blowout. What do you want to be remembered for? Being me. Being totally me.— JOSIE CARTER, MAY 2011 The M&M opened on July 4, 1976, at the peak of gay liberation, and was known for its revolutionary spirit for the next three decades.2 At that time, the Historic…

25 YEARS AGO | 1999 [Fran and Fred] Hamerstrom were moving steadily away from family and the inherited attitudes that did not fit their intended course. Designer clothing, a show-place home, the opera, tea dances, a respectable job—all would be replaced by a life together, working, with their hands and brains, all senses alert to the places they loved. When a job offer came from rural Wisconsin, in a burned-over area, part mistreated marsh, part infertile sand, they did not hesitate. That job was with the Resettlement Administration, created by President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 7027 of April 20, 1935. Helen M. Corneli, “The Hamerstroms: Conservation Pioneers in Hard Times,” vol. 82, no. 4, Summer 1999 50 YEARS AGO | 1974 John F. Deitz was far from being radical, but his…

RIMA D. APPLE, PHD Rima D. Apple is a professor emerita at UW–Wisconsin and has published extensively in women’s history as well as the history of medicine and nursing, home economics, and nutrition. Among her eight books are Perfect Motherhood: Science and Childrearing in America (Rutgers, 2006) and Vitamania: Vitamins in American Culture (Rutgers, 1996). She received a 2018 lifetime achievement award from the American Association of the History of Medicine. ROBERT KROEGER, PHD Robert Kroeger is a Cincinnati-based artist and author who travels in search of historic barns and their stories. Each year he completes around two hundred oil paintings of old barns and documents their histories in essays in an effort to preserve their heritage. The author of Round Barns of America: 75 Icons of History (Acclaim, 2022),…

Flowing southeast from its source near Tomah to its confluence with the Wisconsin River, the Lemonweir is a river of ancient rivers, a stream of braided streams. As it wends through the towns of New Lisbon and Mauston, its oxbows and meanders return to the river’s main course, sluicing through a riverbed of silty loam and sand and red clay. Its soils, characterized in a 1914 survey as lacustrine, come from lake sediment: the product of glaciated runoff. Seventeen thousand years of fires and freshets have passed since the ice dam of glacial Lake Wisconsin burst. In less than a week, icy waters, muck, and debris scoured southward to sculpt the sandstone and standing rocks of today’s Wisconsin Dells. The southern land-water interface, or littoral zone, of glacial Lake Wisconsin…

Along a quiet stretch of road in Copper Country, less than a quarter mile from the Michigan border and just south of Hurley, lies an oft-missed but unusual structure: a round barn and outbuildings made entirely of stone. Barns with fieldstone foundations are not unusual in this part of the country, and round barns can still occasionally be spotted in the region—but the combination makes the Annala round barn unique in Wisconsin. In 1902, Matthew Annala, a Finnish carpenter and stonemason, along with his wife Hilma and twelve children, were among the first five families to settle the rural countryside near Hurley, part of the wave of Finnish immigrants who came to the region between 1890 and 1920. Land in the area was littered with boulders, remnants of the glacial…

How do you convince retailers to stock new kitchen equipment? How do you persuade consumers to purchase newfangled appliances? International Harvester faced these questions in the late 1940s when the company introduced its new line of freezers and refrigerators expressly designed for home use. For International Harvester, the shift to home refrigeration was only a matter of time. As increasing numbers of farm and rural residents gained electrical power following President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1936 Rural Electrification Act, the company saw an opportunity to expand beyond farm equipment. IH had developed and sold milk coolers and walk-in freezers for farm use in the years before World War II. After the war, it converted an aircraft carrier plant in Evansville, Indiana, and began manufacturing 11-cubic-foot “deep freezers” designed for the rural…

WMH by the Numbers Thanks again to the many readers who responded to our survey late last year. For those of you who like to crunch the numbers, here are some results from the survey. Out of 185 respondents, we found: ▪ WMH readers are five times more likely to live in southern Wisconsin than northern Wisconsin. Sixteen percent of you live outside of the state. ▪ 84 percent of you are over sixty years of age. ▪ Nearly half of you have been readers for more than ten years. ▪ For most of you, WMH is one factor in your membership, and for one in five of you, it is the main reason for your membership. ▪ 99 percent of you read the print version. ▪ Among the 8…

RIMA D. APPLE, PHD Rima D. Apple is a professor emerita at UW–Wisconsin and has published extensively in women’s history as well as the history of medicine and nursing, home economics, and nutrition. Among her eight books are Perfect Motherhood: Science and Childrearing in America (Rutgers, 2006) and Vitamania: Vitamins in American Culture (Rutgers, 1996). She received a 2018 lifetime achievement award from the American Association of the History of Medicine. ROBERT KROEGER, PHD Robert Kroeger is a Cincinnati-based artist and author who travels in search of historic barns and their stories. Each year he completes around two hundred oil paintings of old barns and documents their histories in essays in an effort to preserve their heritage. The author of Round Barns of America: 75 Icons of History (Acclaim, 2022),…

$25,000+ Anonymous (3) Ruth and Hartley Barker Advised Fund through Incourage Community Foundation Judge Thomas H. Barland and Jill B. Barland Jane A. Bartell and John W. Thompson Rick Bock Fund of The Minneapolis Foundation Bradbury Family The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation Kathleen Burke Circus World Museum, Inc. Cleary-Kumm Family Culver’s Diane Dei Rossi and James Hardy Robert C. Dohmen Ray and Kay Eckstein Charitable Trust Estate of John H. Englesby Pat and Anne Fee W. Jerome Frautschi Pleasant Rowland Frautschi Greater Milwaukee Foundation Black Point Historic Preservation Operation and Maintenance Fund Black Point Horticulture Fund A. William and Joanne B. Huelsman Fund Mary Roelli Hilfiker Gregory Huber Claire and Marjorie Johnson Kohler Foundation, Inc. Kohler Trust for Preservation William and Jennifer Kraemer Paul Lenhart and Maria Fabrega Irving…