|
Our Motto: Strange but true.
Our Mission: Amuse, surprise, perplex, astonish, and otherwise connect you with your past.
Our Method: Lower a bucket into the depths of Wisconsin history and bring to light curious fragments of forgotten lives.
Odd Wisconsin
This week public television aired the first episode of a new British series dramatizing the life of Wisconsin native Harry Gordon Selfridge. The producers call him, "the flamboyant entrepreneur and showman seeking to provide London's shoppers with the ultimate merchandise and the ultimate thrill." That may be hyperbole, but in fact much of the consumer culture that surrounds us began,...
read the rest.
Posted in Odd Lives on March 31, 2013
According to local legend, fur trader Michel Brisbois (1759-1837) had himself interred high on a bluff over Prairie du Chien so he could look down on his rivals forever. A Fierce Competition Brisbois was a fur trader who arrived in Wisconsin in 1781 and thumbed his nose at the rich and powerful for the next four decades. He undercut more...
read the rest.
Posted in Strange Deaths on March 28, 2013
Back in 1950, the irate owner of a Wisconsin summer resort "accosted the executive secretary of the Governor's Commission on Human Rights, shook his finger in her face, and demanded to know the names of the legislators who were responsible for the state's civil rights act." He was angry that he couldn't decide for himself who to serve or not...
read the rest.
Posted in Curiosities on March 20, 2013
"In my boyhood days" recalled Augustin Grignon* in the summer of 1857, "there was an aged Chippewa woman named 0-cha-own. She was a great huntress, and spent each winter with her dogs in the woods the same as any Indian hunter, and was quite as successful in killing bear, raccoon and other game. Beside a gun,which I presume she used,...
read the rest.
Posted in Odd Lives on March 14, 2013
Here's a story for Women's History Month about a Wisconsin woman who was once well-known but is now all-but-forgotten. She embodied New Age spirituality a century before that term was invented. Here are her own words describing how it all began. "I was crossing the kitchen with a basin of water when, suddenly, some unknown Force pressed me down upon...
read the rest.
Posted in Odd Lives on March 7, 2013
March is Women's History Month, so for the next few weeks Odd Wisconsin will occasionally focus on the lives of Wisconsin women. American Indian women, of course, have been making history here for thousands of years. Passing references to them occur throughout the 17th-century Jesuit Relations, but one of the earliest detailed accounts occurs in this 1702 letter by outraged...
read the rest.
Posted in Curiosities on February 28, 2013
Every year for several decades, students have approached the Society's staff to learn about the Underground Railroad in Wisconsin. Slavery itself can be an awkward topic, especially for younger students. White kids often wonder how their ancestors could have owned other people as slaves and feel guilty or embarrassed, and black kids wonder how their ancestors could have put up...
read the rest.
Posted in Curiosities on February 21, 2013
Born into bondage in North Carolina on Jan. 1, 1829, Mrs. Hattie Pierce, of 1442 Williamson St. in Madison, personally experienced the dramatic social upheavals that most of her neighbors only learned about in schoolbooks. By the time she passed away, slavery had become just a distant memory and horse-drawn wagons had given way to jet airplanes. 'Gone with the...
read the rest.
Posted in Odd Lives on February 14, 2013
Here's a pop quiz for anyone who thinks they know Wisconsin history. The record of African-American life in our state begins in the year: a. 1967, with Milwaukee's fair housing marches; b. 1866, when Ezekiel Gillespie won the right to vote; c. 1792, when Black fur traders settled at Marinette; d. 1724, when an African-American slave was killed by the...
read the rest.
Posted in Curiosities on February 1, 2013
In Germany they speak German; in China, Chinese. So how come, here in the center of No. America, we speak English? When the French and Indian War (1755-1763) broke out, the French controlled the interior of North America and the English the Atlantic seaboard. Here are a French map from 1757 and an English one from 1754 showing what they...
read the rest.
Posted in Curiosities on February 1, 2013
|
