April 2005 Odd Wisconsin
Today is Earth Day, a celebration of our place in nature that owes its origin in large part to Wisconsin thinkers. Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson was the prime mover behind legislation recognizing Earth Day, and in the previous decade had created a number of innovative environmental programs as governor of...
read more.
Posted in Curiosities on April 22, 2005
Today is the birthday of John Muir (1838-1914), the Wisconsin-raised environmentalist whose work saved California redwoods, led to the national park system, and created the Sierra Club. We celebrate Earth Day this week in large part because Muir, with fellow Wisconsin activists Aldo Leopold and Gaylord Nelson, inspired appreciation of...
read more.
Posted in Odd Lives on April 21, 2005
This morning’s news brings a report that on a section of the Kennedy Expressway on Chicago's northwest side, a yellow and white image has appeared on the concrete wall of an underpass, with some observers believing it to be an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Candles, flowers and a painting...
read more.
Posted in Odd Lives on April 20, 2005
That was how commissioner of fisheries Brayton O. Webster put it, at the height of Wisconsin's Progressive Era. But presumably he didn't consult the fish. The 1887 institution that gave its name to Madison's Fish Hatchery Road, shown here in a somewhat romanticized lithograph, was the first fish hatchery in...
read more.
Posted in Animals on April 18, 2005
This week tens of thousands of protesters occupied streets in four Chinese cities, denouncing attempts by Japanese textbook authors to whitewash atrocities committed during the Japanese occupation of China 60 years ago. Such attempts to rewrite history are nothing new. Revising or selecting facts so history aligns with one's political...
read more.
Posted in Curiosities on April 16, 2005
Although William Rand and Andrew McNally opened a print shop 1856, it was not until 1916 that they started publishing maps. They issued their first road atlas in April of 1924 and have sold 150 million copies since. Their company's name has become synonymous with finding one's way by car...
read more.
Posted in Curiosities on April 15, 2005
When Abraham Lincoln was gunned down on the night of April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth was seen fleeing Ford's Theater by W.D. Kenzie who heard gunshots and saw the actor-assassin leap from the balcony and get away. Another Wisconsin man, W.H. De Groff, was outside the theater and saw...
read more.
Posted in Strange Deaths on April 14, 2005
More than 100 years ago, UW professor Richard Ely had the audacity to teach controversial and unwelcome ideas in his classroom -- and he nearly lost his job for it. In 1894 Ely was teaching economics at Madison, including the various socialist and communist economic theories gaining popularity at the...
read more.
Posted in Odd Lives on April 13, 2005
Yesterday we gave you stories of how Wisconsin residents greeted the end of the Civil War in 1865. This morning we leap back four years to show you how they greeted its arrival, when Southern troops attacked Fort Sumter on this day in 1861. Following the outbreak of the war,...
read more.
Posted in Curiosities on April 12, 2005
On April 9, 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse and the Civil War came to an end. On that day a Wisconsin soldier, James Angevine, in a unit ready to attack its Confederate adversaries, halted with bayonets fixed on hearing the news. Another soldier, M. H. Cram, told...
read more.
Posted in Curiosities on April 11, 2005
Tiny kinglets and gigantic sandhill cranes are moving north through Wisconsin again, and soon the great grey owls that created a sensation this winter will be back in their Arctic homes. This may be a good time to consider our state's place in American ornithology. Before the Civil War, R.P....
read more.
Posted in Animals on April 8, 2005
What was it like to be a Wisconsin teenager caught up in the Battle of Shiloh? In early April of 1862, Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant was moving through western Tennessee hoping to defeat a Confederate army of 35,000. With Grant were the Wisconsin 14th, 16th, and 18th Infantry regiments...
read more.
Posted in Curiosities on April 7, 2005
In the first week of April, 1832, the Sauk chief Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk, crossed the Mississippi into Illinois with more than 1,000 supporters hoping to reclaim their traditional homeland on the Rock River. Their crossing touched off the tragic events culminating four months later in the Bad Ax Massacre...
read more.
Posted in Odd Lives on April 6, 2005
Major league baseball opens its 2005 season this week, which makes it a good time to look back on the sport's early years. This article describes Baraboo's baseball club in 1867, one of many early amateur groups in small towns around the state after the Civil War. There were even...
read more.
Posted in Curiosities on April 5, 2005
To many Wisconsin residents, Mathilde Anneke, who was born on April 3, 1817, symbolized the Forty-eighters who moved here from Germany in the mid-19th century. Forced to support her family after the end of an early and unhappy marriage, Anneke learned about poverty and the oppression of women first-hand. Her...
read more.
Posted in Odd Lives on April 4, 2005
According to local legend, fur trader Michel Brisbois (1759-1837) had himself interred high on a bluff over Prairie du Chien so he could forever look down on his rivals. Brisbois was an independent trader who arrived in Wisconsin in 1781. For the next 40 years he paid little attention to...
read more.
Posted in Strange Deaths on April 1, 2005
|
