Wisconsin German Land and Life
Wisconsin German Land and Life

Author: Robert Clifford Ostergren

Publisher: Max Kade Institute

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13:

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This volume, an innovative approach to immigration research, is the cooperative project of a group of German and American scholars. The focus is on migrants from farming communities along the Rhine who relocated to Wisconsin in the nineteenth century: from the Westerwald to Reeseville, from the Cologne area to Cross Plains, from the Eifel to the so-called Holyland in Fond du Lac and Calumet Counties, and from Rhine Hesse to Washington and Sheboygan Counties. Taking different approaches, the authors of the essays concentrate on the migrants' relationship to the land, and use, among other sources, official records on both sides of the Atlantic, such as census and family records, and land registers, plat maps, and land surveys. The broad picture presented here includes the migrants' situation in their original home, the migration process itself, and their experience in Wisconsin. Distributed for the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies

Wisconsin Land and Life
Wisconsin Land and Life

Author: Robert Clifford Ostergren

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 588

ISBN-13: 9780299153540

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Rolling green hills dotted with Holstein cows, red barns, and blue silos. The Great Lakes ports at Superior, Ashland, and Kenosha. A Polish wedding dance or a German biergarten in Milwaukee. The dappled quiet of the Chequamagon forest. A weatherbeaten but tidy town hall at the intersection of two county trunk highways. Ojibwa families gathering wild rice into canoes. The boat ride through the Dells. The upland ridges of the Driftless Area, falling away into hidden valleys. . . . These are images of Wisconsin's land and life, images that evoke a strong sense of place. This book, Wisconsin Land and Life, is an exploration of place, a series of original essays by Wisconsin geographers that offers an introduction to the state's natural environment, the historical processes of its human habitation, and the ways that nature and people interact to create distinct regional landscapes. To read it is to come away with a sweeping view of Wisconsin's geography and history: the glaciers that carved lakes and moraines; the soils and climate that fostered the prairies and great northern pine forests; the early Native Americans who began to shape the landscape and who established forest trails and river portages; the successive waves of Europeans who came to trade in furs, mine for lead and iron, cut the white pines, establish farms, work in the lumber and paper mills, and transform spent wheatfields into pasture for dairy cattle. Readers will learn, too, about the platting and naming of Wisconsin's towns, the establishment of county and township governments, the growth of urban neighborhoods and parishes, the role of rivers, railroads, and religion in shaping the state's growth, and the controversial reforestation of the cutover lands that eventually transformed hardscrabble farms and swamps into a sportsman's paradise. Abundantly illustrated with photos and maps, this book will richly reward anyone who wishes to learn more about the land and life of the place we know as Wisconsin.

Wisconsin Talk
Wisconsin Talk

Author: Thomas Purnell

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres

Published: 2013-09-17

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 0299293335

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Wisconsin is one of the most linguistically rich places in North America. It has the greatest diversity of American Indian languages east of the Mississippi, including Ojibwe and Menominee from the Algonquian language family, Ho-Chunk from the Siouan family, and Oneida from the Iroquoian family. French place names dot the state's map. German, Norwegian, and Polish—the languages of immigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—are still spoken by tens of thousands of people, and the influx of new immigrants speaking Spanish, Hmong, and Somali continues to enrich the state's cultural landscape. These languages and others (Walloon, Cornish, Finnish, Czech, and more) have shaped the kinds of English spoken around the state. Within Wisconsin's borders are found three different major dialects of American English, and despite the influences of mass media and popular culture, they are not merging—they are dramatically diverging. An engaging survey for both general readers and language scholars, Wisconsin Talk brings together perspectives from linguistics, history, cultural studies, and geography to illuminate why language matters in our everyday lives. The authors highlight such topics as: • words distinctive to the state • how recent and earlier immigrants have negotiated cultural and linguistic challenges • the diversity of bilingual speakers that enriches our communities • how maps can convey the stories of language • the relation of Wisconsin's Indian languages to language loss worldwide.

Other Witnesses
Other Witnesses

Author: Cora Lee Kluge

Publisher: Max Kade Institute

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13:

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The unique perspective of the "other witnesses" included here--that of immigrant outsiders, foreigners who wrote primarily for a minority-language group in the United States--provides the reader with a new understanding of this important period of America's growth and development. Included are works by Christian Essellen, Reinhold Solger, Mathilde Franziska Anneke, Theodor Kirchhoff, Udo Brachvogel, Robert Reitzel, Julius Gugler, Edna Fern, Lotte Leser, and others: plays, short stories, and poems, as well as selections from novels, essays, and memoirs. Some of the texts have never appeared in book form, and still others are published here for the first time. Introductory essays to each chapter provide background information and point the way for further research. The volume will be a welcome addition to the collections of institutional libraries, historians, and Germanists alike.

Creating Old World Wisconsin
Creating Old World Wisconsin

Author: John D. Krugler

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres

Published: 2013-07-19

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 0299292630

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"Visionaries, researchers, curators, and volunteers launched a massive preservation initiative to salvage fast-disappearing immigrant and migrant architecture. Dozens of historic buildings in the 1970s were transported from various locations throughout the state to the Kettle Moraine State Forest. These buildings created a backdrop against which twenty-first-century interpreters demonstrate nineteenth- and early twentieth-century agricultural techniques and artisanal craftsmanship." --Back cover.

Finns in Wisconsin
Finns in Wisconsin

Author: Mark Knipping

Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society

Published: 2013-03-28

Total Pages: 71

ISBN-13: 0870205323

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From mining to logging to farming, Finns played an important role in the early development of Wisconsin. Although their immigration to the state came later than that of most other groups, their contributions proved just as significant. Finns pride themselves for their sisu, a Finnish term which, roughly translated, means fortitude or perseverance, especially in the face of adversity. They needed their strength of character to help them face the difficult task of building a new life in a new land. Many Finns arriving in Wisconsin, unable to own land at home, hoped to establish themselves as small independent farmers in the new land. They settled mainly in northern Wisconsin, due to jobs and land available there. This book traces the history of Finnish settlement in Wisconsin, from the large concentrations of Finns in the northern region, to the smaller "Little Finlands" created in other areas of the state. Revised and expanded, this new edition contains the richly detailed story of one Finnish woman, told in her own words, of her hardships and experiences in traveling to a new country and her resourcefulness and strength in adapting to a new culture and building a new life.

Swiss in Wisconsin
Swiss in Wisconsin

Author: Frederick Hale

Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society

Published: 2013-03-28

Total Pages: 78

ISBN-13: 087020551X

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As the Föhn blew the first breaths of spring into the Alps in March 1845, two Swiss men embarked on a circuitous voyage that took them from the impoverished canton of Glarus in eastern Switzerland to the hills of southern Wisconsin. Their mission: to select and purchase a tract of land to which the Swiss government could dispatch part of its excess population. With subscriptions from prospective emigrants totaling about $2,600, Nicholas Dürst and Fridolin Streiff ultimately purchased 1,280 acres of timber and prospective farmland in Green County—land fellow immigrants declared “beautiful beyond expectation,” offering “excellent timber, good soil, fine springs, and a stream filled with fish.” Thus began the colony at New Glarus, Wisconsin, perhaps the most distinctively Swiss settlement in the United States. A mere five years later, Wisconsin boasted 1,224 of the nation’s 13,358 Swiss immigrants. In this concise introduction to the state’s Swiss settlers, Frederick Hale traces the catalysts for Swiss emigration, their difficult journeys, and their adjustments to life on Wisconsin soil. Updates for this expanded edition include additional historic photographs and the selected writings of John Luchsinger, who settled at the Swiss colony at New Glarus, in 1856.

Albion's Seed
Albion's Seed

Author: David Hackett Fischer

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1991-03-14

Total Pages: 981

ISBN-13: 019974369X

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This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.

They Came to Wisconsin
They Came to Wisconsin

Author: Julia Pferdehirt

Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 138

ISBN-13: 0870203282

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They Came to Wisconsin presents three themes of the state's immigrant history: leaving the homeland, making the journey, and enduring the first year of settlement. Journal and diary entries and letters from European groups and oral histories from African American, Latino, Hmong, and Amish sources make this book dynamic and wholly inclusive. They Came to Wisconsin breaks fresh ground in presenting document-centered Wisconsin history to a young audience. More important, these firsthand stories add a real human dimension to history, helping students to compare the experiences of the varied groups who came to Wisconsin in the last two hundred years.

Danes in Wisconsin
Danes in Wisconsin

Author: Frederick Hale

Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society Press

Published: 1981

Total Pages: 40

ISBN-13:

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"By 1860 Wisconsin's Danish-born population had climbed to 1,150. But these newcomers remained only a small segment of the state's increasingly complex ethnic mosaic, and the challenges of adapting to life in this new land, among diverse cultures, forged the Danish experience in Wisconsin. In this concise introduction to the state's Danish settlers, Frederick Hale traces the catalysts for Danish emigration, their difficult journeys, and their adjustments to life on Wisconsin soil. Updates for this edition include additional historic photographs and the selected letters of Andrew Frederickson, which were written over a forty-year span and capture the personal observations of one Dane who made a new life in Wisconsin."--BOOK JACKET.