Elizabeth Digby-Britten: Thanksgiving is a celebration of genocide. Please digest that along with your turkey on Thursday.
Category: People's History
Archives and the Power of Democratizing History
Trump’s “pro-American curriculum” will never match up with the evidence in our nation’s archives. History is more complicated.
Remembering the Passenger Pigeon
On Sept. 1, 1914, the passenger pigeon went extinct. In 1947, a monument for the pigeon was erected near Prairie du Chien, where Aldo Leopold delivered an elegy for “the funeral of a species.”
Revolutionary Hope along the Mississippi: Kenneth Rexroth’s “The Motto on the Sundial”
Rexroth’s poem, written during a brief stop in the driftless, offers a vision of the upper Mississippi landscape and his hopes for a political revolution.
The Rise and Fall of the “Big Indian” Statue
A trip to the archives clears up factual misconceptions about “the Colossus of Kitsch” and puts the statue in its proper historical context.
Brooks are not for Brothers
Keonte R. Turner: “I thought that if I just dressed the way they wanted me to, I would not be feared.”
Prisoners in the Dairyland
Wisconsin once had more dairy farms than prisoners. Now, the reverse is true.
Communia Revisited: Utopian Communists in the Driftless and Beyond
Resurrecting the revolutionary dreams of the German radicals who built Communia in the hills of northeast Iowa.
Keonte R. Turner: The Meaning of Juneteenth
On this Juneteenth, celebrate with us, just as we celebrate with you on the fourth of July.
Plowshares and Prison Bars: Southwest Wisconsin’s Black Settler Communities
What happened to the vibrant black farming communities that once populated parts of the driftless region?