she had been carried off her feet by the strength of the young giant when his great arms were about her in the distant African forest, and again today, in the Wisconsin woods..." So wrote Edgar Rice Burroughs in one

Mrs. Murphy came over to our house first thing in the morning, and she says to my father, 'Hitch up the horses and take me to town. I seen my son Mike in a dream,' she says, 'standing at the

As you've surely noticed, this summer's floods spawned a record crop of mosquitoes. Few of God's creatures are quite as annoying, or in quite the same way. Beseiged by them while exploring the northwoods in 1820, Henry Schoolcraft reflected that,

Civil War soldier Joseph Bailey (1826 - 1867) of Columbia Co. is best-known for having saved the Union fleet on the Red River in the summer of 1864. Two years earlier, however, he supervised a wild-eyed failure when Union generals

Henry Thoreau claimed that "In wildness is the preservation of the world".* It's also true, though, that in wildness lies the destruction of civilization. This reflection struck young James Doty after he'd canoed and hiked from Detroit to Minnesota in

If you ask most people about African-American history in Wisconsin, they're likely to think of Milwaukee's civil rights struggles in the 1960s. In fact, black settlers had been living here for nearly two centuries by then, and perhaps the best-known

In July 1854, John W. Quinney (1797-1855) returned home from Wisconsin. A leader of the Stockbridge (Mohican) Indians who helped organize the tribe's emigration to Wisconsin in the 1820s, Quinney had been invited to speak at July 4th celebrations in

Today we tolerate a wide range of domestic arrangements. Most families are simply too busy to sit down and eat together regularly, much less clean, dust, or do the laundry according to prescribed standards. In fact, most of us would

Although Wisconsin became legally part of the United States at the end of the American Revolution, in practice it remained a Canadian outpost for another generation. This only changed with the War of 1812, and after the war the U.S.

When Lake Delton disappeared this week, questions naturally arose about where it had come from. This lake around which much of Dells tourism revolved was man-made, not natural, and has its own unique story. The town of Lake Delton was

The philosopher Heraclitus claimed that you can never step in the same river twice, but his logic apparently didn't apply to Wisconsin lumberjacks in need of a drink. The trees of the Wisconsin River pinery were among the first harvested

In late August 1862, a coalition of Sioux bands in Minnesota, angered by continuing white incursion and failure of the U.S. government to make payments authorized by treaties, attacked settlers and Indian Agencies southwest of the modern Twin Cities. In

No one did more to create modern American poetry than Ezra Pound (1885-1972). At a time when poetry in English had more in common with greeting card verses than with the intimate insights of Anne Sexton, Pound and a small

After the Civil War, Belle Boyd was as famous as Paris Hilton and Britney Spears are today. Boyd was a Virginia teenager when the war broke out, and her sympathies naturally lay with her homeland. Union troops soon occupied her

When a shotgun blew a fist-sized hole in Alexis St. Martin's side on June 6, 1822, military physician William Beaumont was astonished that the young fur trader worker didn't simply die on the spot. Instead, he recovered -- though with

In the summer of 1834, Rev. Cutting Marsh of Kaukauna journeyed across Wisconsin into Iowa, keeping a daily diary as he went. On the Mississippi he heard about the recent death of "a very wicked man" named Nadeau, whose fate

As tiny kinglets and gigantic sandhill cranes move north through Wisconsin again, this may be a good time to consider our state's place in American ornithology. Before the Civil War, R.P. Hoy cataloged the birds of southeastern Wisconsin and reported

That was the headline atop the final section of Industrial Milwaukee, an annual review of business trends and statistics about Wisconsin's largest city that ran from 1919 to 1929. The anonymous writer went on, "Industry still has its ups and

The first day of air mail service linking Wisconsin to New York was marked by violent weather that not only stopped the mail but claimed the life of a veteran pilot. On June 6-7, 1926, planes were supposed to leave

On the evening of March 31, 1918, Prof. E.A. Schimler, a language instructor at Northland College, was kidnapped by a mob of masked men. They took him to a lonely spot outside Ashland, stripped him naked, roughed him up, covered