Current Issue of the Wisconsin Magazine of History
Spring 2023, Volume 106, Number 3
Cover Photo
COURTESY OF THE HISTORY MUSEUM, SOUTH BEND, INDIANA
Featured Story
Pinch Hitters: All-American Women in Wisconsin
By John Nondorf
Professional men’s baseball had been entertaining Americans since 1876 when the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December of 1941 and the United States’ entry into World War II diverted fans’ attention from the National Pastime. The question arose: would there be a 1942 baseball season at all? In order to keep fans coming to ballparks during the diminished professional men’s season and to provide entertainment for war production workers, Phillip Wrigley, owner of the Chicago Cubs, established the All-American Girls Softball League—a professional league paying women to play ball for the first time. The experiment would ultimately outlast the war and would produce teams whose history has been celebrated in popular films and documentaries and, most recently, an HBO series: the Racine Belles, Kenosha Comets, Rockford Peaches, and South Bend Blue Sox.
Raymond Hagen
RAYMOND HAGEN
A Washington Island Boyhood
By Raymond Hagen
In this short memoir, Raymond Hagen depicts a joyful coming of age on a remote island seven miles off the tip of Door County, Wisconsin, in the 1920s and 30s. Fishing was the family business for his parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, and Raymond and his brothers were expected to do the same. Hagen recalls the pleasures and frustrations of growing up in an isolated but closely knit Scandinavian Lutheran community; his early love of singing and his longing for adventure; and how his father eventually came to accept Raymond’s dream to leave the island and train to become an opera singer. Raymond left the island at age sixteen and traveled the world. Now, at age ninety-eight, this is his love letter to home.
Nation-to-Nation Treaty
This map, based on the 1821 nation-to-nation treaty between the New York Indians and the Menominee and Ho-Chunk Nations, shows the Stockbridge-Munsee community at Grand Kaccalin (Kakalin), what is today Kaukauna. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, GEOGRAPHY AND MAP DIVISION
Nation-to-Nation Treaty
By Peter Shrake
In 1830, the New York Indians—a group of seven nations forced to move from their homeland in the east, including the Oneida, Stockbridge, Munsee, and Brotherton—were locked in a twenty-year border dispute with the Menomonee. In August of that year, Indian Agent Samuel C. Stambaugh, an ambitious political appointee of President Andrew Jackson, arrived at Green Bay, seized control of the negotiations, and forced through a treaty. The treaty of February 8, 1831, sometimes referred to as “Stambaugh’s Treaty,” marked the beginning of large-scale land cessions by the Menominee. While Stambaugh’s Treaty led to the formation of the Oneida and Stockbridge-Munsee reservations, it failed to end the dispute between the nations and contributed to nations’ distrust of one another and their deepening distrust of the US government.
Available Summer 2023
Book Excerpt - - Obreros Unidos: The Roots and Legacy of the Farmworkers Movement
By Jesus Salas
This excerpt is from a book which will be released this summer by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. As a young man, Jesus Salas and others led a historic march from Wautoma to Madison to demand that lawmakers address rampant violations of Wisconsin’s minimum wage laws and housing codes. Inspired by César Chávez, these young labor leaders founded Obreros Unidos—“Workers United”—to fight for fairness and respect, as well as to provide much-needed services to migrant families.
A subscription to the Wisconsin Magazine of History is a benefit of membership to the Wisconsin Historical Society. The current issue, described above, will become available in the online archives as soon the next issue is published.
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