Event Details

Name: Michael Stevens discusses The Making of Pioneer Wisconsin
Start: 2024-06-11
End: 2024-06-11
Location: Historic Indian Agency House Visitor Center

Tuesday, June 11, 2024

6:30pm

Free and open to the public

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Location

Historic Indian Agency House Visitor Center

1490 Agency House Rd

Portage, WI 53901

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About the Event

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The Wisconsin Historical Society Speakers Bureau offers an exciting opportunity for our historians, curators and authors to visit your community and share the stories of our great state

Between the mid 1830s and the 1850s, nearly three quarters of a million people moved to Wisconsin. The Making of Pioneer Wisconsin: Voices of Early Settlers, tells the migration experience through the words of ordinary people. How did it feel to decide to move, adapt, and create a new society? Meet an excited young man who is delighted by the abundance of food in Wisconsin, or a teenaged girl who missed her schoolmates, or immigrants who worried about their children forgetting their old language. It is easy to think of the first generation of settlers as stiff, cardboard figures as they appear in their portraits. By exploring their joys, sorrows, and humor, we come to understand their lives and even a little more about our own.

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Author Michael Stevens

Michael Stevens is Wisconsin State Historian Emeritus. Stevens retired from the Wisconsin Historical Society in 2013, He holds a Ph.D in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has published 15 books and more than 30 articles. Since his “retirement,” Stevens has continued to research and write history and has taught at Marquette University as a visiting history professor.