The Wisconsin Magazine of History, Volume 1, 1917-1918

In this inaugural volume from 1917, the Wisconsin Magazine of History captures a state still intimately close to its frontier past. The opening tribute to Increase Allen Lapham reconstructs the intellectual architecture of early Wisconsin: a scholar and scientist who helped shape the state's educational and environmental consciousness from its earliest days. A companion piece plunges readers into the chaos of a devastating Northern Wisconsin forest fire, where lumbermen battled flames with desperate heroism. These are not polished retrospective histories but accounts written by people who lived through Wisconsin's formative decades, their memories still raw, their stakes still real. Volume One establishes the magazine's mission: to preserve the state's story before the last witnesses vanish. For anyone curious about the raw material of American regional history, this is a primary source with no intermediary between the reader and the past.