Ada James (1876-1952) was a leading social reformer, humanitarian, and pacifist from Richland Center, Wisconsin and daughter of state senator David G. James. The Ada James Papers document the grass roots organizing and politics that were required to promote and guarantee the passage of women’s suffrage in Wisconsin and beyond.
Travel along with famous explorers when you browse more than 18,000 pages of eyewitness accounts of North American exploration, from the sagas of Vikings in Canada in AD1000 to the diaries of mountain men in the Rockies 800 years later. Read the words of explorers, Indians, missionaries, traders and settlers as they lived through the founding moments of American history. View, search, print, or download more than 150 rare books, original manuscripts, and classic travel narratives from the library and archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society.
Papers of Walter Eugene Leach (1857-1938), curator of the Racine County Museum. Included are biographical materials on notable Racine residents and Leach’s writings on Racine County history, including chapters of his unpublished manuscript “The Story of Racine County, a History.” There are also records of the Racine Senate, 1844-1851, and the Racine Relief Association, 1883-1898.
The Wisconsin Historical Society has one of the richest collections of Civil Rights movement records in the nation, which includes more than 100 manuscript collections documenting the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964. More than 25,000 pages from the Freedom Summer manuscripts — enough to fill several file cabinets — are available online. In them you will find official records of organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); the personal papers of movement leaders and activists such as Amzie Moore, Mary King and Howard Zinn, letters and diaries of northern college students who went South to volunteer for the summer; newsletters produced in Freedom Schools; racist propaganda, newspaper clippings, pamphlets and brochures, magazine articles, telephone call logs, candid snapshots, internal memos, press releases and much more.
An overview of Wisconsin’s maritime history. Includes records on individual ships as well as photographs, postcards and pamphlets related to commerce and tourism on Lake Michigan and Lake Superior.
Elizabeth Baird (1810-1890) and Henry Baird (1800-1875) were prominent 19th-century Wisconsin settlers. They were connected to most of the founders of modern Wisconsin through family ties, marriage, business interests and politics. This digital collection includes all the Baird correspondence and selected business, family and personal papers.
More than 6,000 historic maps of Wisconsin and the world, dating from as early as 1513. Examples of nearly every type of traditional cartographic medium can be found, from elaborate maps of Renaissance explorations to simple outline maps.
This digital collection contains the complete manuscripts of Wisconsin scientist Increase A. Lapham (1811-1875) owned by the Wisconsin Historical Society, including letters, diaries, scientific notes, drawings and other papers.
Records, pamphlets, newspaper clippings, ephemera and artifacts documenting a popular movement that most Americans would rather forget – a so-called “reform” movement driven by xenophobia and bigotry. Although largely gone from the state by the late 1920s, the Klan persisted in northwestern Wisconsin, including Chippewa, Clark, and Pierce counties, through the 1940s.
The Listening to War digital collection brings together first-person accounts of veterans and civilians in Wisconsin during World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Persian Gulf War. These stories of everyday life during wartime come from men and women who served on the battlefront; nurses, journalists, shipbuilders, and others who contributed to wartime work at home and abroad; Holocaust survivors who immigrated from Europe to Wisconsin after World War II; and Hmong refugees from Laos who were resettled in the state following the Vietnam War.
