“Ach Ya!: The Story of German Music in Wisconsin” presents images from the nineteenth through the late twentieth century that evoke the long-standing heritage and rich diversity of Wisconsin’s German musical traditions, especially in German-American communities in Calumet, Dodge, Marathon, Milwaukee, Ozaukee, and Sheboygan counties.
The Americana Sheet Music Collection database was developed to provide bibliographic access to the Americana Collection of sheet music, one of the special collections of the Mills Music Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Some records for selected compositions have associated images of the scanned sheet music. Over time additional images may be added to the collection.
Bernard “Bunny” Berigan was one of the most prominent jazz trumpeters of all time. Born in Hilbert, Wisconsin in 1908, he moved to Fox Lake with his parents when he was only a few months old. This collection documents Berigan’s childhood and his career in music.
The exhibit of “The Spirit of Milwaukee” was a cooperative agreement between the Common Council’s Special Committee on Public Information and the students and faculty of the Milwaukee Center for Photography. The photographs were taken between February and May of 1976 in Milwaukee, documenting Milwaukee life during the 1976 Bicentennial. After the Bicentennial, the City of Milwaukee CETA Arts Program hired student photographers from the Milwaukee Center for Photography to take pictures and document Milwaukee. The Department of City Development would exhibit the photographs and other art created under the program.
Drawings and blueprints created by master blacksmith Cyril Colnik, his Ornamental Iron Shop and the Colnik Manufacturing Company. Includes designs for architectural commissions in the Milwaukee area and beyond.
Short video interviews with quilters in Lodi, Wisconsin, recorded in 2018. The Lodi Woman’s Club Public Library and the Lodi Valley Quilters Guild partnered with the non-profit Quilt Alliance to record the stories of local quilters and quilts as part of the Quilt Alliance’s Go Tell It at the Quilt Show! project.
This collection showcases Hamilton’s rare collection of vintage posters and related printing plates dating from 1920 – 1960. Whether you love lions or adore road races, this collection has something for everyone. This collection showcases the best of two 20th century printshops, Globe Printing in Chicago and Enquirer Printing in Cincinnati. Take a tour of American advertising art today.
This digital collection contains two components: images of citizens and businesses along Main Street in the city of Fort Atkinson from the 1880s through the 1970s, and manuscripts, notes, letters, oral histories and photographs from or about poet Lorine Niedecker, who spent most of her life in the Fort Atkinson area.
The History of UW–Waukesha Collection includes resources that document the history and evolution of this campus. The collection currently includes published material and photographs. Founded by Phil Zweifel in 1978, the Windy Hill Review is the University of Wisconsin–Waukesha’s student-run literary magazine. This annual publication features the short stories, poems, and artwork of students, faculty, and local writers and artists.
Jay Norwood Darling was a Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist who attended Beloit College from 1895-1900, where he served as art director for the college yearbook. The digital collection features illustrations Darling created for the 1899 yearbook as well as a selection of Darling’s letters and other writings.
The Jeypore Portfolio of Architectural Details digital collections includes two of the twelve volumes from an original 1890-1913 publication. The volumes include volume IX, Dados, with a note on the process of fresco paintings in Jeypore and volume X, Parapets.
Born February 17, 1889, Laura Janvrin Aldrich studied at the Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania and attended Beloit College with the class of 1912. On June 16, 1914, Laura Aldrich married Elbert H. Neese. While her husband served as president of the Beloit Corporation (now known as Iron Works), she worked closely with the Beloit Foundation, the First Congregational Church, and the Art League of Beloit. She was also a practicing artist and in 1952, Beloit College awarded Neese an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts for her commitment to the discipline of art and for her longtime service to the college. This digital collection includes beautifully-illustrated diaries containing accounts of Neese’s time in Beloit and abroad.
The Mills Music Library and the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, along with many partners at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, present a growing collection of unique, historic, regional and endangered sound recordings with related documentation. These include recordings produced for immigrant, ethnic and indigenous audiences by American companies in the first half of the 20th century as well as more than 700 hours of original field and home recordings from the 1950s through the 1990s featuring the Upper Midwest’s culturally diverse traditional musicians.
The Logan Museum of Anthropology houses over 300,000 archaeological and ethnographic objects from 123 countries. The objects made available through Recollection Wisconsin include bandolier bags, baskets, beadwork, bitten bark, and silver jewelry. Wisconsin and Upper Great Lakes tribal affiliations represented include Ojibwe, Menominee, Ho-Chunk and Potawatomi.
A visual chronicle of the artistic productions of Milwaukee Repertory Theater in the years 1977-1994. The collection presents 1,800 images documenting 195 performances during these 17 seasons.
The Digital Fashion Archive is intended as an educational and research resource that will allow users to study fashion as it evolved in the classroom, on the runway, and in the world at large. Created by professionally photographing garments and accessories in the Fashion Archive, the Digital Fashion Archive provides users with 360° views and the ability to zoom in to examine items in detail.
MPL’s Own Archives contains the history of the Milwaukee Public Library system. Encompassing written records, photographs, and film the collection offers a look back at how the library has served the community of Milwaukee since its founding. This online portion of the collection contains an interview with Toni Morrison, a handful of PSAs, informational videos, and a partial episode of “Library Playhouse”, a library created TV program.
The Odin J. Oyen firm was once a thriving business in downtown La Crosse, Wisconsin, that created original watercolors as proposed interior designs. The firm, or variations of it, existed from the late-1800s up to the Great Depression, generating countless watercolor designs for the interiors of courthouses, churches, fraternal organizations, and private residences, in locations across the Upper Midwest and beyond. Several hundred original watercolors reside in Murphy Library Special Collections, owned by the Wisconsin Historical Society, and local attorney Nicholas J. Passe acquired over 100 Oyen interior renditions and was willing to allow the Murphy Library Digital Collections to digitize and include those items in the Digital Collections. These items currently make up the Odin J. Oyen Collection.
This collection is a discographical database with information and label scans of the Paramount 78rpm recordings held by the Mills Music Library. Titles, performer names, release dates and numbers, matrix numbers, and other details are all keyword searchable. Information is being added on an on-going basis. Broadway, Famous, and Puritan recordings are included, as they were also produced by the New York Recording Laboratories (NYRL) of Port Washington, Wisconsin.
Photographs of members of the Menominee Nation community including Barney Doud, Jim Frechette, Jerome Sanapaw, Merciline Sanapaw, Karen Washinawatok, Hilary Waukau, Theresa Wescott and others.
Contemporary and historic images and selected caption information representing the history and significance of polka music in Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest. Content was compiled for the “Polka Music/Polka Culture” photo-text exhibit that toured Wisconsin in 1991.
In April 2008, downtown Oshkosh, Wisconsin was transformed into a movie set for the film Public Enemies. This collection features photographs submitted by the residents of Oshkosh who experienced Tinseltown in their hometown.
The Skare Collection at the McFarland Historical Society comprises over one thousand objects related to the Norwegian immigrant experience collected by Albert Skare of McFarland, Wisconsin. The digital collection provides access to selections from this extensive collection, focusing on household goods and folk art brought to Wisconsin by Norwegian immigrants in the 19th century.
Founded in 1996 by members of the UW-La Crosse English department, Steam Ticket: A Third Coast Review is a nationally-distributed annual literary journal that publishes poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and artwork from writers and artists around the world.
Since 1971, The Catalyst, an undergraduate publication for the UW-La Crosse community, has featured original prose (fiction and nonfiction), poetry, artwork, photography, videos, music and more from UW-L students, faculty, and staff.
Images of Sawyer and Harris, the iconic bronze lions that have stood outside the Oshkosh Public Library since 1912. Includes photographs of their removal for restoration in 1998.
Wisconsin’s oldest theater organization, the Carroll Players, was inaugurated in June 1896 with a production staged by May N. Rankin, the first female professor at Carroll College. This collection includes photographic portraits of Rankin as well as notes and letters related to the drama program at Carroll University.
The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters is an independent, nonprofit membership organization chartered by the state legislature in 1870. Transactions, an annual journal (1870-2001), was central to the Academy’s goal of uniting scientists, humanities scholars and artists together to stimulate learning and exchange of research.
More than 400 playbills and posters from various theatrical productions on the UW-La Crosse campus from 1916 to the present.
Digital representations of 31 artists’ books from the Special Collections at UWM Libraries. This collection presents artists’ books – books designed and handmade by artists – that provide examples of the expressive use of the book arts including binding, papermaking, printing, typography and page design.
Photographs of musicians and music-related subjects held by Mills Music Library, dating from the late nineteenth century to the present, representing the musical heritage of Wisconsin from Swiss yodeling to Les Paul. Also includes postcards, lithographic prints, advertising and promotional materials, posters, and other types of ephemera.
Published quarterly by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, the Wisconsin Academy Review (now known as Wisconsin People and Ideas) focuses on contemporary Wisconsin thought and culture. Issues in the digital collection date from 1958-2008.
This digital collection provides access to primary sources documenting the activities and output of Works Project Administration (WPA) arts projects in Wisconsin from 1935-1943, especially the work of the Milwaukee Handicrafts Project. Materials include design portfolios, oral history interviews with artists and selections from the papers of Elsa Emile Ulbricht, director of the Milwaukee Handicraft Project, and Charlotte Russell Partridge and Miriam Frink, co-founders of the Layton School of Art.
Posters and flyers advertising a variety of concerts, mostly rock and punk shows that took place in the early 1980s in and around Milwaukee. Milwaukee-area bands represented include Colour Radio, Die Kreuzen and the Violent Femmes.
More than 1,000 examples of Wisconsin’s material heritage from public and private collections across the state, including furniture, ceramics, metalwork, quilts and needlework as well as beadwork, basketry, woodcarving and marquetry made in Wisconsin between 1820 and 1930.
Materials from two collections from Mills Music Library at UW-Madison: field recordings, notes and photographs made by UW-Madison faculty member Helene Stratman-Thomas as part of the Wisconsin Folk Music Recording Project during the summers of 1940, 1941 and 1946 and recordings collected by song catcher Sidney Robertson Cowell during the summer of 1937 for the Special Skills Division of the Resettlement Administration.
This collection from the Mills Music Library at UW-Madison consists of music written by Wisconsin composers, published by Wisconsin publishers and/or pieces whose subject matter is Wisconsin. The publications date from the late 1850s to the present.
