“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 Belgian-American Research Collection was established by the Cofrin Library, UW-Green Bay, to help preserve and make available original materials reflecting the character of the Belgian community in northeastern Wisconsin. An architectural survey was conducted to identify typical Belgian architecture including log, stone and brick houses and oral histories were recorded to document the Walloon language spoken in Brown, Door and Kewaunee Counties.
Whether it was segregation in the 1950s or the cultural and political tumult of the 1960s and 1970s, South Asian immigrants to Wisconsin confronted a world fundamentally alien to that they had left behind. Neither black nor white, these individuals managed to raise families and often succeeded in their careers. From a few dozen students, professionals, and businessmen and their families who settled in Wisconsin, the presence of South Asian immigrants grew exponentially as they became tightly integrated into the fabric of their communities. The journey to develop a distinct identity as South Asian Americans in Wisconsin over the course of decades is highlighted in this collection of oral histories from some of the first South Asian immigrants to Wisconsin.
From 1965–1970, fieldworkers for the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) conducted interviews with nearly 3,000 “informants” in 1,002 communities across America. They visited native residents in all fifty states and Washington, D.C., collecting local words, phrases and pronunciations. DARE’s main partners in the effort to digitize, interpret, and make accessible these audio recordings were the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures and the University of Wisconsin Libraries, all at UW–Madison.
The Freedom Flotilla, also known as the Mariel Boatlift, occurred in 1980 after President Carter opened the doors to the United States for hundreds of thousands of Cuban refugees, of which nearly 15,000 would eventually arrive at the resettlement camp at Fort McCoy in western Wisconsin. This collection contains photographs taken by journalists reporting on the “Cuban Odyssey,” most of whom worked for the La Crosse Tribune, bringing together nearly 250 images of individuals and events directly involved with the Freedom Flotilla.
Diaries of the travels of Austrian Norbertine priest Father Maximilian Gaertner of Wilten Abbey in Austria. Gaertner arrived in Wisconsin in 1846 and remained there until recalled to Wilten Abbey in 1858.
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.
In 1983, volunteers from the Generation After (an organization of children of Holocaust survivors) conducted interviews with 65 Jewish immigrants residing in metropolitan Milwaukee. The digital version of the Generation After Oral History Project consists of 25 interview transcripts for subjects with surnames between A-L.
Selected materials from the Kvamme Local History Collection maintained by Stoughton Public Library. Documents in this collection include Stoughton city directories and telephone directories as well as volumes of newspaper clippings on topics of local interest including World War II, Syttende Mai, the Martin Luther Children’s Home and the Stoughton Ski Jump.
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.
