"A governor who saw ghosts, an incorrigible horse thief, a husband and wife who each stood over seven feet tall, an American Indian chief who defied forced removal, and the first woman to practice law before the Supreme Court: these are just some of the remarkable characters whose lives influenced and defined the state of Wisconsin. Authors Michael Edmonds and Samantha Snyder plumbed the depths of the Wisconsin Historical Society's collections to research and compose lively portraits of eighty of these notable individuals: mayors, ministers, mystics, murderers, and everything in between. Each story is followed by recommended sources for readers' continued exploration. Whether read on the fly or all in one sitting, these short, colorful narratives will intrigue and inform as you delve into Wisconsin's diverse and diverting history"--"Names and dates give us cold hard facts, but stories touch our hearts. True stories about real people make us laugh or sigh or wince, or shake our heads in disbelief. They make us want to learn more. But few of us have time for four-hundred-page biographies. These days, readers appreciate bite-sized history that can be consumed in one sitting.
The brief narratives in this collection contain everything essential and nothing extra about colorful Wisconsin characters from long ago. We've sifted through the Wisconsin Historical Society's immense collections and discovered noteworthy soldiers and priests, criminals and crusaders, loafers, politicians, mystics, inventors, drunks, and oddballs--three centuries of non-conformists from all of Wisconsin's regions, races, and walks of life. Of course, these sketches are too short to do full justice to their subjects. How would your own life look, reduced to five hundred words? So we've recommended sources (mostly available for free on the Web) for further exploration. Enjoy these stories while the tea kettle boils or the bus rolls you to work. Read them in snatches, read them at random, but read them for fun. Because names and dates are just history's lifeless skeleton. Its flesh and blood is real people like us--people who struggled, stumbled, and danced across the same landscape that we do, who laughed and cried their way through life and now lie silent beneath our feet.
Flip open to any page and meet one"--.