Wisconsin

Make yourself at home in Wisconsin history. Build a frame with timber from an Oshkosh logging trail. Borrow that Door County rooftop with the grazing goats. Attach a brightly painted barn stuffed with the bounty of the St. Croix Valley. Smuggle in a back porch from a Geneva Lake lodge, right under the noses of Milwaukee mobsters vacationing there. Flip on the television just as Brett Favre slips a tackle to complete an impossible pass. Settle down for the long haul with our Wisconsin history books. [View all Wisconsin books]
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Cover image for Finding Dairyland, isbn: 9781467148894
Finding Dairyland
Paperback
$21.99
Cover image for Milwaukee Frozen Custard, isbn: 9781467118613
Milwaukee Frozen Custard
Paperback
$21.99
Cover image for Wisconsin Tobacco Farming, isbn: 9781467158985
Wisconsin Tobacco Farming
Paperback
$24.99

Finding Dairyland

9781467148894

$21.99 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 248): Computation results in '-Infinity'%

Explore America's Dairyland and the American Spirit

At the dawn of World War II, Wisconsin was home to nearly 200,000 dairy farms. Today, barely 6,000 remain. The ghosts of the missing can still be seen in withering old farms along lonely highways, some restored, many abandoned or decayed, but all with a story to tell. Immigrants dreamed of owning their own farms, only to be fleeced by the promotion of "cutover'? lands in the Northwoods. Freedmen and women arrived in southwestern Wisconsin and became farmers and renowned barn-builders in one of the earliest integrated communities in the nation.

Through hundreds of hours of site visits, interviews, and research, historian and photographer, Scott Wittman extracts the forgotten truths from legend to tell the real stories of those who created The Dairy State.

Cover image for Finding Dairyland, isbn: 9781467148894

Milwaukee Frozen Custard

9781467118613

$21.99 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 248): Computation results in '-Infinity'%

Frozen custard is more than a dessert in Milwaukee. It's a culture, a lifestyle and a passion. Find the stories behind your favorite flavor at local festivals and homegrown neighborhood stands.


From the stand that inspired television's Happy Days to the big three - Gilles, Leon's and Kopp's - take a tour through the history of this guilty pleasure. Learn about its humble origins as an unexpected rival to ice cream and its phenomenal success as a concession at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933 that made the snack famous. Milwaukee authors and editors Kathleen McCann and Robert Tanzilo launch a celebration of custard lore, featuring a stand guide and much more. Dig into what makes Milwaukee the Frozen Custard Capital of the World.

Cover image for Milwaukee Frozen Custard, isbn: 9781467118613

Wisconsin Tobacco Farming

9781467158985

$24.99 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 248): Computation results in '-Infinity'%

“The great concerns of the southern states have made their products so well known that few people realized that tobacco can be grown elsewhere than Virginia and Cuba.” – Clarence Olson, Edgerton Reporter, 1953

 

Widely known as America’s Dairyland, Wisconsin also has a long, fertile history with tobacco. For centuries, Indigenous tribes cultivated it for spiritual, medicinal, and ceremonial purposes. First introduced commercially in Dane and Rock Counties, and later Vernon County, the crop earned a reputation among generations of local farmers as the "mortgage lifter.” Specializing in the broadleaf tobacco used to bind cigars, local farms became major producers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a lifeline for newly arrived Norwegian immigrants. Ultimately, the state’s golden age of tobacco spawned the creation of the country’s first cooperative tobacco marketing association.

Author and Wisconsin historian Gail Klein surveys the Badger State’s historic tobacco regions and the agricultural commodity’s lasting impact.

Cover image for Wisconsin Tobacco Farming, isbn: 9781467158985