Pioneering the Upper Midwest: Books from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, ca. 1820-1910

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Go directly to the collection, Pioneering the Upper Midwest: Books from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, ca. 1820-1910, in American Memory, or view a Summary of Resources related to the collection.

Because the collection Pioneering the Upper Midwest, ca. 1820-1910 contains materials covering such a vast period of time, it lends itself to activities that foster chronological and comparative thinking. Narratives allow thorough examinations of a variety of topics and provide an opportunity to analyze authors and authors' biases through their own works. Finally, the historical content provides challenging issues and rich research topics.

Choose a historical era in American history and make a list of its major events. Then, create a timeline that shows the impact of these events in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. With this list, you can explore the collection for illustrative examples to reference in your timeline. If you are able to make their timeline in HTML, you can reference your examples with links to images and excerpts from texts.

Alternatively, you can illustrate continuity and change over time by searching on a topic such as emigration. Searching on emigrant or immigration, and on place names such as Norway, Germany, and Scotland yields narratives that reflect possible reasons for migration at different periods of time.

The narratives of this collection recount events; disclose individuals' thoughts, feelings, and intentions; tell stories; and portray a time period. As such, they afford users of the collection a multifaceted and thorough understanding of a variety of topics. For example, Tracks and Trails, depicts frontier life in the second half of the nineteenth century. Use this text or pick a similar topic and narrative, and begin an inquiry with the following questions:

• How does the author think or feel about his life on the frontier? How can you tell?
• What are the major events of the narrative? How do they comprise a story? What does the way the story ends suggest about living on the frontier? What do other events in the story suggest?
• What do the descriptive details in the text tell you about frontier life?
• How do you think you would have liked living on the frontier in the nineteenth century?

Sojourner Truth "Votes for Women" Suffrage Pictures, 1850-1920.

First person narratives also lend themselves to activities of analysis and interpretation based on the author's subjectivity. Look at two accounts of meetings with Abraham Lincoln, one by Jane Swisshelm in 1863 (found on the bottom of page 175), and the other by Sojourner Truth in 1864. Compare and contrast the two accounts using the following questions: What is different about these two meetings? What is the same? Who wrote these two accounts? How are the authors different and how are they alike? Who is each author's audience?

Jane Grey Swisshelm.

Abraham Lincoln, Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920.

What do your answers to the preceding questions suggest about each author's values and opinions, especially in regards to the subjects of their narratives? How do the accounts reflect those values and opinions? To what extent do the accounts seem to be biased by them? Do these accounts tell you more about Abraham Lincoln or their authors? What information, events, and details does each include and exclude? What kind of language does each author use?

Historical Issue-Analysis and Decision-Making

The collection allows readers to analyze the expansion and industrial growth which also resulted in untold devastation of the environment and Native-American cultures. Search on words including railroad, city, Black Hawk War, and Native, for citations that not only illustrate destructive activities, but illuminate the complex set of values and ideals behind them.

St. Anthony is on the east side of the Mississippi; Minneapolis is opposite, on the west side. Both places are now large and populous . . . One of the finest water powers in the Union is an element of growth to both towns. The lumber which is sawed there is immense. A company is undertaking to remove the obstructions to navigation in the river between St. Paul and St. Anthony . . . The suspension bridge which connects Minneapolis with St. Anthony is familiar to all. It is a fit of the enterprise of the people. I forget the exact sum I paid as toll when I walked across the bridge--perhaps it was a dime; at any rate I was struck with the answer given by the young man who took the toll, in reply to my inquiry as I returned, if my coming back wasn't included in the toll paid going over? "No," said he, in a very good-natured way, "we don't know anything about coming back;it's all go ahead in this country."

Page 40 [Transcription]
Minnesota and Dacotah

Analyze and take a position on congruent contemporary controversies. Newspaper articles provide information about environmental issues, while the poetry and short stories of Sherman Alexie provide an engaging starting point for considering the situation of Native Americans today.

Many topics pertinent to the history of the upper Midwest can be well researched in this collection. Search on fur trade and John Jacob Astor to find readings about the French, English, and American fur trading enterprises. Search on names of religions or denominations such as Baptist, Methodist, Episcopal, Catholic, and Mormon for materials on religion and missionary work in the upper Midwest; or supplement this collection with a variety of other sources such as museum collections, newspaper archives, and trial transcripts to study different views of the Sioux Uprising of 1862 and the subsequent execution of thirty-eight Dakotas. Search on Swisshelm for one woman's discussion of contemporary opinions about the uprising.