"This book provides insights into the lives of those who were raised in or spent significant time in Wisconsin on their journey to the Olympic Games. Through interviews with contemporary athletes and archival research into the earlier history, the author shows us how deeply entrenched Wisconsin is in the Olympics. Featuring the athletes' personal insights (many of them are telling their stories in complete detail for the first time) and filled with...

"From 1791, when the first school was established in what is now Wisconsin, to the consolidation of rural school districts in the 1960s, the one-room school's history has been one of growth and change. In One-Room Country Schools, Jerry Apps relays this history through his own vivid recollections of attending Chain O'Lake School in Waushara County, along with the stories of countless students and teachers who populated small country schools across...

"The Great Lakes-- Erie, Huron, Michigan, Ontario and Superior-- hold 20 percent of the world's supply of surface fresh water and provide sustenance, work and recreation for tens of millions of Americans. But they are under threat as never before, and their problems are spreading across the continent. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes is prize-winning reporter Dan Egan's compulsively readable portrait of an ecological catastrophe happening right...

"Hit the trail for a dramatic look at Wisconsin's geologic past. The impressive bluffs, valleys, waterfalls, and lakes of Wisconsin's state parks provide more than beautiful scenery and recreational opportunities. They are windows into the distant past, offering clues to the dramatic events that have shaped the land over billions of years. Author and former DNR journalist Scott Spoolman takes readers with him to twenty-eight parks, forests, and natural...

"The fall and maybe rise of Detroit, America's most epic urban failure, from local native and Rolling Stone reporter Mark BinelliOnce America's capitalist dream town, Detroit is our country's greatest urban failure, having fallen the longest and the farthest. But the city's worst crisis yet (and that's saying something) has managed to do the unthinkable: turn the end of days into a laboratory for the future. Urban planners, land speculators, neo-pastoral...

As part of the Treaty of Paris, in which Great Britain recognized the new United States of America, Britain ceded the land that comprised the immense Northwest Territory, a wilderness empire northwest of the Ohio River containing the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. A Massachusetts minister named Manasseh Cutler was instrumental in opening this vast territory to veterans of the Revolutionary War and their families...

Eve L. Ewing knows Chicago Public Schools from the inside: as a student, then a teacher, and now a scholar who studies them. And that perspective has shown her that public schools are not buildings full of failures-they're an integral part of their neighborhoods, at the heart of their communities, storehouses of history and memory that bring people together. Never was that role more apparent than in 2013 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented...

"Shipwrecks are junction points of history. In seeking to make sense of the submerged material culture found in shipwrecks, this book explores maritime-related stories that shaped the Midwest and the nation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In shipwrecks, we find stories of the frontier, the environment, immigration, politics, and the rise of large-scale agriculture, lumbering, and heavy industry. Individually and collectively,...

"A history of a quintessentially American place - the rural and small town heartland-- that uncovers deep yet hidden currents of connection with the world"--

"Against the backdrop of the extraordinary history of Great Lakes shipping, Too Much Sea for Their Decks chronicles shipwrecked schooners, wooden freighters, early steel-hulled steamers, passenger vessels, whalebacks, and bulk carriers-some well known, some unknown or forgotten-all lost in the frigid waters of Lake Superior"--