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"Wisconsin history offers an
unusually good vantage point for a long view of much of
our national history. The Fox-Wisconsin waterway between
the St. Lawrence and Mississippi drainage basins made the
Wisconsin country a focus of French and British imperial
policy from the late seventeenth century. The Wisconsin
country was the meeting place of the eastern woodlands Indians
and those from the plains. It was an important crossroads
for the fur trade and therefore important in diplomacy and
Indian policy well into the nineteenth century.
"Wisconsin Territory's Organic
Act of 1836 represented a landmark in the interpretation
of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. The settlement of the
territory offers examples of a variety of frontiers: fur-trading,
mining, agricultural, lumbering, and urban. The mingling
of native-born and European-born Americans began early in
Wisconsin and continued on a scale which provides rich material
for the study of immigration history. The state has a higher
proportion of her people engaged both in agriculture and
industry than the national average, reflecting that both
made difficult transitions from a careless exploitation
of finite resources to intensive use of capital and labor.
As for politics, a state that offered two such contrasting
generic terms to national politics as La Follettism and
McCarthyism must command attention. Finally, the most generally
satisfying explanation of the American pioneer experience
and one which continues as a commonplace in the national
rhetoric found expression in Frederick Jackson Turner's
The Significance of the Frontier in American History, published
in 1893. Turner's generalizations started with his home
town, Portage, Wisconsin."
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