Category Archives: 80th Anniversary

Christmas Chemistry for 47 Years

bucky-big Earlier this month, chemistry professor Bassam Shakhashiri and his crew staged their 47th presentation of “Once Upon a Christmas Cheery, in the Lab of Shakhashiri.” The popular family-friendly show of colorful and surprising chemical demonstrations, accompanied by live music and a visit from Santa, delivers a message that has long been Shakhashiri’s slogan: Science Is Fun! Girl_Scout_ThankYou-sm

Educating children, students, and the general public about science, and about chemistry in particular, is Shakhashiri’s passion. A past president of the American Chemical Society and founder of both the Institute for Chemical Education and the Wisconsin Initiative for Science Literacy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he is also the lead author of five world-renowned books on chemical demonstrations published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

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UWP published Volume 1 of CHEMICAL DEMONSTRATIONS: A HANDBOOK FOR TEACHERS OF CHEMISTRY in 1983. That first volume offered 282 chemical demonstrations arranged in 11 chapters, setting the pattern for the following four volumes focused on different kinds of chemical phenomena. Each demonstration includes seven sections: a brief summary, a materials list, a step-by-step account of procedures to be used, an explanation of the hazards involved, information on how to store or dispose of the chemicals used, a discussion of the phenomena displayed and principles illustrated by the demonstration, and a list of references.

By 2011, the fifth volume was published. Although flames do not normally leap out of Volume 5 when opened, as they do in Shakhashiri’s holiday show, Volume 5 is distinctive from the other books in the series because it is printed in full color, to better convey the volume’s focus on the chemistry of color and light.

Nobel laureate in chemistry Roald Hoffmann has pronounced the series, “The most comprehensive set of chemical demonstrations handbooks ever created.” Taken together, the five volumes constitute the bestselling publication in the University of Wisconsin Press’s eighty-year history.

The success of the Chemical Demonstrations books led UW Press to work, as well, with UW-Madison physics professor Clint Sprott to create the book PHYSICS DEMONSTRATIONS: A SOURCEBOOK FOR TEACHERS OF PHYSICS and accompanying online videos. A review in Physics Today urged that Sprott’s Physics Demonstrations “should be placed in the libraries of all college physics departments and would be useful for many high school physics programs.”

Professor Sprott and other campus physicists have also presented public shows since 1984. The 2017 Wonders of Physics shows will be presented February 11, 12, 18, & 19 in conjunction with the annual Physics Fair.

The Wonders of Physics Show

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The Art & Craft of Print

We are celebrating University Press Week with the theme of “community,” and from April 2016 to April 2017, we are blogging monthly about University of Wisconsin Press history to mark our eightieth year. On top of that, for this Wednesday blog tour of university presses, the theme is “university press staff spotlight.”

Terry Emmrich at the Overture Center galleries in summer 2016

It is was an obvious choice, then, to shine that spotlight on Terry Emmrich, production manager in the books division of UWP. In addition to his expert knowledge of typesetting, composition, papers, offset printing, and binding (as well as digital files and production), Terry is a fine art printmaker. In that, he joins a large and historic community of Wisconsin artists.

He also has an impeccable production pedigree, hailing from Neenah in the heart of Wisconsin’s “Paper Valley.” He grew up among folks working in the paper industry, and after studying art and printmaking at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, he was a sales rep for a printing company before joining UWP in 1989.

A linoleum block relief print by Terry Emmrich

Nine of Terry’s linoleum block relief prints were chosen for a dual exhibition in summer 2016 in the galleries of the Overture Center for the Arts, Madison’s premier visual and performing arts venue.

As UWP production manager, Terry has also taken an important role in the documentation of Wisconsin and American printmaking. He has been either the manager or assistant production manager when UWP published significant books on printmaking that required the highest production quality.

Managing the production of our titles related to printmaking has been a special treat for me as it has allowed me to apply my professional knowledge to the publication of a subject in which I have had a lifelong interest. In the case of the books on Warrington Colescott’s prints, it also gave me an opportunity to work with an international giant in the field of printmaking and an artist whom I have long admired.

The most notable of the UWP publications on printmaking are these.

A Century of American Printmaking, 1880–1980 by James Watrous
In this sumptuously illustrated history, James Watrous captures the vast panorama of American printmaking in the past century. As he traces the roots and evolution of the art, the story becomes one of prints, people, and events—from the printmakers, their artistic conceptions, and works, to the curators, dealers. collectors, critics, printers, workshops, and exhibitions that played crucial supporting roles. The result is both a compelling cultural history and a seminal survey of a major American art form.
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The Print in the Western World: An Introductory History by Linda C. Hults
A history of 500 years of the fine-art print, including detailed treatment of the work of five master printmakers—Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt van Rijn, Francisco Goya, Pablo Picasso, and Jasper Johns. More than 700 illustrations, forty-nine of them in color, show the evolution of the relief, intaglio, planographic, and stencil processes through the centuries.

Progressive Printmakers: Wisconsin Artists and the Print Renaissance by Warrington Colescott and Arthur O. Hove
Printmaking exploded on the American art scene after World War II, rapidly expanding from New York to the Midwest and beyond. Central to this movement and its development was the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where a group of talented young artists was making prints and developing a print curriculum. Progressive Printmakers documents, in words and stunning pictures, the breakthrough aesthetics and technical innovations that made the Madison printmakers a force in the art world.

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The Prints of Warrington Colescott: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1948–2008 by Mary Weaver Chapin
A satirist in the tradition of William Hogarth, Francisco Goya, Honoré Daumier, and George Grosz, Warrington Colescott interprets contemporary and historical events, from the personal to the public, the local to the international. He is noted for his exceptional command of complex printmaking techniques and for his innovative approach to intaglio printing. This book is the first fully illustrated catalogue of Colescott’s extensive and varied graphic career and accompanied a major retrospective exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Colescott, also a UWP author as the co-writer of Progressive Printmakers, is still making art today at age 95.

To read more 80th Anniversary posts about publishing history at the University of Wisconsin Press, click here.

To read more “staff spotlights” from other university presses, visit here.

Livia Appel, the University of Wisconsin Press’s first editor

Livia Appel was appointed the first managing editor (essentially, the first director) of the University of Wisconsin Press in 1937. University Press Committee records from the time indicate that she was hired because she thoroughly understood academic publishing operations and could be employed for much less pay than a man.

Livia Appel. Photo by Arthur M. Vinje, collection of the Wisconsin Historical Society, #43412

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1893, Appel became a school teacher and then a research and editorial assistant at the Minnesota Historical Society. Her work as an assistant was apparently impressive enough that she was credited as coauthor of a MHS book: Minnesota in the War with Germany by Franklin F. Holbrook and Livia Appel.

Very little about Appel’s work at UWP has been researched, but her tenure included the difficult years of the Great Depression and World War II. We know that the first book published at the Press was Reactions of Hydrogen with Organic Compounds over Copper-Chromium Oxide and Nickel Catalysts by Homer Adkins. Appel also authored a small book herself—Bibliographical Citation in the Social Sciences and the Humanities: A Handbook of Style for Authors, Editors, and Students, published by UWP in 1940.

A few of the more notable books published between Appel’s arrival in 1937 and departure in 1948 include:

The Early Writings of Frederick Jackson Turner Edited by Everett E. Edwards (1938)
A Regional Approach to the Conservation of Natural Resources by V. C. Finch and J. R. Whitaker (1938)
The Leguminous Plants of Wisconsin by Norman C. Fassett (1939)
The Wars of the Iroquois: A Study in Intertribal Trade Relations by George T. Hunt (1940)
The Articles of Confederation: An Interpretation of the Social-Constitutional History of the American Revolution, 1774–1781 by Merrill Jensen (1940)
Lincoln and the Radicals by T. Harry Williams (1941)
De Rerum Natura: The Latin Text of Lucretius Edited by William Ellery Leonard and Stanley Barney Smith (1942)
Japan: A Physical, Cultural, and Regional Geography by Glenn T. Trewartha (1945)
The Wisconsin Prisoner: Studies in Crimogenesis by John L. Gillin (1946)
Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth by Norman O. Brown (1947)

What we do know about Appel as an editor and as a person comes mainly from her later work elsewhere. In 1948, she was hired by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin as editor for their publications. Distinguished historian Francis Paul Prucha, whose work Appel edited for SHSW, wrote a lengthy tribute to her in the summer 1996 issue of the Wisconsin Magazine of History on the occasion of the society’s sesquicentennial.

In Prucha’s article titled, “Livia Appel and the Art of Copywriting: A Personal Memoir,” he noted, “In her years at the [University of Wisconsin] Press, she gained a reputation as a perfectionist.” Prucha describes in detail how Appel worked painstakingly and authoritatively with him to transform his dissertation into a successful book. “My encounter with Livia Appel at the beginning of my career as a historian was a never to be forgotten experience. . . . It is remarkable how far I have been carried by the principles of good writing and the practical skills she taught me.” He mentions that he discovered after his book was published that Appel was not only the editor, but the book designer, for SHSW’s publications.

Prucha also briefly describes meeting Appel: ” I met Livia Appel personally only once, at the end of June 1956, when I was able to spend a short time in Wisconsin. My memory of that meeting after so many years is now dim. I do not remember just what my expectations had been in regard to Appel’s personality and appearance—after all, our long correspondence had been very professional and all business. What I found was a woman less precise in dress and demeanor, more informal and friendly, than I would have imagined. The one clear picture that I have retained is that she perpetually had a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth. But I also remember that she made me feel that we were kindred souls in discussing at length the problems we had solved together in revising my dissertation.”

In 1956, Prucha reports, Appel moved to New York City, where she apparently did freelance editing until 1962. She died in New York in January 1973.

Margaret H’Doubler and Dance Publishing at UW Press

Dance as an academic field of study has deep roots at the University of Wisconsin, where Margaret H’Doubler (1889–1982) founded the first university courses in dance in 1917. She established the first university degree program in dance anywhere in the world in 1926. As dance educator and historian Janice Ross shows in her book Moving Lessons: Margaret H’Doubler and the Beginning of Dance in American Education (UWP, 2000), H’Doubler was both emblematic of her time and an innovator who made deep imprints in American culture. An authentic “New Woman,” H’Doubler emerged from a sheltered female Victorian world to change the way Americans thought, not just about female physicality but also about higher education for women.

Margaret H’Doubler, c. 1965.

In her efforts to create a curriculum, the “Wisconsin Dance Idea” was born:

“We’ll begin on the floor, relieve the body of the pull of gravity and explore movement in a basic way. We’ll rediscover the body’s structural limitations and possibilities, we’ll attend to movement sensation. We’ll create movement out of our knowledge of body structure, no imitation. We’ll study movement as movement first. We may never arrive at dance, but we’ll make an honest beginning.”

Eventually, H’Doubler would write a pioneering book, Dance: A Creative Art Experience. UWP published it in 1957 and issued a second edition in 2001 with an essay by Mary Alice Brennan of the UW-Madison Dance Department. Dance Magazine noted that “as a dance pioneer, Margaret H’Doubler combines both vision and down-to-earth practicality. It is she who established dance as a part of the college curriculum [and] organized the first campus performing group.”

UWP continues to publish books on dance, including publishing the series Studies in Dance History in collaboration with the Society of Dance History Scholars.

You can browse the full list of UWP dance books, covering American and global dance traditions, criticism, and issues, on our dance subject page.

Read more posts about the University of Wisconsin Press’s eighty years of publishing here or subscribe to receive all our blog posts!

UW Press & John Muir: A long walk together

The National Park Service is 100 this year, and the University of Wisconsin Press is 80. John Muir has had a significant influence on both!

A son of Wisconsin pioneers, University of Wisconsin student, inventor, naturalist, and prolific writer—John Muir is one of the most fascinating figures in American history and the nation’s most celebrated advocate for land preservation and national parks. Muir’s writings convinced the U.S. government to create the first national parks at Yosemite, Sequoia, Grand Canyon, and Mt. Rainier. An NPS biographical note states, “Muir’s great contribution to wilderness preservation was to successfully promote the idea that wilderness had spiritual as well as economic value. This revolutionary idea was possible only because Muir was able to publish everything he wrote in the . . . principal monthly magazines read by the American middle class in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”

UW Press editions of Muir’s “The Story of My Boyhood and Youth”

The University of Wisconsin Press has been publishing books by and about John Muir for at least 50 Muirsc1 years. In 1965, we reissued Muir’s autobiography, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth. (It was first published before he died in 1914.) Muir recounts in vivid detail his early life: his first eleven years in Scotland; the years 1849–1860 in the central Wisconsin wilderness; and two-and-a-half inventive years in Madison as a student at the recently established University of Wisconsin.

We have also published four different biographies of John Muir. Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir by Linnie Marsh Wolfe won the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for biography. UWP obtained rights to it, issuing an edition in 1978 and an expanded edition in 2003. Based in large part on personal interviews with people who knew Muir, it follows Muir his life from Scotland through his teens in rural Marquette County, Wisconsin, to his history-making pilgrimage to California.

The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness, by scholar Michael P. Cohen, tracks the change in Muir’s aims from personal enlightenment to public advocacy, as he promoted the ecological education of the American public, governmental protection of natural resources, the establishment of the National Parks, and the encouragement of tourism.

The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy by Stephen Fox is both a biography—the first to make unrestricted use of all of Muir’s manuscripts and personal papers—and a history of a century of environmental activism. Fox traces the conservation movement from Muir’s successful campaign to establish Yosemite National Park in 1890 to the 1980s concerns of nuclear waste and acid rain.

The Young John Muir: An Environmental Biography by Steven J. Holmes, published in 1999, offered a dramatically new interpretation of Muir’s formative years. Holmes uses rich archival material to show how the natural world confronted the young Muir with practical, emotional, and religious conflicts. Only with the help of his family, his religion, and the extraordinary power of nature itself could Muir in his late twenties find a welcoming vision of nature as home—a vision that would shape his lifelong environmental experience, most immediately in his transformative travels through the South and to the Yosemite Valley.

In the 1970s through the 1990s, UWP was very active in publishing both new collections and reissues of Muir’s writings about his wilderness travels. Some of these are now out of print, but his impassioned work of promotion, Our National Parks, remains a steady seller. Originally published in 1901, its goals were to entice people to visit the newly established parks and to encourage public support for conservation. The book treats Yellowstone, Sequoia, General Grant, and other national parks of the Western U.S., but especially Yosemite.

Articles that Muir wrote for the San Francisco Evening Bulletin in 1874 and 1875 comprise John Muir Summering in the Sierra, edited by Robert E. Engberg. In the course of the articles, Muir grows from a student of the wilderness to its professor and protector. Yosemite, Alaska

John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, first published by Knopf in 1938, was reissued by UWP in 1979. John Muir: To Yosemite and Beyond, collected writings from the period 1863 to 1875, was published in 1980. Muir’s book The Yosemite was reissued in 1987, and Letters from Alaska appeared in 1993. All are now out of print with UWP.

In 1998, UWP published Tom and Geraldine Vale’s retracing of Muir’s steps, Walking with Muir across Yosemite, based upon Muir’s journals from his first summer in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. From the foothills through Yosemite Valley and up to the Tuolumne Meadows, the Vales follow the present roads and trails that crossed Muir’s route, imagining his reaction to the landscape while reflecting on the natural world in both his time and our own.

We look forward to publishing a selection of Muir’s writing in A Driftless Area Reader edited by Curt Meine and Keefe Keeley, forthcoming sometime in 2017.

Subscribe to our blog (at right) to read more UWP history throughout the coming year.

Read past 80th anniversary blog posts here.

Publishing Politics

As another presidential election approaches, here’s a political reading list drawn from throughout the University of Wisconsin Press’s eighty years of publishing. This includes some truly landmark books, many demonstrating the important role of Wisconsin in American politics and the role of UWP in documenting that history.

The Presidents We Imagine: Two Centuries of White House Fictions on the Page, on the Stage, Onscreen, and Online
Jeff Smith

Examines the presidency’s ever-changing place in the American imagination, from the plays and polemics of the eighteenth century—when the new office was born in what Alexander Hamilton called “the regions of fiction”—to the digital products of the twenty-first century. A colorful, indispensable guide to the many surprising ways Americans have been “representing” presidents even as those presidents have represented them.

The American Jeremiad
Anniversary Edition
Sacvan Bercovitch

In this anniversary edition, the late Sacvan Bercovitch revisits his classic study of the role of the American political sermon, or jeremiad, from a contemporary perspective, assessing developments in the the culture at large. The American Jeremiad demonstrates how fully our national identity has been forged from conflicted narratives of self-examination and redemption.

A Black Gambler’s World of Liquor, Vice, and Presidential Politics: William Thomas Scott of Illinois, 1839–1917
Bruce L. Mouser
Foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

William Thomas Scott (1839–1917) was an Illinois entrepreneur and political activist who in 1904 briefly became the first African American nominated by a national party for president of the United States before his scandalous past forced him to step aside. Scott helped build the National Negro Liberty Party to forward economic, political, and legal rights for his race. But the underworld hustling that had brought him business success proved his undoing as a national political figure. He was the NNLP’s initial presidential nominee, only to be quickly replaced by a better-educated and more socially acceptable candidate, George Edwin Taylor.

For Labor, Race, and Liberty: George Edwin Taylor, His Historic Run for the White House, and the Making of Independent Black Politics
Bruce L. Mouser

More than one hundred years before Barack Obama, George Edwin Taylor made presidential history. Born in the antebellum South to a slave and a freed woman, raised and educated in Wisconsin, Taylor became the first African American ticketed as a political party’s nominee for president of the United States, running against Theodore Roosevelt in 1904. At a time when many African Americans felt allegiance to the Republican Party for its support of abolition, Taylor’s sympathy with the labor cause drew him first to the national Democratic Party and then to an African American party, the newly formed National Negro Liberty Party, which named him its presidential candidate.

Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest
Centennial Edition
Walter Lippmann
Introduction and notes by William E. Leuchtenburg
Foreword by Ganesh Sitaraman

In 1914, a brilliant young political journalist published a book arguing that the United States had entered a period of “drift”—a lack of control over rapidly changing forces in society. He highlighted the tensions between expansion and consolidation, traditionalism and progressivism, and emotion and rationality. Mastery over drift is attainable, Walter Lippmann argued, through diligent attention to facts and making active choices. Lippman’s Drift and Mastery became one of the most important and influential documents of the Progressive Movement. This centennial edition remains invaluable as a window to the political thought of early twentieth-century America and as a lucid exploration of timeless themes in American government and politics.

La Follette’s Autobiography: A Personal Narrative of Political Experiences
Robert M. La Follette
Foreword by Matthew Rothschild

Robert M. La Follette (1855–1925) was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, governor of Wisconsin, U.S. senator, and the U.S. Progressive Party’s presidential candidate in 1924, winning one-sixth of the total national vote. His Autobiography is both a memoir and a history of the Progressive cause in the United States, charting La Follette’s formative years in politics, his attempts to abolish entrenched state and corporate influences, and his embattled efforts to advance Progressive policies. This centennial edition includes a foreword by Matthew Rothschild, former editor of The Progressive—the magazine that La Follette himself founded.

Joe McCarthy and the Press
Edwin R. Bayley

“No one who cares about liberty will read Mr. Bayley’s masterful study without a shudder about the journalistic cop-outs that contributed to making the nightmare called McCarthyism. This book reminds us that it could happen here, but perhaps will make it harder to happen next time.”—Daniel Schorr

“Thorough, incisive and fascinating, this is the best account we have of the strange relationship between Joe McCarthy and the American press.”—Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

When Government Was Good: Memories of a Life in Politics
Henry S. Reuss
With a Foreword by John Kenneth Galbraith

U. S. House Representative Henry S. Reuss (D-Wisconsin, 1955–83) believed there was indeed a time when government worked—the “Golden Age” of 1948–68. The economy was functioning, the long overdue civil rights movement had begun to blossom, and the government had integrity. In his memoir, When Government Was Good, he blasts the political forces that he believed led to the disintegration of that Golden Age: economic and racial inequality and excessive militarism.

With Honor: Melvin Laird in War, Peace, and Politics
Dale Van Atta
Foreword by President Gerald R. Ford

In 1968, at the peak of the Vietnam War, centrist Congressman Melvin Laird (R-WI) agreed to serve as Richard Nixon’s secretary of defense. It was not, Laird knew, a move likely to endear him to the American public—but as he later said, “Nixon couldn’t find anybody else who wanted the damn job.” This biography illuminates Laird’s behind-the-scenes sparring with Henry Kissinger over policy, his decisions to ignore Nixon’s wilder directives, his formative impact on arms control and health care, his key role in the selection of Ford for vice president, his frustration with the country’s abandonment of Vietnamization, and, in later years, his unheeded warning to Donald Rumsfeld that “it’s a helluva lot easier to get into a war than to get out of one.”

The Man from Clear Lake: Earth Day Founder Senator Gaylord Nelson
Bill Christofferson

The life of Gaylord Nelson, a small-town Wisconsin boy who learned his values and political principles at an early age, is woven through the political history of the twentieth century. His story intersects at times with Fighting Bob La Follette, Joe McCarthy, and Bill Proxmire in Wisconsin, and with George McGovern, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Russell Long, Walter Mondale, John F. Kennedy, and others on the national scene. His founding of Earth Day in 1970 permanently changed national and global politics; more than one billion people worldwide now participate in annual Earth Day activities.

Raising Hell for Justice: The Washington Battles of a Heartland Progressive
David R. Obey

David R. Obey (D-Wausau) served in the U.S. House of Representatives longer than anyone in Wisconsin history, culminating in the chairmanship of the House Appropriations Committee. After forty years in Congress, Obey looks back on his journey in politics beginning with his early years in the Wisconsin Legislature, when Wisconsin moved through eras of shifting balance between Republicans and Democrats. On a national level Obey traces, as few others have done, the dramatic changes in the workings of the U.S. Congress since his first election to the House in 1969. He discusses his own central role in the evolution of Congress, ethics reforms, and crucial chapters in our democracy.

Emergency Presidential Power: From the Drafting of the Constitution to the War on Terror
Chris Edelson
Foreword by Louis Fisher

Defining the scope and limits of emergency presidential power might seem easy—just turn to Article II of the Constitution. But as Chris Edelson shows, the reality is complicated. In times of crisis, presidents have frequently staked out claims to broad national security power. Drawing on excerpts from the U.S. Constitution, Supreme Court opinions, Department of Justice memos, and other primary documents, Edelson weighs the various arguments that presidents have used to justify the expansive use of executive power.

Power without Constraint: The Post-9/11 Presidency and National Security
Chris Edelson

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama criticized the George W. Bush administration for its unrestrained actions in matters of national security. In a thorough comparison of the Bush and Obama administrations’ national security policies, Chris Edelson demonstrates that President Obama and his officials have used softer rhetoric and toned-down legal arguments, but in key areas—military action, surveillance, and state secrets—they have simply found new ways to assert power without meaningful constitutional or statutory constraints. Edelson contends that this legacy of the two immediately post-9/11 presidencies raises crucial questions for future presidents, Congress, the courts, and American citizens.

Wisconsin Votes: An Electoral History
Robert Booth Fowler

This history of voting in Wisconsin from statehood in 1848 to 2008 both tracks voting in key elections across the years and investigates electoral trends and patterns over the course of Wisconsin’s history. Fowler explores the ways that ethnic and religious groups in the state have voted historically, discusses the great struggle for women’s suffrage, and reminds us of many Wisconsin third parties—Socialists, Progressives, the Prohibition Party, and others. Here, too, are the famous politicians in Wisconsin history, including the La Follette family, William Proxmire, and Tommy Thompson.

UW Press & the Wisconsin Idea

In April of 2016, we kicked off our 80th anniversary year with a blog overview of the history of the University of Wisconsin Press. This post delves further into the Press’s history, highlighting our long connection with the Wisconsin Idea.

Charles Van Hise

The Wisconsin Idea is usually attributed to former UW President Charles Van Hise, who in a 1904 speech declared, “I shall never be content until the beneficent influence of the University reaches every home in the state.”

Later this month, we’ll be publishing a new book by UW-Milwaukee historian David Hoeveler. In John Bascom and the Origins of the Wisconsin Idea, Hoeveler shows the even earlier beginnings of the Wisconsin Idea in the tenure of John Bascom as president of the University of Wisconsin from 1874 to 1887. Bascom outlined a social gospel that called for an expanded role for state governments and universities as agencies of moral improvement. His ideas deeply influenced a generation of students at the University of Wisconsin, including Van Hise and Robert La Follette. (We’ve invited Professor Hoeveler to blog here on June 30.)

As UW president from 1903 to 1918, Van Hise created the university’s extension division (known today as the University of Wisconsin-Extension), which oversaw summer courses and other programs that brought university knowledge directly to state citizens. These programs took, and continue to take, many forms, and reached out in areas ranging from the arts to agriculture. In the 1940s, Robert Gard founded the Wisconsin Idea Theater and worked for decades to foster theater arts and creative writing in small communities. UWP published his influential book Grassroots Theater: A Search for Regional Arts in America. A current Extension program is the Master Cheesemaker certificate and brand offered by the Center for Dairy Research, highlighted in the UWP book The Master Cheesemakers of Wisconsin.

During the early twentieth century, President Van Hise also took advantage of his longtime friendship with classmate Robert M. La Follette, who had become governor of Wisconsin. Together they forged closer ties between the university and state government; faculty experts consulted with legislators to help draft many influential and groundbreaking laws, including the nation’s first workers’ compensation legislation, tax reforms, and the public regulation of utilities. These activities would not formally be described as “The Wisconsin Idea” until 1912, when Charles McCarthy described the philosophy in a book by that name. By that time, Wisconsin had developed a national reputation for legislative innovation.

John R. Commons

The University of Wisconsin Press published numerous books by these influential University of Wisconsin faculty and policy experts. John R. Commons was one of the nation’s foremost writers and lecturers on political economy and sociology. UWP published his books Institutional Economics, Legal Foundations of Capitalism, and Economics of Collective Action, as well as his autobiography Myself. Commons drafted legislation establishing Wisconsin’s worker’s compensation program, the first of its kind in the United States.

A fellow political economist at the University of Wisconsin was Richard Ely. Considered the “father of land economics,” he published his book Land Economics with UWP and founded our journal of the same name, now in its 91st year.

Edwin E. Witte was a Wisconsin farm boy who, like Commons and Ely, became a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin. On the faculty from 1933 to 1957, he was a profoundly influential contributor to public policy and the principal author of the federal Social Security Act. Indeed, he is considered “the father of Social Security.” UWP published his books Social Security Perspectives and The Development of the Social Security Act.

Over time, the Wisconsin Idea has come to signify more broadly the university’s commitment to public service. For eighty years, the University of Wisconsin Press has published useful books for Wisconsin, ranging from Lake Michigan in Motion and A Field Guide to Wisconsin Grasses to 9XM Talking: WHA Radio and the Wisconsin Idea. And, we have continued to document the history, culture, heritage, and voices of our state. Learn more about our regionally themed books by browsing our e-catalog, Wisconsin in Print.

It’s our 80th birthday! 1936-2016

“Publication is as much a function of the university as teaching or research [and] an obligation that every great university owes to itself and to society.”
—The University of Wisconsin Committee on University Publications, April 13, 1936

In 2016, we mark the eightieth anniversary of the founding of the University of Wisconsin Press. Throughout the calendar year, we’ll be blogging about the history of the Press, as well as welcoming guest posts from our UWP authors and editors.

Subscribe to our blog (at right) to read more UWP history throughout the coming year.

Livia Appel

1936 On April 13, 1936, the University of Wisconsin faculty senate enacts legislation to “publish particularly meritorious manuscripts as books using the imprint ‘The University of Wisconsin Press.’” Livia Appel is hired as managing editor.

1940s Hit hard by the toll of war—paper shortages, staff shortages, and the near impossibility of finding printers with facilities for “non-essential” work, the Press nearly ceases operations. 0469-165w

1950s The Press publishes the two-volume Classics in Translation edited by University of Wisconsin faculty Paul L. MacKendrick and Herbert M. Howe. It will become our all-time bestseller.

1960s The new Journals Division publishes its first volumes of Contemporary Literature, Luso-Brazilian Review, Slavic and East European Journal, Journal of Land Economics, Arctic Anthropology, and Monatshefte. Five of these continue as UWP journals, joined by later acquisitions.

1970s University budget cuts result in the Press reducing by half both its staff and the number of new publications.

1980s The Press publishes its largest-ever book in a single volume: the 1056-page Fishes of Wisconsin, by George C. Becker of the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point. (It’s now UWP_Spring2011_catalog_12610 available free online.)

1990s UW–Madison professor of art Warren G. Moon dies, leaving an endowment of $700,000 for the book series Wisconsin Studies in Classics. His legacy continues to support a thriving series.

2000s The Press begins publishing journals and books in both print and electronic formats. Our bestselling e-book is Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders by William R. Drennan.

2010s Several new book series are launched: Critical Human Rights, the Harvey Goldberg Series in Understanding and Teaching History, and Languages and Folklore of the Upper Midwest. Three new journals in African Studies are added to the Press’s publications: Mande Studies, Ghana Studies, and African Economic History.