Schweber: “I don’t know a moment that parallels this one for the extremity of the changes in such a short time.”

Over the course of a week last June, the United States Supreme Court made headline-grabbing rulings on abortion, gun rights, climate change, immigration, school prayer, and separation of church and state. The conservative majority flexed its muscle with decisions like Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion established by Roe v. Wade in 1973. According to constitutional scholar Howard Schweber, a UW political science professor, that seven-day period was unprecedented in Supreme Court history. “I don’t know a moment that parallels this one,” Schweber says, “for the extremity of the changes in such a short time.”

What’s the historical significance of the Supreme Court’s June decisions?

For a century or more, there was an understanding that the Constitution is an instrument to protect rights that became recognized over history. An enormous range of the rights fall into that category: the idea that the Constitution protects parents’ rights to have a say in how their children are educated; the idea that people have a right to dictate health care decisions for their children. And if this court were to be consistent with Dobbs and its other decisions, a huge range of rights that we’ve taken for granted for generations would be stripped down. I think people have barely begun to realize just how revolutionary the implications of these rulings are.

How do the justices in the current majority differ from their predecessors?

In the past, even justices who had strong ideological convictions would usually back off and say, “Well, we’re not going to do something too upsetting or too radical.” With very few exceptions, justices have tended to be cautious. The current majority is not cautious at all.

Is it conceivable that the Supreme Court would see fundamental changes?

The number of justices — nine — is not magical. There have been as few as six and as many as 10. There’s also nothing in the Constitution that would prohibit [Congress from setting] term limits.

How do you think the court’s recent decisions will affect public trust?

The number of people expressing a great deal of trust in the Supreme Court is down to 25 percent — wildly lower than any court since polling began. And the reason is that, love it or hate it, there was always a sense in the past that the justices were grownups doing something sane and defensible, even if you didn’t like it. If the current court acts in a way that continues to drive their poll numbers down, at a certain point there will be bipartisan distrust. And then the political conditions would be in place for some kind of serious change.

Armbruster’s book recounts a tail gunner’s experience as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany and his 600-mile death march across Europe.

By the time John Armbruster ’89, ’93 fell in love with the Flying Fortress airplane as a young aviation aficionado, it had been more than 30 years since tail gunner Gene Moran’s Fortress fell from the sky during World War II. Moran kept the harrowing ordeal of his crash and capture by the Germans a secret for more than 60 years until he met Armbruster, now a history teacher and neighbor in Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin, with whom he agreed to share his story.

In a series of Tuesdays with Morrie–style interviews, Armbruster unearthed Moran’s long-guarded memories, which he recounts in Tailspin. The book details Moran’s recovery from his four-mile plummet in the tail of his plane and his experience as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany, where he was subjected to solitary confinement, transport on a “hell ship,” and a 600-mile death march across central Europe before his liberation in April 1945. At the same time that Armbruster was documenting Moran’s remarkable bravery, he was trying hard to muster his own after his wife’s diagnosis of brain cancer.

In Armbruster, Moran found a safe way to reveal wounds that had yet to heal after decades. In Moran, Armbruster found strength to face his life’s most daunting challenges. And in a book that Kirkus Reviews calls “cinematically grand,” Armbruster shares both stories of hope and resilience.

Keyes’s favorite character is Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who fought for women’s right to vote. Robert Kaplafka

Laura Keyes MA’07 has wonderful personalities — six, to be precise. Since 2008, Keyes has given more than 750 presentations as acclaimed 19th-century women, mostly as Mary Todd Lincoln, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Her other characters include Charlotte Brontë, the fictional Irene Adler (the only woman to outwit Sherlock Holmes), and Lincoln’s daughter-in-law Mary Harlan Lincoln.

In real life, Keyes heads the public library in Dunlap, Illinois, a role that meshes well with her passion for accurately re-creating the past. “I’m an extraordinarily well-organized person,” says Keyes, who earned her master’s degree in library science at the UW. “I am careful in what I say, and I’m careful in my research as well.”

That research extends to the period clothing she wears as she works with seamstresses to ensure that apparel — from Lincoln’s silk ballgowns to Wilder’s cotton day dresses — is as authentic as possible. The costumes help her get into the mind-set of her characters. Some of her dresses weigh 10 pounds, and she wears three layers of underclothing. “You move and think differently,” according to Keyes. “You gesture differently — not only because of the corset, but because of the [restrictive] cut of the dress.”

Her avocation began when she was cast as President Lincoln’s widow in a local play. Newly graduated from UW–Madison, Keyes dove into studying the tragic First Lady. A newspaper noticed her scholarship. Soon other libraries asked her to appear.

“Mary Lincoln was a complicated person who lived a very hard life,” says Keyes. Besides her husband’s assassination, Mary suffered the deaths of three sons. Her surviving son had her committed to a mental institution. Keyes offers five different Lincoln presentations, each at a crucial moment in her life, and shares stories of her compassion as well as of her selfish, petty behavior. Keyes acknowledges Lincoln had symptoms that match bipolar disorder. “I share different perspectives of her,” she says.

Wilder has proven to be a challenging persona as well. In recent years, her books have been attacked for racial insensitivity. “They are still good teaching tools,” says Keyes. “But as one tool in a series of other books.”

Keyes’s favorite character? Stanton, who fought for women’s right to vote. “Her words are timeless. I use a lot of passages from her writings, letters, and autobiography. Some of her arguments are very, very relevant today,” says Keyes.

People often ask her characters to comment on news events or current First Ladies. Perhaps mercifully, she gets to dodge those questions. Says Keyes: “Mary Lincoln says she doesn’t know who those people are, but people still ask.”

Herrera: “For decades to come Russia will be a pariah state, possibly facing charges of war crimes and genocide, and its economy will be seriously damaged.”

Yoshiko Herrera was earning her undergraduate degree at Dartmouth as the Berlin Wall came tumbling down and the Soviet Union faced dissolution. After a study-abroad visit to Eastern Europe in 1990 and a peek behind the crumbling Iron Curtain, Herrera switched academic tracks to study the “different world” she saw and the ethnic, national, and social groups within it. Now she’s an expert in Russian politics and a professor of political science at the UW, and the war in Ukraine has given her yet another post-Soviet conflict to study. Since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, Herrera has done countless interviews for local and national news outlets to explain Russian president Vladimir Putin’s destructive actions and why she believes Ukrainians’ resolve for statehood will eventually prevail.

At the start of the invasion of Ukraine, you called Putin’s actions an “incredible miscalculation.” What did Putin miscalculate?

It’s a miscalculation based on a profound misunderstanding of Ukraine and a significant underestimation of the international reaction in terms of sanctions and military support for Ukraine. The lack of respect for sovereignty and nationhood in Ukraine led Putin and his military advisers to not seriously examine the situation, including assessing Ukraine’s likely resolve, military capabilities, and lack of support for a Russian occupation. Because the 2014 Crimea invasion was such a shock for Ukraine, Ukrainians realized the danger to their state and nation, and they largely got over some of their historic differences and built a more inclusive sense of Ukrainian national identity that’s not just based on ethnic or linguistic traits.

What are the consequences that Putin, and Russia more broadly, have faced?

Even if Ukraine doesn’t join NATO per se, it is going to remain strongly anti-Russian, which is the opposite of what Putin wanted. Plus, Finland and Sweden are now on track to join NATO. And every other country in Europe has been put on alert that Russia is a dangerous country, and they need to treat it as such. In many ways the results for Russia have been disastrous. Regardless of the outcome of the war, for decades to come Russia will be a pariah state, possibly facing charges of war crimes and genocide, and its economy will be seriously damaged. Ironically, a military defeat of Russia and Putin may be the best hope that Russia has to improve its prospects. But I want to emphasize the war has been a terrible, unprovoked, humanitarian and economic catastrophe for Ukraine.

How do you see this war ending? Do you expect to see peace anytime soon?

Right now, nobody really knows how long this can last. Unfortunately, I think both sides are very committed to fighting, so I don’t really see the prospect of a ceasefire or any negotiated settlement anytime soon. Ukrainians will not give up their state. The only question is to what extent they will be able to beat back Russian forces. On the Russian side, we see that there is no limit to Putin’s cruelty.

What do you believe is the United States’ role in this conflict?

Number one is in the coordination of international economic sanctions, especially with Europe, against Russia. There is more to be done on energy sanctions, and the U.S. should keep pressing on further secondary sanctions. Even though sanctions are not going to have an immediate effect on the war, they are going to weaken Russian state capacity and capabilities over the next few months or year.

Second is military support and weapons supply, and the U.S. is doing a lot, but Ukraine needs more help on this, and the U.S. should lead the way. There are a lot of reasons why Western governments might not be advertising everything they’re doing — I tend to be of the view that there is a lot going on behind the scenes that we are not aware of — but the military support from the West is absolutely critical to helping Ukraine win.

Humanitarian support for people in Ukraine, as well as displaced people, is important. There is also a major role for Europe and the U.S. in terms of supporting the rebuilding process in Ukraine. The world needs to hold Russia to account in terms of war crimes.

How should the United States navigate future relations with Russia?

As long as Putin is in power, we have to deal with a threatening, malevolent, untrustworthy government. There is no building trust with an untrustworthy regime, and hence the U.S. and Europe will have to act accordingly. One thing that is likely to change is that there has to be a long-term reconsideration of energy policy generally to [take] into account both the environment and these national security issues. Given the Russian threat, it is more important than ever that the U.S. have a coordinated national security policy with a reliable executive in the Oval Office.

Descendant is the most intimate account of the slave ship Clotilda, thanks to rare footage. Courtesy of Participant / Netflix

The last known illegal slave ship, the Clotilda, reached the shores of present-day Mobile, Alabama, almost 40 years after African slave trading became a capital offense in the United States. The ship was intentionally destroyed upon its arrival — its remnants were only discovered in 2019 — but its legacy lives on in Africatown, a community founded by descendants of the enslaved Africans aboard the ship.

In Descendant (2022), cowriter and coproducer Kern Jackson MA’91 shares the stories that have kept the Clotilda’s memory alive among the residents of Africatown. According to the Hollywood Reporter, while the documentary is not the first account of the Clotilda, it is among the most intimate, thanks to the rare footage, interviews, and images provided in part by Jackson, a folklorist and director of the African American studies program at the University of South Alabama.

“All of our ancestors are helping to reveal this narrative of resilience,” Jackson says. “As a folklorist, my preoccupation is with the nuances. The nooks and crannies of culture are my inspiration for the historical truths and perspectives brought to this film.”

Descendant premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and won a U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for creative vision. The film is a Netflix original presented by Participant and Higher Ground, President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama’s production company, in association with Two One Five Entertainment.

Initially, the archaeologists thought it was a relatively young canoe — an artifact of the 1800s or a Boy Scouts project from the 1950s. The revelation of its true age took their breath away: the vessel was 1,200 years old, built around 800 CE by early ancestors of the Ho-Chunk Nation.

News of the canoe’s discovery and recovery made waves that traveled the world, but the impact is felt most strongly at its source. For some, the vessel is a tangible reminder of a history frequently forgotten in the wake of watersports and watercolor Terrace sunsets. For others, it affirms a truth as old as the ancient lake herself, one that reflects on her glassy surface and rests in her cloudy depths.

“Madison is the water,” says Molli Pauliot x’94, MA’20, PhDx’23, a cultural anthropology student and member of the Ho-Chunk Nation’s Buffalo clan. It was the water that sustained this area’s earliest residents, and it’s the water that has drawn everyone since.

Water has memory — sometimes so vivid that it freezes a moment in the form of a dugout canoe. Lake Mendota is speaking. A great many people are eager to hear what she has to say.

“I think I found something”: The first glimpse of the canoe in Lake Mendota. Wisconsin Historical Society

A Whisper Underwater

June 11, 2021, was a perfect summer day in Madison: the weather was warm, and Mendota was beautiful. For Tamara Thomsen ’91, MS’93, a maritime archaeologist with the Wisconsin Historical Society, these were prime conditions to do no work at all. Equipped with diver propulsion vehicles — underwater scooters — Thomsen and Mallory Dragt ’20 set out to a popular dive spot off the lake’s southwest shore.

“I have been to [this dive site] probably a hundred times, and thousands of divers have been there, too,” says Thomsen. “We were going to scooter around and chase fish, and then pick up trash.”

Halfway into their joyride, Dragt signaled to Thomsen that it was time to circle back to the boat. But Thomsen was focused on a log sticking out of the lake’s wall. In the rare clarity of Mendota’s June waters, the log resembled the dugout canoes she had spent recent years studying around the state. She counted the minutes it took to scooter back to the boat in hopes of finding the canoe again later that day, this time not as a recreational diver, but as an archaeologist.

Amy Rosebrough MA’96, PhD’10 was working from home when she got a call from Thomsen, her colleague at the historical society.

“I think I found something,” Thomsen said.

Rosebrough is a terrestrial archaeologist in the State Historic Preservation Office and an expert on the Indigenous peoples who lived in Wisconsin and surrounding areas during the Late Woodland period, which lasted from 500 CE through 1200 CE. A self-described “landlubbing archaeologist,” she wasn’t about to suit up and dive in with Thomsen, but on a day like this, she couldn’t refuse an opportunity to sit on the boat and offer her expertise.

Back in the water, Thomsen located the canoe again, recorded its coordinates, and investigated its condition. She fanned around the edges of the wood, expecting to find a fragment, only to discover the vessel almost entirely intact. She resurfaced to share photos with Rosebrough before returning to retrieve the “weird, colorful rocks” she reported finding nearby.

“We put them in a row and looked them over, and I thought, well, this is very, very strange because they’re not round, they’re not tumbled, and they’re not smooth like you would see if they were dropped by a glacier,” Rosebrough says. “But I couldn’t, at that point, figure out what on earth they were.”

Thomsen returned the rocks, measured the canoe, and reburied their discovery. That evening, Rosebrough realized that the rocks were net sinkers, tools thought to be used by Late Woodland fishermen. Intrigue quickly became excitement. What memories would Mendota reveal?

Resurfacing

The Wisconsin Historical Society was between state archaeologists in June 2021, so further inquiry into the canoe’s origins was put on hold until the arrival of Jim Skibo. Skibo was a professor of archaeology at Illinois State University for 27 years before coming to the historical society.

When he learned of a story resting at the bottom of Lake Mendota, he committed to telling it. Thomsen retrieved a hair-sized sample of the wood from the canoe to send out for radiocarbon dating.

“When Jim announced what it was, I almost fell on the floor,” Rosebrough says. “From that time period, we have things made out of stone. If the preservation’s really good, we’ve got a bone tool or two. We’ve got pottery, but even that is usually broken into tiny little pieces, so we were making history based on scraps and impressions and the occasional mound.”

But Mendota, a meticulous conservator, kept this piece of history safe: packed tightly into the lake bed, the wooden canoe evaded sunlight, invasive species, and centuries of other vessels and visitors.

“This is a chance to touch a piece of history that should, by all accounts, have turned into dust a couple of decades after it was abandoned,” Rosebrough says.

On November 2, 2021, after months of careful planning and practicing, Thomsen, Skibo, maritime archaeologist Caitlin Zant, and a group made up of experienced volunteers and divers from the Dane County Sheriff’s Office executed a maneuver never before performed by the historical society when they excavated the canoe from the lake. The process took hours, during which a crowd amassed on the shore where Rosebrough was communicating with the team out on the water and fielding questions from curious onlookers and media outlets.

The canoe — the oldest intact vessel ever recovered from Wisconsin waters — emerged to applause, cheers, and tears before being carted away to the State Archive Preservation Facility. The recovery made headlines from CNN to the BBC. The canoe itself harbors many more stories to tell.

Ancestral Footprint

To appreciate the canoe’s stories, you have to know the people who made it. While Lake Mendota’s present-day shores may be the most populated they’ve ever been, the vast majority of her history has been spent in the company of the Ho-Chunk Nation, who have called these waters home since time immemorial.

“We’ve been in Madison as long as we’ve been Ho-Chunk, and the Ho-Chunk have been there since before it was Madison,” says Casey Brown x’04, public relations officer of the Ho-Chunk Nation and member of the Bear clan.

According to Brown, the tribe’s oral histories indicate that the Ho-Chunk first entered the world at the Red Banks (near present-day Green Bay). From there, they spread throughout the Midwest, from the Mississippi River to Lake Michigan. Archaeologists refer to them as the Late Woodland people or the Effigy Moundbuilders after the animal- and spirit-shaped burial mounds with which they sculpted the landscape. To the modern Ho-Chunk Nation, they’re simply centuries-removed kin who established the tribe’s ancestral footprint in the Madison area: Teejop, or “Four Lakes,” a region whose beauty lies in its waters, and whose waters spring from stories. One Ho-Chunk account of the Four Lakes’ origins tells of Man’una, or “Earthmaker,” who was traveling through the region when he stopped to rest. He filled his kettle with spring water, caa (deer meat), and roots, and set it atop a fire to cook when he heard a sound in the woods. He left to investigate, thinking it might be his friend Bear. When he returned, the kettle was on its side and the water flowed into depressions in the earth, forming the Four Lakes.

Another Ho-Chunk story tells of a man who once fell so deeply in love with a water spirit that he turned into a fish to follow her, carving out the Four Lakes in a pursuit that culminated in the creation of the largest one, Wąąkšikhomįk, or “Where the Man Lies.” To this day, mounds that resemble water spirits can be located just off Mendota’s shores.

The presence of mounds in the area indicates a landscape that allowed for exploration and education, its residents’ basic needs having been readily met by their environment. These early Ho-Chunk were expert navigators, engineers, and astronomers, learning from the land and sky and innovating with the abundant resources.

The mounds themselves are teachers to this day, not only educating people about their builders, but also serving their original purpose by indicating directions and reflecting cosmic phenomena such as solstices.

“The entire Four Lakes area is essentially a university,” Brown says. “Even before the UW was there, the Ho-Chunk were using it as a teaching tool.”

And it continues to be. The Ho-Chunk Nation worked closely with the historical society throughout the canoe retrieval process, and they’ll continue to be involved in helping the canoe tell its story. After all, it’s their story, too.

Mendota’s Oldest Companions

As the leading expert on the ancestral Ho-Chunk who resided on Mendota’s shores during the Late Woodland period, Rosebrough knows more than most Western academics about their customs, technology, and ways of life. With the discovery of the canoe, she also has the most questions.

In the summer, the early, seminomadic Ho-Chunk lived in small villages along lakeshores and riverbanks and grew gardens of sunflowers, squash, goosefoot, and little barley. In the winter, they spread out to preserve resources and the environment. Hunting was integral to their sustenance; archaeologists have recovered arrow and spear points, skinning knives, and hide scrapers, along with remnants of bird and deer bone at many village sites. The importance of fishing was an educated guess.

“We’ve assumed that they were fishing and working on the lakes because the pottery is decorated with the impressions of fabric and cordage and, in some cases, nets,” Rosebrough says. Along with a small collection of harpoons and bits of fish bone at village sites, the canoe and its net sinkers are concrete evidence of fishing in these communities, which raises more questions. Were they fishing onshore or offshore? In deep water, where the big catches lurked? With nets alone, or are there hooks yet to be found?

Inquiries into fishing are just the start. According to Rosebrough, the historical society already has stone tools believed to be axes dating back nearly 10,000 years. By comparing the tools to the markings on the canoe, archaeologists can determine if these implements, once thought to be used for cutting down trees, were actually used for canoe-building.

Rosebrough is also interested in exploring the vessel’s capability for travel. Archaeological evidence suggests that early Ho-Chunk traded with the Cahokians, Indigenous peoples who lived just across the Mississippi River from present-day Saint Louis. The Cahokians were almost certainly traveling up the river to reach the northern tribes — could this canoe have traversed rough waters like the Mississippi or the Great Lakes to reach distant civilizations before meeting its end in Lake Mendota?

Wisconsin’s First Shipwreck

Wisconsin is distinguished by its more than 800 miles of Great Lakes shoreline. The state flag, first adopted in 1863, features a sailor and an anchor, nods to Wisconsin’s early shipyards and nautical industries, the remnants of which lie at the bottom of lakes and rivers and occasionally wash ashore or startle anglers before revealing details of historic shipbuilding in the Midwest. But Wisconsin’s maritime history far predates its flag.

Thomsen is an expert in Wisconsin shipwrecks and spends a great deal of her time documenting and protecting these historic elements. With the canoe, she may have found the very first.

“When Euro-Americans are here and ships go down, we call them a shipwreck. When canoes go down and are found, we call them an artifact,” Skibo says. “But this was a shipwreck.”

Most Indigenous dugout canoes found in Wisconsin were recovered from shallow waters because it was common for early fishermen to cache their canoes offshore in the fall — to commit them to the water’s memory — and recover them in the spring. This canoe was found in 27 feet of water, far from the shores on which it would have been stowed.

The state of the canoe also points toward maritime mishap. Of the minimal damage the canoe has sustained, its oldest flaw may have also been its demise: a heel-sized hole in one end. Wood contains knots that stubbornly refuse to warp with the wood around them, causing them to become weak and fall out. While many recovered canoes show signs of patchwork and repairs, this one’s hole remains.

“Archeologists love touching individual moments: the fingerprint impressed into the pot, the footprint in the floor of a dirt-floored house,” Rosebrough says. “We have a moment here where somebody was either in that canoe or had stashed their net and gear in that canoe, and it went down.”

Like the side-wheel steamers Thomsen traces back to 19th- and 20th-century shipyards, the canoe offers insight into the building techniques of its makers. The USDA Forest Products Laboratory on the UW campus determined that the canoe is made of white oak, a hard and watertight wood native to southern Wisconsin and known to the Ho-Chunk, to whom it is sacred, as caašgegura. Dark soot inside the hull and markings from stone tools suggest the use of burning and scraping to create the vessel. According to Thomsen, wear on the bottom of the canoe can indicate which ends might have been the bow and the stern. Studying its construction can also help archaeologists track the progression of canoe-building through time and across tribes.

“This canoe would be great, like a pickup truck,” Skibo says. It may not have been built for speed or agility, but it could carry a couple of fishermen out to their nets and tote the cargo home — until it didn’t.

To test this theory, Skibo partnered with Lennon Rodgers, director of the UW Grainger Engineering Design Innovation Lab, to investigate the canoe’s structural integrity. Rodgers’s 3-D scans of the canoe have yielded detailed digital and physical models that will be used to test its flotation and satisfy Rosebrough’s curiosity about its maritime capabilities. They can also help determine whether a dislodged knot could truly be the culprit in its ruin.

The likelihood of shipwreck also raised the question of whether the canoe might indicate a burial, which would have stopped the excavation in its tracks. Wisconsin State Statute 157.70 prevents the disturbance of human remains of any kind and assigns immediate ownership of discovered burials or funerary objects to the respective tribes. Review of culturally specific burial practices and careful dredging of the area around the canoe ruled out this possibility. Still, the canoe’s location and condition create emotional ties that transcend centuries and generate wonder about the person whose vessel went under one day.

“Were they panicking? Were they upset? Were they looking at shore going, ‘Dang it, I didn’t want to get wet today’?” Rosebrough asks. “To reach back and start to think about one individual on one day — one moment of one day — we can empathize with them as another human being.”

The canoe rests in a custom-built vat in the State Archive Preservation Facility. Bryce Richter

People of the Mother Tongue

For some, these ties through time run deeper than the shared experience of a watercraft lost to the lake.

While the Ho-Chunk are the region’s longest-standing residents, their numbers have fluctuated over thousands of years after repeated attempts to eradicate them. According to Rosebrough, disease and intertribal wars instigated by the arrival of French fur traders in the 17th century decimated the Ho-Chunk population. The tribe’s oral histories indicate that, at one point, there were only 50 adult Ho-Chunk men. Later, federal policy displaced the Ho-Chunk from their ancestral lands and allowed for the destruction of mounds and other earthworks.

“When you’re colonizing people, you take over their most beautiful sites, their most sacred sites, and you put your site on top of it,” Pauliot says. “That’s why the capital’s in Madison.”

Perhaps the most recent and haunting attempt at eliminating Indigenous influence was the rise of residential schools. The Ho-Chunk language provided the foundation for many Siouan languages throughout the American Midwest and West; the tribe is known as the “People of the Loud Voice,” “People of the Sacred Voice,” or “People of the Mother Tongue.” After generations of cultural undoing in residential schools, the speakers of the “mother tongue” — those who taught language and its culturally preservative capabilities to others — are few.

Oral histories, the intangible and invaluable records of time from which the Ho-Chunk derive their sense of identity and connection with the past, do not die with the language, but they will suffer immensely from its absence.

“That’s why historic preservation is so important,” Brown says. “It is almost a form of protest, [us] just being alive.”

What is a canoe, then, to those who need no evidence of their own existence and who rely not on things, but on stories?

“It’s just another part of our culture,” says Bill Quackenbush, tribal historic preservation officer with the Ho-Chunk Nation and member of the Deer clan. “We don’t need to see items brought out of the water just to reassert that we are here.”

Bryce Richter

For the Ho-Chunk, history and culture are not lying at the bottom of Lake Mendota; they’re taking place on and around it. They keep their ways alive through the continuation of skills, values, and practices that have existed even longer than the canoe. This, Brown says, is how a nation survives.

One way they have done this is by building a canoe themselves. Prior to the discovery in Lake Mendota, Quackenbush gathered a group of Ho-Chunk youth to make their own dugout canoe out of a cottonwood tree. The team spent months burning, scraping, and sawing the log and, this past June, embarked on a weeklong journey through the Four Lakes region in their completed vessel, which included a stop along the Yahara River to visit the new canoe’s oldest known ancestor. Even as language is lost, water remembers.

“We’re going to show these kids what it means to be Ho-Chunk,” Brown says. “This is Ho-Chunk land. This is where you’re supposed to be. They have a 1,000-year-old canoe, but your people have been here, and they’re still going to be here.”

Reflecting on previous canoe-building experiences, Brown recalls that a vessel is imbued with the spirits of its creators. Submerged in busy waters, the ancient vessel found in Lake Mendota had every reason to disappear in the 1,000-plus years since it sank. It should have disintegrated into the lake bed, splintered apart, broken into bits under the churning of boat motors, or been eaten by zebra mussels — and yet. The People of the Mother Tongue had the first word, and they will certainly have the last.

Dehydrating History

Lake Mendota is not done speaking. Since the retrieval of the dugout canoe, two more have been located near the site of the first. These vessels were found in fragments and will remain in their final resting place, though radiocarbon-dating will reveal their respective ages.

The discovery of the additional canoes in such proximity challenges the theory of shipwreck: in addition to dating the new canoes, Skibo is currently working to determine the location of ancient shorelines — some of the research that has yet to be conducted on this most-studied lake. Perhaps these canoes weren’t sunk, but were simply forgotten.

Today, the original canoe is back in water, this time in a rubber-lined vat in the State Archive Preservation Facility on Madison’s east side, just down shore from its resting place of over a millennium. It’s one year into a three-year preservation process involving a purified-water bath, UV-lights, and, eventually, polyethylene glycol, or PEG.

When removed from the environment that kept it safe through thousands of years, the canoe was held together only by the water in its cells. By gradually adding PEG to the solution in which the canoe rests, the preservative will replace the water in its cells before it’s freeze-dried to remove any excess water the PEG didn’t reach.

It’s up to us to preserve its memory now. •

Mildred crossed the Atlantic and enrolled in a doctoral program in Germany when she was 26, just as Hitler was rising to power. Appalled by the Nazi leader’s popularity, Mildred and Arvid began holding meetings in their Berlin apartment to discuss strategies of opposition. During the 1930s, their small, scrappy group intersected with three other resistance groups. By 1940, it was the largest underground resistance network in Berlin. In 1942, the Gestapo tracked them down. Arvid was hanged and Mildred was beheaded, the only American woman executed on Hitler’s direct order.

Mildred’s great-grandniece Rebecca Donner conducted extensive research, drawing on family records and archival documents in four countries — Germany, England, Russia, and the United States — to create a compelling chronicle of courageous resistance. Mildred tried to thwart Hitler by every means possible, recruiting Germans into the resistance, producing and distributing anti-Nazi leaflets, helping Jews escape Germany, and becoming a spy in an effort to defeat one of the greatest evils of the 20th century.

National Archives and Records Administration

Donner’s book, which she describes as a fusion of biography, espionage thriller, and scholarly detective story, has won numerous literary awards and is now out in paperback. We have excerpted a section that depicts Mildred and Arvid’s time at the UW and their move to Germany after their marriage.

From the book All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days by Rebecca Donner, published by Little, Brown & Company, an imprint of Hachette Books. Copyright © 2021 by Rebecca Donner.

IT IS SEPTEMBER 1, 1932.
In exactly seven years, the Second World War will begin.

This morning, by comparison, is not noteworthy. For Mildred it begins, we may imagine, like any other morning as she rises from a simple, wood-frame bed to draw back the curtains, letting in the light. Because the apartment has wide windows, there is plenty of it, even in the dead of winter, when the air in Berlin seems grainy, the texture and hue of chalk. A narrow hallway leads to the main room, where Mildred drifts from window to window, drawing back curtains. Bookcases crammed with well-loved books line the walls. Oil paintings of dense forests bring rich splashes of gold and emerald to an otherwise modestly furnished room. Here is a sofa with wooden armrests. Here are two tattered rugs. A sturdy round table, two sturdy chairs. Floor planks show their wear, pitted in places, and creak under Mildred’s feet as she moves to the far corner of the room, where a white porcelain stove stands, its thick pipe stretching to the ceiling. Sometimes there’s coal, sometimes there’s not. Today, perhaps, there is. Mildred stokes the coal lumps with an iron rod, bringing up fresh sparks. The water in the kettle she sets on the stove is enough for two cups of coffee, one for her, one for Arvid.

It’s by force of habit that she does this. She is alone, though not for long. Arvid will return from his trip to Russia soon, in time for her birthday. She will be 30 — is it possible? — in just over two weeks.

Breakfast is simple, usually nothing more than a hunk of bread swiped with whatever’s on hand — jam, butter, mustard, she’s not particular. At the center of the table, she likes to put a flower or two in a glass of water. Tulips in spring, lilacs in summer, alpine roses in the fall, honeysuckle in winter. Sometimes the flowers are from her students. Sometimes they’re from Arvid.

Arvid is a romantic. It’s a side others don’t see. Others see a man who wears round, owlish spectacles and rarely leaves the house without a necktie. (Behind closed doors, he happily yanks it off.) Others see a man who spends hours on end at his desk. (But Arvid loves nothing more than to amble around a mountain on a Sunday afternoon, letting his thoughts wander, inhaling the tart, bracing air.) And though it’s true that Arvid is a man who loves the certitude of cold, hard facts, his head is stuffed with poetry. He was made to read Goethe as a boy and can now, at 31, recite long verses from memory, murmuring them into her ear.

They met at the University of Wisconsin, when Arvid wandered into the wrong lecture hall. He’d wanted to watch Professor John Commons deliver a lecture on American labor unions, but the person at the lectern wasn’t Commons. It was Mildred, then a 25-year-old graduate student. The topic of her lecture was American literature, and he stayed until the end. Then he approached the lectern and introduced himself.

She’d gotten a BA in humanities and started her master’s. He had a law degree and was on his way to getting a PhD in philosophy. After these preliminaries were out of the way, Arvid told her — with a sweet, tenderhearted formality that pierced her to the core — that his family home was in Jena, a small university town along the Saale River in Germany. He spoke English awkwardly, though earnestly. How different he was from the Midwestern boys at the UW, boys who tackled each other in cornfields and on football fields, boys who bragged about all the money they’d make with their degrees, boys who vied for Mildred’s attention with boisterous jokes — Har-dee-har-har! — that weren’t at all funny, at least not to her, although you were supposed to smile anyway, smile and blush and flip your hand and say, Oh, you’re such an egg.

The second time they saw each other, Arvid brought her a fistful of wildflowers. He’d picked them himself. “A great bunch of thick, white odorous flowers mingled with purple bells,” Mildred wrote later, remembering every detail.

Courtesy of the Donner Family

It was morning — a “beautiful” one. Arvid stood on the porch of the two-story house where Mildred rented a room. The house was near campus, owned by a professor who lived there with his wife and their two children. The wife peeked through the curtains, absorbing the sight of blue-eyed Arvid and his wildflowers. She’d taken a keen interest in Mildred’s private life. As Mildred worked doggedly on her master’s degree, the professor’s wife may have believed the younger woman could benefit from a little motherly guidance, mindful that the wrong man could lead her astray. Or maybe she was just nosy. At last she closed the curtains and nodded her frank approval. “Men from the North Sea,” she said, “make very good husbands.”

A husband — good or otherwise — was not what Mildred was looking for. Not now. She was still reeling from a heart-wrenching breakup with an anthropology major from Kansas City named Harry, but she stepped onto the porch anyway, shutting the door behind her. Arvid gave her the wildflowers and expressed his hope that Mildred was having a good morning. He labored to soften his German accent, and she realized that he’d practiced what he was about to say many times before coming to her door. He wanted to take her canoeing — on Lake Mendota, he said, “the greatest of all the lakes.”

His shy gallantry.

All right, she told him, with a shy smile of her own. She would join him in a canoe.

Six months later, on a Saturday, they said their vows under an improvised bower on a ramshackle dairy farm.

Arvid Harnack and Mildred Fish Harnack met on the UW campus and married soon afterward. They then moved to Germany, Arvid’s home country, just as Hitler was rising to power. Courtesy of the Donner family

Arvid returned to Germany to finish his PhD. Mildred would join him soon; Goucher College in Baltimore had hired her to teach English literature for the 1928–29 term. While they were apart, they wrote long letters. They described the books they were reading, their plans for the future. They would both become professors and teach in German universities, and perhaps American universities too. Mildred ended her letters with a drawing of a sun. Arvid ended his letters with the same sun.

THERE ARE MOMENTS — this morning may be one of them — when she misses Arvid with a force that takes her breath away. Right now, he’s probably eating breakfast too, seated at a table in Moscow with a group whose very name is a mouthful: Arbeitsgemeinschaft zum Studium der sowjetischen Planwirtschaft, or Working Group for the Study of the Soviet Planned Economy. (Mildred prefers to refer to the group by its less cumbersome acronym, ARPLAN.) Its members include economists, political scientists, literary critics, politicians, and playwrights, among them self-avowed right-wing ultranationalists and die-hard Communists. In other circumstances, these strange bedfellows might not have shaken hands, much less sat around a breakfast table, but Arvid is optimistic; they may disagree about methodology, but they are united in their aim.

Germany is in crisis. Something must be done. By studying what appears to be a novel economic solution to the Soviet Union’s woes, Arvid hopes to discover a remedy for the crisis in his own country. Arvid is secretary of ARPLAN. He receives no pay for this work, but his compassion for the poor in Germany and his desire to devise a new economic model to address this problem drive him to his desk day and night.

There are two desks in the apartment. Arvid’s is a great expanse of carved wood that once belonged to his father. The other desk, equally imposing, was once his maternal grandfather’s — Arvid calls him Grossvater Reichau. This is Mildred’s desk now. A big slab of mahogany. Lectures, articles, translations — she writes them all in longhand, filling page after page before turning to the typewriter.

It’s here, at Grossvater Reichau’s great slab of a desk, that Mildred stokes her own outsize dreams. One day she will be a great literary scholar; she will write magnificent books. The desk imparts heft and weight and stability, qualities that are entirely foreign to Mildred. She has no family heirlooms of her own. Whatever slim sticks of furniture had cluttered the small, drafty rooms of her childhood she has long since left behind.

MILDRED DOESN’T LINGER LONG over breakfast. A final swallow of coffee and she’s on her feet again, setting the cup and saucer in the sink, brushing crumbs from her lips. Dirty dishes will accumulate there for days before she notices them, a teetering tower of plates and cups and cutlery. There are always better things to do than the dishes.

She’s still wearing a bathrobe over her nightgown and long, boiled-wool stockings knit by her mother, who bundled them up in a trim package that took two months to make its way from a transatlantic steamer ship to her front door. Her feet skim the creaking floorboards — the heel of one stocking is wearing thin — as she walks to a wide window and opens it. The air, crisp as a cold apple, invigorates her. She flings off her bathrobe.

She begins a series of exercises now, following directions from a book she bought for a few pfennigs. “Most of the exercises aim to strengthen the muscles of the abdomen,” she wrote to her mother last year, scribbling a hasty assurance that she and Arvid will have children “as soon as we can.” The routine — leg lifts and sit-ups and backbends — takes 20 minutes. She’s slender as a dancer, but she’s more earnest than graceful as she flails her arms, kicks her legs. Her nightgown bunches. Her stockinged feet on the wood floor skid and slip.

After exercising, she bathes quickly, using lard soap, and gets dressed.

Though today isn’t significant in the grand stretch of history, to Mildred it’s an important milestone. Today she begins a new teaching job at the Berliner Städtisches Abendgymnasium für Erwachsene — the Berlin Night School for Adults — nicknamed the BAG. There, she’ll come into contact with a fresh crop of German students, and she’s energized by the possibilities. They will be different from the students she taught at the University of Berlin — poorer, predominantly working class, mostly unemployed. Precisely the type of person the Nazi Party has been relentlessly targeting with propaganda.

See her now, striding out the front door with her leather satchel, descending four flights of stairs to the sidewalk. See her walking toward the U-Bahn station, swinging the satchel. In the eyes of her neighbors, she’s an American graduate student, nothing more. •

The rest of the book describes the couple’s resistance work in suspenseful detail, as well as documenting their tragic capture and death.

Schmitt ventures into the UW steam tunnels to give the rest of us a peek. Bryce Richter

Over the last couple months, writer Preston Schmitt ’14 and photographer Bryce Richter were two of the luckiest people at UW–Madison. They got to visit fascinating corners of campus that are hidden, hard to find, or completely inaccessible to the average person.

But the rest of us are lucky, too, because we can tag along on their journey. “UW Mysteries, Secrets, and Hidden Places” ventures down into tunnels, up into attics, and even out into the woods in search of legendary UW spots. It’s your once-in-a-lifetime chance to explore private areas of the university that coexist with the public ones in a parallel dimension.

“As a student, I’d heard rumors about some of these locations and have always been intrigued by them,” Schmitt says.

To find the shadowy spaces, Schmitt and Richter needed help from UW staff, who not only unlocked doors but also told stories likely to surprise you. Did you know about the charred timber in Bascom Hall’s attic from a devastating 1916 fire? About the Lost City in the Arboretum? About the remnants of a massive glass dome concealed above Memorial Union’s Great Hall?

“In some cases, the institutional knowledge of these places has simply been passed down by generations of UW employees,” Schmitt says. “The documentation that does exist often has to be pieced together through a century’s worth of newspaper and magazine archives.”

So what do we gain from this tour, other than the thrill of peeking behind curtains? By providing historical context for each location, the article significantly enriches our understanding of UW–Madison’s evolution. The next time you stroll through campus, you’ll surely see it with new eyes — and you’ll know that, above your head and beneath your feet, there’s more to this place than you ever dreamed of.

It made me wonder about other secret spots on campus, whether remnants of past glory or hidden inner workings. Would there be any way to visit them?

It turns out there is, with special permission (and a lot of keys). So over the course of two months, photographer Bryce Richter and I crisscrossed campus to uncover the stuff of UW legend. Few people have seen these fascinating locations and artifacts — until now. Join us on an exclusive tour of the UW’s hidden places.

The Charred Attic

At 10:15 a.m. on October 10, 1916, a chorus of fire alarms sounded inside Bascom Hall. It’s unclear how the fire started, though early speculation faulted a cigarette butt. Regardless, by 11 a.m., flames were shooting out of the building’s ornate dome as onlookers crowded Bascom Hill. Sections of the dome started to crumble in the blaze.

A 1916 fire destroyed Bascom Hall’s dome. UW Archives

Instructor Oscar Roeseler 1915, MS1916, watching from the Chemistry Building, wrote to his father that “a great sheet of flame shot through the top part of the dome. [It] seemed to lean a little, and then it collapsed, everything disappearing.”

Firefighters and volunteers confined the fire to the collapsed dome and the roof of the fourth floor before extinguishing it. The university erected a temporary roof and planned to ask the legislature to appropriate funds to reconstruct Bascom Hall’s crown. But the United States’ involvement in World War I delayed most construction efforts on campus. By 1921, reports on the project had petered out. A 1930s alumni magazine story stated that “the main structure would no longer support the erection of a heavy addition.” The dome was never replaced. We wanted to see the charred timber that remains in Bascom Hall’s unfinished attic. You can locate this room from the outside — look for the small oval window on the front of Bascom’s portico.

Building manager Lisa Walters ’88 leads us to the fourth floor and a locked door clad with insulation. The wind rustles the creaky rafters as we enter the attic. It’s largely empty, save for some empty shelving, moisture-damaged paperwork, spare lumber, and an abandoned Reebok sneaker. The oval window, framed by student graffiti, affords a singular view of State Street. As we glance up, we see blackened rafters and beams that trace how far the 1916 fire reached. Legend has it that the fire was finally defeated when the eight-ton dome collapsed into a large cistern beneath it. While that water tank did exist, I couldn’t find any contemporary newspaper accounts that confirm such a serendipitous event. The alumni magazine did report that hundreds of students provided “invaluable service in fighting the fire from the roof.”

A Subterranean Network

“Our forefathers who designed this were geniuses from a heating and cooling distribution standpoint,” says Edward Corcoran, steamfitter supervisor for the UW’s Physical Plant. And for him, forefathers is literal — his father, Kevin, held the same job. Who better to guide us around campus’s subterranean system of steam tunnels?

In the late 1890s, the university constructed the first underground tunnels with pipes carrying steam from central heating stations to campus buildings. With the addition of chilled water pipes to provide air conditioning, the tunnel system remains a far more efficient and economical way to heat and cool a sprawling campus compared to installing individual HVAC systems in every building.

Corcoran brings us down to the basement of the Agricultural Bulletin Building, constructed on Observatory Drive in 1899 as the central heating plant for west campus. Down here, we can explore two of the three remaining original brick-lined tunnels.

Before we enter them, we notice a massive black boiler. At the bottom of this relic are heavy steel doors where soot-covered workers once shoveled in coal by the thousands of tons to keep the campus warm. (Today, the steam system is powered by cleaner natural gas.) We then climb a ship ladder to a six-foot-high arched passage heading toward King Hall. When I touch one of the tan bricks, it releases a plume of salt. We hear the hisses of steam and the flow of running water as we navigate through the dark, damp, narrow tunnel. A few cockroaches scatter. Although the pipes are wrapped in four inches of insulation, it’s far warmer down here than it is outside. The ambient air temperature of the tunnels can rise as high as 130 degrees, Corcoran says. We reach a diminutive door at the end of the passage, and I can’t help but marvel at the artful brick arch framing it. I see more craftsman pride down here than in many new homes.

Most of the other brick-lined tunnels have been filled in and replaced with newer concrete tunnels or smaller box conduits. The route has become more efficient, but there are still three and a half miles of walkable tunnels snaking under campus. We head over to a new segment by the Gordon Dining and Event Center that stretches to Langdon Street. By comparison, the new tunnels are remarkably clean, bright, and spacious — not that you should go exploring unsupervised. The tunnels can be extremely dangerous (the steam travels at 425 degrees and 175 pounds per square inch in gauge pressure), and entering the locked passageways is a trespassing violation. We hope our photos satisfy your curiosity. To see how it feels down in the UW steam tunnels, check out this video.

Where Beetles Feast

Perhaps you’ve heard a rumor that six feet beneath Bascom Hill lies a climate-controlled chamber crawling with a colony of flesh-eating beetles.

That’s actually more fact than fable. The only objection you’ll hear from the keepers of this crypt is the descriptor flesh-eating. These tiny dermestid beetles can’t penetrate human skin. “They only like dried jerky,” says graduate researcher Jacki Whisenant ’11, MSx’22. But their appetite for residual meat makes them the perfect helpers for the UW Zoological Museum.

The museum keeps a catalogued collection of more than 500,000 animal specimens spanning the size chart from mussel shells to hippo skulls. Most of the specimens — including extinct species such as the passenger pigeon — are painstakingly preserved with skin or fur intact. But for research and teaching needs, some of them have to be reduced to the bones. And that’s where the beetles come in handy.

The beetles’ home is called the Dermestarium. Its unmarked exterior entrance is near Birge Hall’s Botany Greenhouse. “You wouldn’t notice it unless you were looking for it,” says museum associate director Laura Monahan ’02.

A dark hallway leads to a 300-square-foot arched brick room, where four stainless steel tanks hold the beetles feasting on the animal carcass of the day. They can reach and clean the deepest crevices of bone, finishing their dinner in a few days or weeks, depending on the size of the specimen. Other methods for precise cleaning, such as chemical maceration or boiling, risk damaging the bone. Originally, the Dermestarium space was a magnetic observatory. The university built it in 1876 for $1,200 to conduct research for the U.S. Coast Survey. It was concealed underground and constructed with two feet of dead-air space around it to control temperature for accurate measurements of Earth’s magnetic field. The space was later repurposed for cheese curing and oil storage and as a potato cellar before the zoology department acquired it in 1950. It’s become a perfect home for the picky beetles, which need steady warmth and humidity to survive. The museum staff members speak of them as if they were family — or roommates, as is currently the case for Dianna Krejsa. Nearby construction has temporarily blocked access to the Dermestarium, so the museum curator brought the beetles home.

“They’re on my sunporch with my plants,” she says, “with a humidifier and heater to try to keep them happy.”

The Anatomical Attic

In August 1974, graduate students in the geography department were cleaning out a room in Science Hall when they noticed a trap door to the building’s attic. Trained to be curious, they popped their heads through the opening and saw what they initially thought was a dead chicken. It turned out to be an embalmed human foot.

“[We] thought it was gross and ugly but were not horrified,” Jon Kimerling MS’73, PhD’76 told the Cap Times.

What the steely students had stumbled upon was research material from the attic’s old tenant: the anatomy department, which had moved out of the building in the mid-1950s but apparently left behind a few souvenirs. (A set of leg bones was also discovered in the ’70s and ’80s.) These stories, along with Science Hall’s undeniably spooky Romanesque Revival façade, have made the building a source of intrigue for paranormal enthusiasts.

We don’t count ourselves among the ghost-hunting ranks, but we did want to explore the eerie north-wing attic that welcomed the anatomy department around the turn of the 20th century. Building manager Jay Scholz takes us up to the fifth floor via Science Hall’s antique gold elevator, unlocks a couple of doors, and shows us the deserted space.

The anatomy department moved into Science Hall’s attic at the turn of the 20th century. UW Archives S11727

After the original burned down, the new Science Hall was one of the first buildings in the world constructed largely of masonry and structural steel in 1888. Up here, we can see how the workers crudely cut the Carnegie metal before acetylene torches were available — by drilling a row of jagged holes and bending the beams until they snapped.

In the attic, you can see how the 19th-century workers who constructed Science Hall crudely cut the Carnegie metal before acetylene torches were available.

No one is sure what this space was originally used for. The anatomy department’s dissection labs were on the fourth floor, with a winch that delivered cadavers up from the basement. According to Howard Veregin, the Wisconsin state cartographer, the most famous cadaver to come through Science Hall was that of Julian Carlton, who in 1914 murdered the companion of Frank Lloyd Wright x1890 and several others in the famed architect’s home.

A 1926 alumni magazine article offers some clues to the attic mystery, profiling Professor Arthur Loevenhart’s pharmacology lab, which studied neurosyphilis.

“An unused attic in the very top of the tower of Science Hall has been converted to one of the most attractive laboratories of its kind in the country,” it reported. “Here, a number of strains of trypanosomes … are maintained, as well as a large number of animals infected with syphilis.”

We do find signs of past research activity in the attic. Three rooms contain deteriorating lab benches with old, disconnected gas lines running to them and nearby sink fixtures. I see a storage cubby with the label “Dick Bunge” attached to it. A Google search reveals Richard Bunge ’54, MS’56, MD’60 studied anatomy at the UW and became a renowned professor at the University of Miami.

But much of the mystery of this space remains.

A Theater Hidden in Plain Sight

If you’ve ever sat for a lecture in Bascom Hall’s Room 272 — as Rodney Dangerfield did for a literature class in the movie Back to School — you’ve been to the Bascom Hall Theater. If you didn’t realize it, you’re not alone: the theater’s curtains have been closed for more than 80 years.

On May 18, 1927, the Bascom Hall Theater opened with a production of Outward Bound under the direction of speech professor William Troutman. Recognizing that the UW was lacking the theatrical equipment and space to host dramatic productions, the Board of Regents approved construction of a 414-seat theater with a two-story auditorium in the building’s newer west wing.

The UW’s alumni magazine called it “the finest college playhouse in the Middle West.” Troutman had even larger ambitions for the theater, labeling it “a center for the theater movement in Wisconsin” that will “endeavor to encourage new playwrights not only at the university, but throughout the state.” Students Don Ameche x’31 and Bernardine Flynn ’29 performed at the venue. (During renovations in 2020, workers uncovered graffiti with the future stars’ names.)

Bascom Hall Theater was the UW’s first theater, built in 1927 as “the finest college playhouse in the Middle West.” Wisconsin Historical Society

But by 1937, the alumni magazine was already lamenting the “inadequacy” of the theater. The much larger Memorial Union Theater opened in 1939, effectively decommissioning Bascom Hall as an arts venue. Despite a brief reopening in the late 1940s, the theater space transitioned to a full-time lecture hall.

Today, the biggest hint of the space’s history is the intricate proscenium arch that frames the lecture stage. It’s grander than you’d expect in an ordinary classroom.

But we wanted to see behind the scenes — literally.

Walters leads us to the back of Bascom Hall, through a locked and unlabeled door, to the theater’s original backstage area and fly loft. What’s now an oversized storage closet was once the command room for the university’s first theater.

Immediately, we notice the black spiral staircase leading to catwalks by the ceiling. Around the room’s brick-lined perimeter, original mechanicals are scattered among new wirings and 1980s fraternity graffiti. A slab of drywall permanently covers the area where the curtain once rose and fell.

The theater’s mechanicals are scattered around the original backstage area.

I try to envision the earliest days here, with young stagehands frantically pulling off the university’s first major productions.

“The theater is literally being flooded with hundreds who want to act, scores who want to shift scenery, dozens who want to work props, design costumes, and paint settings,” Troutman wrote proudly in 1928.

And so they coined the theater’s slogan: “Dramatics for all.”

The Concealed Glass Dome

When Memorial Union opened its doors in fall 1928, visitors who entered Great Hall were treated to a churchly view. Suspended 25 feet above the room, a massive Tiffany glass dome sparkled with sunlight. “[The] dominating oval space in the ceiling is made of cathedral hammered glass and illuminated by a skylight above,” the UW’s alumni magazine wrote at the time.

But few visitors alive today have ever seen this work of art. The skylights leaked like a sieve, rendering the dome an instant liability. In the late 1940s, Wisconsin Union staff decided to seal the skylights, plaster under the dome, and remove its glass. If you know where to look in Great Hall today, copper detailing on the ceiling traces the dome’s outline. What’s left of the actual dome has been concealed from public view for nearly 75 years.

So we asked for a look above the ceiling.

Behind a small metal door in the Memorial Union attic lies the original dome.

“We don’t do a lot of tours up here,” says Paul Broadhead, the Wisconsin Union’s assistant director for facilities management. He leads us to the fifth floor, through the Marketing and Graphics Office and a thick, locked door. This surprisingly spacious attic is where Memorial Union’s mechanicals are housed. Climbing down a couple ship ladders, we reach a small metal door. Behind it lies the dome’s 400-square-foot metal frame.

The scale is still impressive, despite the structure’s dusty, rusted, and naked appearance. A small oval pattern lines the outer ring, helping us imagine the intricate glasswork that once made the dome shine. The original swinging doors for the skylights remain, though the opening is covered with plywood and roofed over. A couple sheets of plastic are draped over the dome, offering evidence of past leaks.

“What it’s really become is a structural support element for the plastered ceiling below,” Broadhead says.

There have been unsuccessful efforts in recent years to raise private funds to restore the dome, with estimates as high as $500,000. The most realistic and cost-effective approach, Broadhead says, would be creating an homage to the dome below the existing ceiling rather than attempting to reuse the original frame.

“I don’t think there are very many people left who remember it,” he adds. “The folks who are nostalgic are those who have heard stories about it.”

Madison’s Lost City

Deep in the woods of UW–Madison’s Arboretum lies the hidden history of a utopian subdivision gone wrong, doomed by human greed and swallowed up by Mother Nature. Before its remains became known as the Lost City, the planned community was called Lake Forest — “the greatest piece of work of its kind that has ever been undertaken in Wisconsin,” according to a 1920 Lake Forester promotional newsletter.

Developers Chandler Chapman and Leonard Gay indeed had a grand vision for the 840-acre Lake Forest tract off the southern shore of Lake Wingra. After years of intensive dredging to build up marshland into residential habitat, they sought to create a new type of living community — a “Venice of the North” where urban housing would coexist with spacious parks and playgrounds, spring-fed lagoons, streetcar service, a golf course, and a civic center encircled by businesses. Between 1918 and 1921, the Lake Forest Company poured roadways and constructed single-family homes.

Lake Forest was planned as a Venice of the North: “the greatest piece of work of its kind that has ever been undertaken in Wisconsin.” But all that remains of this house are crumbling concrete steps deep in the woods of the Arboretum.

But today, all that remains of that 1,000-lot planned paradise are some streets, seven still-occupied houses (many of them between Carver and Martin Streets), a brick pump station, and two large craters in the ground of the Lost City Forest.

Consumed by wilderness, the crumbling foundations within the Arboretum are well off trail and extremely hard to find. To protect habitat, the Arboretum offers only one guided tour each year around Halloween. Naturalist educator Kathy Miner ’76, MA’04 took us on an exclusive visit.

Why did the Lake Forest development fail so spectacularly? First, the terrain proved untamable, with concrete roads and foundations sinking into swampy soil. Second, World War I caused a shortage of workers and a rise in the cost of building materials, slowing construction projects. And third, the Madison Bond Company, which underwrote the whole development, defaulted after its president was convicted of mail fraud. By 1922, the development had effectively died.

Our journey to the Lost City begins on Martin Street, which extends into a public trail of the Arboretum. The concrete path, once a boulevard, is a relic of Lake Forest. Eventually, we head off trail, fight through dense thicket, and reach the concrete remains of Capitol Avenue. Now almost entirely covered with leaves and dirt but evident from its raised grading, this was to be the main diagonal roadway that led to the civic center circle and pointed straight to the state capitol.

We follow Capitol Avenue, avoiding branches and stepping over stumps, when a surprisingly square object emerges from nature. Miner climbs on top.

“I am standing on the front steps of the house that once stood at lot 14 Capitol Avenue, Lake Forest,” she announces.

Behind the moss-covered concrete steps is a massive hole with remnants of the home’s poured-concrete foundation and a matching set of back steps. A July 15, 1921, article in the Lake Forester noted of this once-standing abode: “The porches are of concrete; the house is roomy though compact; and the workmanship is excellent throughout.”

Following Capitol Avenue, we reach another set of front steps. This one is sinking unevenly, and behind it are a scattering of cinderblocks and a large, mysterious metal pipe sticking up from the ground. After Lake Forest collapsed around it, this house’s isolated locale made it a perfect speakeasy during Prohibition until it burned down in 1928. The UW acquired large portions of the Lake Forest area between the 1930s and the 1960s after “untangling knotty legal problems,” the alumni magazine reported in 1967.

Developers had a grand vision for the 840-acre tract off the southern shore of Lake Wingra. Wisconsin Historical Society

An initiative kicked off last November to restore the Lost City Forest — now overrun with invasive shrubs like buckthorn and honeysuckle — to its original oak savanna landscape. According to land care manager Michael Hansen, you could practically see through the forest until the 1950s. But clearing the whole area could take decades, so rest assured that the Lost City will remain lost for a while longer.

The Tent Colony

Today, a family living in a university apartment at Eagle Heights would pay at least $962 per month. In 1912, that family could have stayed on campus the whole summer for $5. There was just one catch: you had to pitch a tent. The university’s Tent Colony — colloquially named Camp Gallistella after its beloved on-site supervisors, Albert and Eleanor Gallistel — originally popped up when a group of agriculture students asked to stay along the forested shore of Lake Mendota during summer session. The site west of Frautschi Point (now part of the UW’s Lakeshore Nature Preserve) soon turned into a popular destination for penny-pinchers, especially male schoolteachers pursuing graduate degrees during the summer with wives and children in tow. By the 1930s, there were as many as 65 tent platforms and 300 residents. The stateliest shelters featured light wood framing, tarpaper, and canvas. While the students made the two-mile trip to class by ferry boat, bike, or foot, their spouses attended to chores around camp. The kids enjoyed a classic lake life of swimming, fishing, and boating. The camp considered itself a little city and held elections each year for mayor and other official roles, including treasurer, postmaster, athletics director, aldermen, and newsletter editor. The only comforts provided by the university were two screened and lighted study halls, pit latrines, a hand-operated water pump, and a telephone in the Gallistells’ cottage near the grounds. By 1962, the Gallistells had retired, the infrastructure had fallen into disrepair, and most married students had opted for modern amenities in the new Eagle Heights community across the road. Camp Gallistella closed for good. Perhaps it’s no surprise that such a minimalist sect left behind little for us to see in Tent Colony Woods. Outreach coordinator Bryn Scriver ’97, MS’05 guides us through some of the Lakeshore Nature Preserve’s least-visited paths along the narrow and steep shoreline. It’s hard to imagine that this tranquil forest once vibrated with the activity of hundreds of young families. We embark on a scavenger hunt for slightly-too-square objects. Along the lakeside path, a concrete foundation marks the spot of the old well. In the woods, we find a pair of cement structures that held the outhouses. And by the shore, we locate small concrete and metal pieces from one of the swimming piers.

In the spring, visitors may notice a peculiar plant for the middle of the woods: daylilies. And that’s because Mrs. Gallistel planted them there. •

With images like Mark Twain’s 1870 “Fortifications of Paris,” the History of Cartography Project shows how different eras have thought about space. . Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division

For more than 40 years, UW–Madison’s History of Cartography Project has labored over a reference work of maps and map history, bringing together cutting-edge research and a colorful collection of stories. The final of six volumes, Cartography in the Nineteenth Century, will soon be completed, thanks to $350,000 in funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Rich in content, with millions of words and thousands of illustrations, the project is drawing international attention to the history of mapping.

The project comprises an interpretive encyclopedia of 409 entries written by 193 contributors. Five volumes were published between 1987 and 2019, and the full series will eventually be made available in both print and digital forms.

The History of Cartography Project began at UW–Madison in 1981, when its founding editors, the late David Woodward MA’67, PhD’70 and J. B. Harley, envisioned a reference work that would examine maps across cultures and in all eras.

“When volume one came out in 1987, it was absolutely revolutionary, and it prompted so much new work in classical mapping and especially in medieval mapping,” says Matthew Edney MS’85, PhD’90, who came to the project in 1983 as a graduate student before succeeding the founding editors in 2005. “The project makes you think about how someone — maybe the Romans, for example — thought about space.”

The online edition, which includes four volumes, has received four million views since 2011. Chapters have also been translated into many languages. The project launched an online video series in spring 2021 to promote Cartography in the European Enlightenment.

Creating each million-word volume is a painstaking exercise, with years of fact-checking, translating, editing, and image acquisition. It brings Edney back to Science Hall two or three times a year, in addition to frequent virtual meetings.

The History of Cartography Project appeals to scholars, but Edney notes that entries are written for a broader audience.

“[We] always asked ourselves, ‘Will this be understood by a high school student in Romania?’ ”