1. Bremer, Harry M. Wisconsin Agriculture. National Child Labor Committee; 1913. ??? (NCLC Investigation Report ; 209.
  1. Goc, Michael J. “The Wisconsin Dust Bowl”. Wisconsin Magazine of History. 1990 Spring; 73(3):163-201.Notes: The Central Sands Region of Wisconsin covers parts of eleven counties in central Wisconsin and this study looks at how seventeen townships in four of those counties (Adams, Juneau, Portage and Wood) were affected by what came to be known as the Wisconsin Dust Bowl, caused by the same combination of drought and soil erosion as the famous Dust Bowl in the Great Plains from approximately 1932 to 1940. In this fascinating article, Goc creates a vivid picture of the difficult conditions endured by farmers of the Central Sands Region of Wisconsin during a severe drought in the spring of 1934, including some severe dust storms in the area.Besides an emergency seed program and other forms of direct relief granted to the farmers, longer-term strategies were also undertaken, such as resettlement of some farmers to land more suited to agriculture, use of more suitable crops, better soil conservation techniques to preserve more moisture, construction of more dams, and the restoration of wetland areas. The planting of shelterbelts of pine trees to protect the edges of cleared fields proved to be among the most effective actions taken. Four varieties of pine were preferred for this purpose in the central Wisconsin area: white pine, red pine (also known as Norway pine), jackpine (also known as Banks pine), and Scotch pine; the first three were native to the area, but the Scotch pine originated in Europe.
  1. Gough, Robert. Farming the Cutover: A Social History of Northern Wisconsin, 1900-1940. Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas; 1997. 295 p. Notes: At the time of settlement by Euro-Americans, the northern-most third of Wisconsin was almost entirely covered by an old-growth forest of pine and hardwoods, which varied depending on the soil and moisture conditions in each local area. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century commercial loggers clear cut almost one hundred percent of that great forest of northern Wisconsin; this “cutover region” is made up of eighteen Wisconsin counties: Ashland, Bayfield, Burnett, Douglas, Florence, Forest, Iron, Langlade, Lincoln, Marinette, Oconto, Oneida, Price, Rusk, Sawyer, Taylor, Vilas, and Washburn. (The only portion of the original forest to be left intact was that held by the Native American tribe of the Menominee Nation, who at the time of the cutover refused to permit the commercial loggers to clear cut their reservation in Oconto and Shawano counties; in fact, today their Menominee Reservation makes up virtually the only old-growth forest remaining in the entire state of Wisconsin.)With the assistance of governmental state boosterism, the lumber companies sold off the land after the last of the forest had been cut down to families for small farms. The chiefly cool-climate forest soils of the area and the mass of stumps left in place by the lumber companies combined, however, to make agriculture in the “cutover region” a very daunting endeavor. In this outstanding example of a social history, Gough looks at how the development and settlement of northern Wisconsin was influenced by a host of factors, including the environmental, commercial, governmental, political, professional and academic. It is refreshing to find a book which gives the settlers of this region the respect they deserve for what they accomplished and which is sensitive to how they struggled to overcome the challenging circumstances they faced.Farming the Cutover received a “Book Award of Merit” in 1998 from the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
  1. Hine, Lewis. Midwest Agriculture. National Child Labor Committee; 1916. ??? (NCLC Investigation Report ; 222.
  1. Jacobs, Herbert. “The Wisconsin Milk Strikes”. Wisconsin Magazine of History. 1951 Autumn; 35(1):30-35.
  2. Jamieson, Stuart. Labor Unionism in American Agriculture. Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics; 1945. 457 p. (Bulletin; no. 836). Notes: A detailed report describing unionization efforts in agriculture throughout the entire United States from about 1910 to 1940; for details on the situation in Wisconsin, see Chapter 21, “Farm-Labor Unionism in the Great Lakes Region” (p. 373-395).The author reports on “the combinations of circumstances that gave rise to organized labor-employer conflicts in agriculture; the types of farming and the changes in farm structure and labor relations that tended to generate such conflict; the issues over which the labor disputes on farms occurred, and the tactics of group pressure and combat employed by the contending parties; the reactions of nominally neutral or disinterested groups in rural communities to farm labor unions and strikes, and the degree to which their reactions were influenced or governed by economic interest, social status, cultural tradition, or politico-legal considerations” (p. 1). The organizing efforts by the American Federation of Labor, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Congress of Industrial Organization are all examined.
  1. Piech, Roman. “The Wisconsin Milk Strike of 1933”. IN: Holter, Darryl. Workers and Unions in Wisconsin: A Labor History Anthology. Madison, Wis.: State Historical Society of Wisconsin; 1999; pp. 118-119. Notes: Excerpted from an academic paper written in 1935 for the School for Workers at the University of Wisconsin, here are the reminiscences of a member of the National Guard about his Wisconsin unit being called out to confront farmers outside of Shawano, Wisconsin during the 1933 milk strike of Wisconsin farmers.
  1. Stare, Fred A. The Story of Wisconsin’s Great Canning Industry. Madison, Wis.: published for the Wisconsin Canners Association by The Canning Trade; 1949. 630 p. Notes: Written by an insider of the Wisconsin canning trade, this book is included here because of the reference value of its three hundred pages of histories of individual Wisconsin canning companies from their earliest days in the late 1880s up to the late 1940s. There is also an extensive year-by-year history of the development of the canning trade in Wisconsin from 1887 through 1948–all the improvements in machinery step by step, all the weather conditions season by season, all the management changes. But no mention of the employees in the industry (except for an occasional mention in an individual company’s history regarding the number of employees involved with its operations.
  1. Walsh, Margaret. “The Manufacturing Frontier: Pioneer Industry in Antebellum Wisconsin, 1830-1860”;Notes: Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1969. 2 volumes (564 leaves). In an impressive work of original research, Walsh explores the development of manufacturing in Wisconsin from 1830, when settlement by northern European immigrants increased dramatically, to 1860 just prior to the U.S. Civil War. The author provides a statewide survey of the subject, as well as extensive discussion regarding the economies of six Wisconsin counties, selected as being representative of the different development patterns in Wisconsin during the period. The profiled counties are Jefferson, Grant, Winnebago, Eau Claire, Racine, and Milwaukee; the examples they represent are drawn from agriculture, lumbering, and mining, in addition to both rural and urban settings. With the state’s plentiful raw materials and good natural transportation routes helping to create a strong manufacturing base, the author concludes that it was not surprising that by 1860 Wisconsin’s industrialization had achieved significance not only for the Midwest, but also for the nation as a whole. The major primary sources used by the author included “the federal manuscript censuses for the state of Wisconsin, 1850 and 1860, schedule 5, products of industry, the Dun & Bradstreet handwritten commercial credit rating reports for Wisconsin, 1844-1865, and local newspapers … supplemented by manuscript business papers, agricultural and trade journals, city directories, reports of boards of trade and chambers of commerce and official state and federal government publications” (p. 538). For a fuller abstract, see Dissertation Abstracts International, 1970, 31/01, p. 348-A.
  2. —. The Manufacturing Frontier: Pioneer Industry in Antebellum Wisconsin, 1830-1860. Madison, Wis.: State Historical Society of Wisconsin; 1972. 263 p. Notes: A revision of the author’s thesis (Ph.D.)–University of Wisconsin. Walsh explores the development of manufacturing in Wisconsin from 1830, when settlement by northern European immigrants increased dramatically, to 1860 just prior to the U.S. Civil War. The author provides a statewide survey of the subject, as well as extensive discussion regarding the economies of six Wisconsin counties, selected as being representative of the different development patterns in Wisconsin during the period. The profiled counties are Jefferson, Grant, Winnebago, Eau Claire, Racine, and Milwaukee; the examples they provide are drawn from agriculture, lumbering and mining, in addition to both rural and urban settings. With the state’s plentiful raw materials and good natural transportation routes helping to create a strong manufacturing base, the author concludes that it was not suprising that by 1860 Wisconsin’s industrialization had achieved significance not only for the Midwest, but also for the nation as a whole.This book won the D.C. Everest Prize in Wisconsin Economic History.