UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM

					Interview #969
				      BOGUE, MARGARET

BOGUE, Margaret Beattie (1924- )
Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin Extension and University of Wisconsin – Madison Division of Outreach and the College of Letters and Sciences Department of History
At UW:  1966-1991

Interviewed:  June 16, 2008 
Interviewer:  Sandy Pfahler
Transcriptionist: Allison Page
Length:  2 hours

	[See index for Key Words]

First Interview Session (June 16, 2008)
00:00:00 
SP: 	Today is Monday June 16, 2008. My name is Sandy Pfahler and I’m an interviewer for the University of Wisconsin—Madison Oral History Project. Today I’m interviewing UW—Madison Professor Emerita [Emeritus] of History and Liberal Studies, Margaret Beattie Bogue. Dr. Bogue received her PhD from Cornell University in 1955. She started her career at Vassar College and also spent a year at the University of Western Ontario. In 1966 she joined the University of Wisconsin Extension where she worked until 1983. At that time she moved to the UW—Madison Division of Outreach and in 1989 she also joined the Department of History. She retired from the University in 1991. Good morning.
MB: 	Good morning.
SP: 	We’re going to start this interview by asking you about your early life; where and when you were born, describe your childhood, your early schooling, [and] talk about any family members, teachers or others who encouraged you in your studies. 
MB: 	Thank you. I was born in Washington, D.C. on June 14, 1924 and in the years 1924 through 1935 I lived in McLean, Virginia in the family home on an eleven-acre piece of land complete with orchards, barn, garden and chicken house. McLean was a very sleepy little rural village in contrast to today, now an upscale Washington suburban commuter community of mega residences and commercial buildings. The family moved to Beltsville, Maryland in 1935 to reside on the U.S. Department of Agriculture Historical—excuse me—Horticultural Experiment Station where my father temporarily abandoned his scientific work in order to take charge of developing the newly-created station. We moved to Cheverly, Maryland in 1944 at the beginning of my senior year in university. As for early schooling, I attended Franklin Sherman School in McLean, Virginia first through fifth grade and then went to sixth and seventh grade at University Park Elementary School in College Park, Maryland; and then to Hyattsville High School in Hyattsville, Maryland, 1937 to 1941. Those who encouraged me in my studies included my parents who both put a high premium on education, all you could get. Teachers, truly all my teachers did. The most notable teacher was the American history teacher in high school, Adelaide [Clout?], I had always loved history and she was a major influence in my decision to major in history at the university. As for my undergraduate work, I did my undergraduate work at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, 1941 through 1945. In truth I did not make the choice of where I would go to college, it was always assumed that I would go there given the Depression years, the necessity for economy, I could live at home and thus save a good deal of money and at a minimized cost all around. My parents financed my undergraduate education and I did have, in retrospect it seemed to me, I had a very fine undergraduate education at the University of Maryland because it opened new doors of thinking and new attitudes to me that I had not had before. I was very, very determined to work hard and get the highest possible grades. I began in the School of Education thinking of becoming a high school teacher. I found education courses boring and in the second year I switched to the College of Arts and Sciences focusing on history as a major. I decided I would shoot for college or university teaching and thus planned to go on to graduate school. 

The undergraduate years were a time of truly expanding horizons for me. They challenged me to think about my mindset on political and social issues, I changed from being a conservative to a liberal, from acceptance of the ideas that Blacks were inferior and a segregated society was appropriate and I came out of my undergraduate experience believing that these people should be treated as equals, in other words, equality became my attitude as opposed to inferior status. It was the influence of my teachers and coursework and the terrible, various terrible anti-Black episodes I personally witnessed. I might just to mention one of those in passing because it’s so vivid. While living on the U.S. Department of Agriculture Horticultural Experiment Station, my father who was in charge of things hired a very, very fine Black man who was to be—well he had a kind of superior position in the work force, supervising other workers and so on—and he gave him a house to live in there on the property. And one Sunday afternoon as we were getting ready to go in to the symphony concert at Constitution Hall in Washington, a car drove up to our backdoor, a man got out of the car waving his hands, yelling, and threatening at my father to the effect that he had better move that man out of there or he was going to burn his house down.
SP: 	Oh my goodness!
MB: 	So that’s a sample of the kind of thing that made me understand what terrible, terrible kinds of discrimination, violent kinds of discrimination, existed in our community.
SP:	 Can I ask what happened?
MB: 	My father went to him and he told him he deeply regretted having to ask him to move but he thought that he should for the safety of himself and his family. And he moved. Another vivid memory of undergraduate days was World War II, on how it cast a shadow over virtually everything we did. Going to university in the dark and watching the sun rise from the chemistry lab window and worst of all, seeing the flag at half-staff as I walked from the bus stop up the hill to class after Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on April 2, 1945. As a senior I worked as a Red Cross nurse’s aid on Saturdays in the local hospital, Prince George’s General, and that too was a very educational experience. There I also learned more about the terrible, terrible things that were happening to Black people in our own community. 
00:07:20
MB: 	The idea of majoring in history, for me, at university was just a kind of a natural. I’d always loved it I think in large part because I grew up with it. The Civil War was all around, evidence of it, old battlegrounds. The War of 1812, Dolly Madison had fled from the White House to a rather attractive brick residence that was not terribly far from our home. And also there was a great lot of talk about Mount Vernon, Monticello, and so on and so on. And so that kind of—you kind of were living in history when you lived in McLean, Virginia and the people there who are still, believe it or not, the really old residences still hark back to the Civil War days, it’s just amazing. The emphasis on Virginia history in grade school and the wonderful history teacher in high school also inclined me toward majoring in history. At the University of Maryland I had very fine young historians who all went on to become professionally outstanding in the field of American history, two were University of Wisconsin products, Frank Freidel, biographer of Franklin Delano Roosevelt; Kenneth Stampp, Civil War and Reconstruction; and the third, Richard Hofstadter, Pulitzer Prize winner in American Intellectual History for his [The] Age of Reform. They were all there in College Park, Maryland to take advantage of the rich resources in the National Archives and the Library of Congress as they were beginning their careers in a scholarly way. They were also very fine classroom instructors and I should mention that Frank Freidel, whom I had as an undergraduate, remained my friend throughout his lifetime and is he who got me my first job at Vassar College. My most notable course was a pro-seminar in historical writing taught by Richard Hofstadter who was then working on The American Political Tradition. He introduced me to original research and whetted my appetite for more. 
00:09:37
MB: 	Graduate work. Well, where and why? I went to Cornell University to do my graduate work in Ithaca, New York. The idea that I wanted an Ivy League degree was part of—the reason for that in my state of ignorance and without the benefit advice from any of my historical friends and history professors, I sent off an application to Columbia, one to Columbia University in New York City, and one to Cornell. Both offered assistance, Cornell’s being the most generous, I accepted it. I had no really well-formed ideas about what part of American history I wanted to concentrate on but I did have some fleeting thoughts about doing something with the Civil War but I wasn’t really terrible serious about that. I chose Paul W. Gates as my major professor. He was a very lively, outgoing, bundle of energy in his mid-forties, enthusiastically, very enthusiastically, absorbed in research, a person with contagious enthusiasm and, at that point, he was deep into Midwestern land policy with his research interests. He was given to strong criticism of student reports in seminar, he was tough, he was demanding, for example he insisted that an acceptable doctoral dissertation should be ready or all virtually ready for publication right away, that that would be an important step in any young historian’s career. And right he was. This was in the mid-1940s, just after World War II when women’s role in society was strongly dominated by the ideal of domesticity, woman as wife, mother, and homemaker. Women in most professions, as university faculty, as business executives, as pastors, or doctors, in politics, et cetera were not ideal women. Professor Gates had married a Harvard University history major who was still working on her doctoral dissertation. He believed women would make fine history faculty and gladly accepted women graduate students. He never gave up the idea in his long years of directing graduate work in American history at Cornell and saw seven women through to the PhD, six of whom ended up as tenured faculty in major colleges and universities. He was a rare bird during the decades before the women’s rights movement when many male graduate directors frowned up women as a bad risk and a waste of time. I was very fortunate to work under his direction and, you know, I just stumbled into that, I didn’t know that about him, but I found that and I think that was remarkable. Other very influential faculty there at Cornell were Robert Cushman in constitutional law, in which I had a minor, and John G.B. Hutchins, professor of economics, another minor—he was deeply interested in economic history and had written on the American maritime industry. I was a teaching assistant for Paul W. Gates’ huge American history survey and that involved teaching—excuse me—involved teaching discussion sections, office hours with students, and grading exams. I was required to give one lecture to a full class because he wanted to find out if I could do it [laughs]. He put all his graduate students to that test.
SP:	 Obviously you could do it.
MB: 	And as for research, Professor Gates continued work on a document collection he had recently acquired for the collection of regional history while he was doing research in Illinois. This became my master’s thesis; it was an exciting experience working with personal documents supplemented with search in the National Archives. For my doctorate I used the master’s thesis as a launching pad for a much broader project on land use and tenure in the Grand Prairie of Illinois [Patterns from the Sod: Land Use and Tenure in the Grand Prairie, 1850-1900?] in the late 19th century. My good fortune was to receive a research training grant from the Social Science Research Council and a jointly held doctoral fellowship grant from the American Association of University Women. This financed a full year of research in Illinois, the dissertation was published in 1959. 
00:14:12
MB:	 As for coming to Wisconsin, I came to Wisconsin as a faculty wife. In 1950, Allan Bogue and I had gotten married. We had been colleagues, coworkers, and fellow graduate students at Cornell since 1947. He had come to Cornell from London, Ontario; I had come to Cornell from Washington, D.C. Now we both still had to complete our doctoral dissertations at the time of our marriage. After twelve years as first an assistant and then an associate professor of history at the state university of Iowa in Iowa City, he was hired here at the University of Wisconsin as a historian of the American west to replace Vernon Carstensen. I had no job offer but had decided that after twelve years away from [a] formal professional position I should return to teaching right away or all was lost—by that time I was forty. And I came with hope of finding such an opportunity here. During those twelve years we had both completed our doctoral dissertations and on a personal level produced three wonderful daughters, both of us had seen our doctoral dissertations published and well received in the profession. He pursued career job research teaching and publication tasks, I felt strongly that I wanted to stay full-time with our children until they were in school before returning to professional employment. A risk, yes, a risk but it was well worth it. In the fall of 1964 our youngest began kindergarten at Randall School [Randall Elementary School?] here in Madison. As for positions held before coming to Madison, following my year of research in Illinois I had taught, 1949 to ’51, at Vassar College and as I had mentioned it was Frank Freidel who helped me get that job. The courses there were the U.S. survey, American cultural history, recent American history. In 1951-’52 I taught on an ad hoc basis English history at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario where Al had taken his first faculty position in 1949. As for the UW hiring process, it was truly unusual in terms of what we think of as [the] UW hiring process. My entry was not traditional in any sense of the word, I began as an ad hoc instructor for the University of Wisconsin Extension, which in the mid ‘60s conducted an extensive evening credit course here in Madison—I taught U.S. history survey. I was hired to do it simply on the basis of my academic credentials; there was no formal hiring process. In the years following my ad hoc night teaching in 1966, my responsibilities at UW Wisconsin Extension grew and changed. In early 1967 I received a half-time appointment as assistant professor heading the history unit in the state-wide extension program. Duties in that position included supervision of history correspondence study program. The correspondence study program at that point in time was very large and very important, much more so, it’s dwindling in importance now, but it was very important at that time to many, many people who could not really handle attendance in classes on campuses. This involved hiring graders, finding authors for study guides primarily from among the Madison campus History Department faculty for the college-level credit courses, finding authors elsewhere for the high school-level offerings, and supervising graders—graders for college-level credit courses came from the ranks of the Madison department’s graduate students for the most part. The same functions became our responsibility for the work this history unit did to fulfill the U.S. Armed Forces Institute contract with the University of Wisconsin, a very large program generating tens of thousands of pieces of written work, lessons and exams to be graded, critiqued, and returned to servicemen both in this country and abroad. This was a sizeable administrative responsibility for the military that lasted well into the 1970s when the military decided to shift their educational work more toward classroom instruction rather than through the correspondence study. As for promotions and changes in appointment while here at Wisconsin I can summarize them this way: I was an instructor from 1966 to ’67, assistant professor ’67 to ’71, associate professor ’71 to ’76, professor ’76 through ’91, full professor. These were within Extension or in the Department of Liberal Studies, Division of Outreach UW—Madison, beginning in 1983. I held a joint appointment with the UW—Madison Department of History, 1989 through ’91. It was a twenty-five year climb, I retired in July of 1991 and I will explain the climb as we go. 
00:20:00
MB: 	My work with the Extension and the Division of UW Outreach was truly unique, a most unusual appointment in the sense that its requirements were ever-changing and called for all different sorts of teaching and administrative experiences under the general umbrella of serving an educational role for the people of Wisconsin, both traditional and non-traditional students. The challenges of designing and redesigning the format of offerings and often completely changing content, experimenting with what would and wouldn’t work, those challenges were always there and it took a great deal of thought to try to figure it out. My superiors left such decisions to their faculty, suggesting what seemed to them to be general areas where they might consider in programming as worthy of attention. Given the kind of state funding our segment of the University received, my administrative superiors had to keep close watch on how well the required income that we generated from our courses and our teaching met fixed goals. There was no fixed formula such as teaching a given number of classes at stated times, directing graduate students, and making professional headway with research and publication as was the case with more traditional types of appointments within the University. My work entailed a good deal of evening and weekend teaching, a lot of traveling, at times on the road for several days in order to carry out what was needed for one particular program and emphasizing onsite instruction as one traveled with the group. That, in general, is a description of the non-credit type of thing. The administrative tasks, aside from those that I’ve already described in connection with my appointment to tenured track faculty position, namely with reference to the correspondence study program, both the University’s correspondence study program and the U.S. Armed Forces Institute. The other administrative things that I might mention: I was chair, Department of History University of Wisconsin Extension, 1967 to ’82, associate chair, Human Resources Development, 1976 to ’83—it was a large unit including humanities, arts, government and sciences within extension. I was chair of the Department of Liberal Studies Extension and Madison campus Division of Outreach, September 1987 to June 1988. Grant writing to secure funds for the program was an important function of administration while I was in these positions. I was successful in securing six grants and served as director for them, two were from the Wisconsin Humanities Committee, three from the University of Wisconsin College Sea Grant program, and one from the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission. I served as co- or assistant director to two federally funded grants, one a cooperative effort with the University of Wisconsin—Madison School of Education and the other a UW College Sea Grant program project twice funded by the Wisconsin Humanities Committee. And now on from administration and then we’ll talk a little bit about teaching. Teaching went along with administrative work. Basically, I taught two types of offerings: non-credit programs for the general adult public and traditional classroom, on-campus credit courses for Extension and for the Madison campus departments. The credit classes taught for Madison departments were: History 397: The United States, 1917 (4 credits) in 1979; History 390: History of Wisconsin in 1980, 1984, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990 (3 credits); Integrated Liberal Studies 225: American Society, 1607-1900 (4 credits), cross-listed with the History Department in 1977, 1978, and 1979. Prior to the spring semester of 1977, I taught History 101, 102, and 397 for the University of Wisconsin Extension Madison night class programs. So the classroom teaching component was always there, that is a credit type along with the rest. [I] need to take a little break.
SP: 	Okay.
00:25:05
MB: 	The non-credit adult education offerings taught included one, two, three and four-day fieldtrips in Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Indiana, Michigan and the Province of Ontario; lecture series and workshops on various topics in American history for the general public. I usually taught ten to twelve such offerings per year but was responsible for programming and administration of those offerings I did not teach. I worked closely with the UW College Sea Grant program, the Wisconsin Humanities Committee, and the Wisconsin Historical Society both as a consultant and as a teaching participant in a number other projects. I also did a number of lectures around the state on history topics as requested by other campuses of the UW system, libraries, senior citizens groups, and various branches of the state and federal government. Given my background in American history and Midwestern regional history in particular, plus the necessity of creating programs that would appeal to the general public, capture interest and demonstrate how history contributes to understanding the present; I had to experiment with ways to accomplish this. Mine was a background in traditional classroom teaching where the students were a ready-made degree-orientated body of students, a captive audience if you will. Non-credit, non-traditional students were a different matter. Persons who came forward because they were interested in the content of a particular offering, the non-traditional students, were a pure delight. They came by personal choice, they were eager, attentive, full of questions, they spoiled me. Trial and error over time revealed their general categories of interest. They were interested generally in current events creating widespread deep public concern; in the history of communities; in the history of very memorable, major events in the state and in the nation past and present; major figures in state and national history; emigration and ethnic history; main themes in the development of Wisconsin’s natural resources; and they were interested also in the histories of major cities in Wisconsin and in the nation. Examples of programs arising from current developments are, here a few of them here. My introduction to non-traditional students came with the Civil Rights movement. It involved a summer institute in integrated history for inner-city teachers, a cooperative effort with the UW School of Education. I taught a series of offering in Black History for Madison teachers, did an all-day program for Madison school district principals and administrators, and wrote two, three-credit study guides for the correspondence study program on black history in America. Another facet of the Civil Rights, Black History effort involved identifying a group of speakers and discussion leaders who could respond to requests for programs. For the most part, advanced UW—Madison graduate students filled these particular needs. Those kinds of requests programs came for the main part from schools around Madison and [the] general Madison area, and also at a considerable distance. Another very large programming area was certainly the National Bicentennial, that one was huge; we just did all kinds of things. And then a third example of general public interest created by major contemporary developments with the spear fishing controversy in the Lac du Flambeau-Minocqua area of northern Wisconsin in the 1980s. And a lot of different types of programs came out for public consumption, or came out of our department for public consumption as a result of that. Examples of programs for hometown communities, most notable example certainly in this category came from Madison. The public here had an almost inexhaustible appetite for information about Madison’s history, offered in different formats: lecture series; walking tours; combined lecture, lunch, and bus tours of the city; year in and year out. Here are some examples of programs about major chapters, incidences, figures in state and national history. Non-traditional students were attracted by the age of the French exploration, the fur trade, the lead mining frontier, the Black Hawk War, the Civil War, immigration patterns and immigrants, the lumbering era and its aftermath and so on. Abraham Lincoln, Cordelia Harvey [Cordelia A.P. Harvey?], John Muir, Robert M. La Follette, Belle Case La Follette, Frank Lloyd Wright and Zona Gale were ever attractive. 
00:30:12
MB: 	There was a developed a very, very strong interrelationship between my credit teaching and non-credit work, it was kind of a symbiotic relationship if you will, it developed as a result of the fact that I was using credit classroom materials to bolster what I was doing with these programs for the general adult public and in doing them I picked up all kinds of data that would help with the work in the classrooms, they kind of intersected. What I did whenever I went out, for example, to plan a tour, one, two , three, four-day tour on-site instruction, take the camera, you run the road and you find out just exactly what routes to take, where to stop, where to eat, where to stay overnight, all that kinds of stuff and along with it, you just take tons and tons of photographs. And I took them in slide format and that was the age in which slides were the thing in the classroom and then I would use that material in the classroom as it fitted in to the kind of information that I was trying to get across to students in the traditional setting. And they loved it, they loved having illustrations to go along with the lectures so that they could see some of these places that we were talking about. So this was quite interesting how the two of these worked together and one supported the other. In the non-credit area I soon learned that walking tours and journeys to various historic locations appealed to many. I came to feel rightly or wrongly that I managed to get more across to students by taking them to the natural setting where events had occurred. For instance, I offered a four-day fieldtrip tour, the Lake Superior fur trade where the major destinations were Grand Portage National Monument close to the Canadian-American border and the Historic Fort William at Thunder Bay, Ontario; both exceptionally fine places to learn about the French, British, and American fur trade in the midcontinent in the late 18th and early 19th century. Bus travel allowed time to fill in essential history background for such visits as well as to talk about the area through which we traveled. Of course this meant careful plans for food and lodging along the way and a test run of the route and the facilities. I always preceded with camera and film, made plenty of slides, all fieldtrips required this kind of preparation for things to run smoothly as well as to do similar adventures whether on foot or by bus. Careful planning and timing always paid off and contingency plans were an essential if something fell through. Other experimental delivery systems used in the non-credit area included WHA Radio—I did a considerable amount of radio work—and the Educational Telephone Network. Now a lot of people would go “huh” now hearing that mentioned. The later was provided by an especially designed telephone network that provided communication between the instructor and the students. The ETN outlets were located for the most part in the Cooperative Extension facilities located in county courthouses throughout the state. In credit-teaching, three times, 1987 through 1989, I taught an in-class televised, three-credit history of Wisconsin course using the television facilities of the School of Education on the Madison campus. Designed especially for the benefit of public school teachers, it was taught and recorded in the classroom in the evening in two ninety-minute sessions per week during the semester, with discussion sections and in-class exams. Those not attending on campus could view the taped lectures on television. They had to come on campus to write examinations and classroom attendance ranged from 150 to 200 in those particular three TV offerings. The taped TV lectures were then broadcast over public television stations in Green Bay, Wausau, Eau Claire and La Crosse for continuing education units in 1988 and 1989; History 389 televised thus served both credit students and the general public. And that was a very successful experiment that worked really, really well. 
00:35:27
MB: 	Experimenting with the correspondence study program. Now the correspondence study program had been a long-established thing when I came upon it. It was well used, but it seemed like there might be ways in which it might be improved, and in the 1970s I attempted to broaden the appeal of correspondence study courses by introducing new ones which addressed the history of current social issues. In addition to the Black History courses I’ve already mentioned, others were: American Women’s History, we had one in the 1970s and Nancy Schrom Dye wrote that for us, she is now president of Vassar College and she was a PhD here at the University of Wisconsin and she worked with Professor Paul Glad who left years ago and went to the University of Oklahoma. But at any rate we had that history course in there and then we arranged for, tried to arrange for a Native American History course. And then we also added independent reading offerings and this would be, you could earn credits by independent reading and that meant that—and we followed the formula of the Madison History Department in requirements, we always tried to keep these things in sync with the Madison department, and university credit was given for this credit work that we did in Extension at that time. I don’t know how it is now but it was true then. But at any rate what we did was we introduced independent reading and this turned out to be—it’s one of these things where you tailor-make a special course of readings for a student who has requested readings in a particular area of interest and they are responsible for getting the books that you assign to them and they have to write, in essence, reviews of the books, and then they have to explain how these helped them in some particular respect. A lot of this was from teachers who wanted to know more about X, Y, or Z, and also a fair number of prisoners liked this and they also did a lot with our correspondence study courses. Now I understand that the prison system doesn’t have this component now of allowing them to work for degree credit, but it did in the time that I was there, and it helped a lot of people who were in special circumstances or very circumscribed circumstances to get information and help them to think, and study, and read and just have their minds very busy expanding the body of knowledge that they had. So we were very glad to do it, it was a bit of a challenge at times but it worked. And another improvement thrust involved revamping the well-established correspondence study offerings to give them greater depth by adding taped lectures to the standard study guide format, which was a study guide and a prescribed set of books for them to work with. And we were able to do that with these taped lectures that had been broadcast over WHA Radio and those tapes became available to us and we were able to use them as an added dimension of the correspondence study so it wasn’t all read and write, it was read, listen, and write. And that seemed to work out fairly well. The most successful experiment of all, I attempted to add interest and vitality to the two four-credit American History Survey courses. This work was made possible by grant from the Annenberg Foundation. The new American History Survey involved adding a taped component to each of twenty-six units of study and each tape related to an event, an individual, et cetera within the subject matter of the unit of study. For example, the Salem Witchcraft Trials was the topic for one, Paul Boyer did that one for us. The Pullman Strike, the Civil Rights Movement and so on. I chaired the Academic History Advisory Committee for the project which selected the historians and others chosen nation-wide to provide essential subject matter for each tape, worked with WHA Radio personnel who created the tapes and they were just—they just did a beautiful job—this was drama. 
SP: 	Oh sure.
MB: 	It was a combination of—some of it was lecture and some of it was drama. I also wrote the study guide for both the two, four-credit courses. This was a challenge indeed but each of the courses received an award for meritorious independent study courses from the National University Continuing Education Association. Experimenting with the delivery systems available in the 1980s was stimulating, in the ‘70s and ‘80s, enjoyable. Now, of course, technological advances have made TV, the ETN—that is the Educational Telephone Network—old hat. Computers have vastly improved the delivery systems and gotten to many, many more students nationally and internationally. The technological advances have changed completely the methods of getting courses to people who can’t be on campus. 
00:41:41
MB: 	And now something about my research and my research interests. My research interests came from the work I did in graduate school which related to the agricultural development in Illinois in the second half of the 19th century. The main themes included the way government policies influenced the relationship of people to the rich natural resources of the Grand Prairie and how, in light of economic change, these relationships changed during the last half of the 19th century. Those main themes of how governed policy and economic change have influenced the relationship between people and natural resources have remained the central theme in my research with the addition of a consideration of how resource use has effected the environment. Without a question my experience with non-traditional teaching at Wisconsin created that additional dimension. Driving all over the state and adjacent areas brought my attention to the results of people’s past and present use of natural resources. The extensive work I did with the University of Wisconsin College Sea Grant Program made me aware of the Great Lakes as a highly significant water resource in need of extensive study. I shifted my research and writing emphasis from agriculture to the Lakes, although the two are so intertwined that inevitably they must be considered together. The work with UW College Sea Grant Program greatly influenced me to make the change and is in large measure responsible for my last three books. I owe them a very great deal and I might add here, and it should be known that it was UW College Sea Grant Program that stepped in and provided a very large subsidy to help this most recent book of mine on Lake Superior to be done in color.
SP: 	Oh! Well thank you to them.
MB: 	Yes! Thank you, thank you UW Sea Grant. 
00:44:03
MB: 	Here are a few thoughts about significant developments in my field of study and my contribution to it. Great Lakes history for decades has centered on political and diplomatic themes, primarily including issues related to: the boundary between the two nations; the international law of the Great Lakes; the naval warfare on the Lakes during the War of 1812; shared canals; the St. Lawrence Seaway; water diversions from the Lakes, especially the early diversions of Lake Michigan to serve the needs of a growing young Chicago. The major overall treatment of Great Lakes history came with the publication of The American Lakes Series in the 1940s edited by Milo M. Quaife [Milo Milton Quaife], five volumes, one for each lake, authored by a highly competent professional historian. None of these considered the effects of human use of the Great Lakes region’s natural resources - rich, rich resources of copper, iron, timber, game, fish and water. Writer as they were before widespread interest in the conservation of natural resources involved in to the environmental movement and environmental history in turn arose from the environmental movement. My recent work has been in the area of Great Lakes history with environmental emphasis. It attempts to trace the relationship between people and natural resources and to show how and why exploitation of the region’s rich abundance has impacted the lakes and the region’s environment more broadly over the centuries. The Great Lakes region has been neglected as a field for environmental history until recently. Part of the neglect stems from the transnational character of the lakes and the region, which requires research in both Canadian and American materials, and another reason for neglect is the preoccupation of American environmental historians with other areas of interest. For some decades, American scholars have dominated the field of environmental history in North America, in other words, they dominated what the Canadians were doing. But in the October 2007 issue of Environmental History, we find that the whole thing was devoted to environmental history of Canada, and among others it contained an article calling for a focus on Great Lakes regional research undertaken as cooperative effort between environmental historians in both nations [Recentering North American Environmental History: Pedagogy and Scholarship in the Great Lakes Region by James Feldman and Lynne Heasley?]. When I began my work on the lakes in the 1970s, I chose to view the lakes as a geographic unit and I have continued to use this framework. Also, it became apparent early on that the fisheries were a largely neglected subject and I resolved to study that once I had retired from teaching at the university and had the time to dig intensively in to dominion archives and national archives. The central task was to explain the reason that I adopted for this particular study was the central task was to explain the reasons for the change in species and overall decline in the fish population of the Great Lakes from the time of exploration on. When I finished the detailed study titled Fishing the Great Lakes: An Environmental History, 1783-1933 published in 2001 by the University of Wisconsin Press, I turned to completely rewriting a publication which was designed to appeal to the general adult public and the result was Around the Shores of Lake Superior published in 2007 by the University of Wisconsin Press with very substantial support from the University of Wisconsin College Sea Grant Program. I kept the same focus, the lake as a geographic unit politically divided between the United States and Balkanized among the states in the U.S. And in tracing a history of people living in the Lake Superior region and developing its rich natural resources around the shores shows how development has effected the natural environment. What do you consider to be your most important contribution to your field my list of questions asks? Well I think Fishing the Great Lakes: An Environmental History, 1783-1933 is my most important contribution because it developed a neglected subject area in Great Lakes history and because it created an integrated Canadian-American history of the lakes transcending their political divisions, treating them as a natural geographic unit that they are, a remarkably rich natural resource for the people of both nations. And how did I manage to do this research? Where did the money come from? Well, again I was very fortunate in receiving support, the Social Science Research Council, the American Association of University Women got me off to a good start with their funding—I mentioned earlier to get the doctoral dissertation research done—I received a Charles Warren Center for Research in American History Fellowship at Harvard, February through June 1972; I was given a sabbatical leave, 1985-’86 by University of Wisconsin—Madison and University of Wisconsin Extension; and from the University of Wisconsin Graduate School Research Committee, I received one semester of salary support and travel funds in 1988-’89 and these were all extremely important for me. 
00:50:27
MB: 	And now we come to this very, very interesting question of the climate for women on the Madison campus. How does it help or hinder the participation and advancement of women? Well the climate for women on the Madison campus, 1966 to 1991, the years when I was party to it as I see it, was in a state of gradual change due in large measure to the influence of the women’s movement. The climate varied from department to department, women’s salaries were in general low compared to men’s, their acceptance as colleagues in male-dominated departments depending on the attitude of the majority, of course in disciplines where women traditionally dominated the issues also differed. Many administrators regarded faculty husbands and wives of those hired, well-credentialed and anxious to find employment to use their talents and education, as “the spouse problem.” Yet departments when some extra instructor was needed, often dipped in to the qualified pool of hopefuls for a limited ad hoc arrangements at a bargain price. As a general rule the pool of husband-wife hopefuls got referred to University Extension for possible employment. Speaking from my limited personal experience as part of the “spouse problem,” I found University Extension to be a place where I could be involved in teaching and in a limited amount of research when it was possible to find outside funding or if I was on sabbatical leave. To my good fortune, a colleague of mine who headed the women’s unit in Human Resources Development was Kay Clarenbach [Kathryn F. Clarenbach?], a PhD in government and one of the founders of NOW, the National Organization for Women. To my further good fortune, my dean Harold Montross and his close associate Theodore Shannon both highly approved of the goals of the women’s movement. Meanwhile, the Madison campus Department of History where Allan, my spouse, was a full professor, found itself in need of someone to teach the History of Wisconsin course given the retirement of Professor Nesbit [Robert C. Nesbit?] who taught it. They were lukewarm about hiring a person to handle the course, they did not consider it important, and that was simply a fact of their thinking, a part of their thinking. The department hit on the idea of having me do it for them. I did this repeatedly in the 1980s, arranged on the basis of a salary transfer to Extension, Madison Campus Outreach in compensation for teaching time. There, the tradition of all-male department had been broken in 1972 with the appointment of a woman, Diane Lindstrom, to the faculty and it was a big faculty, somewhere between fifty and sixty men and she was the first woman. Maureen Mazzaoui was added in ’74, Gerda Lerner in 1980, and Florencia Mallon in 1982. Gerda Lerner came to establish a women’s history program and Florencia Mallon’s appointment marked the first husband and wife faculty in the department—Steve Stern, her husband, had joined the faculty in 1979. My own appointment, a joint appointment, came in 1989. The change came in large measure due to the efforts of John Cooper and Linda Gordon. The department currently has two husband and wife tenured members. An earlier effort had been made to give me a joint appointment but that one had failed, and this one that came along in 1989 worked. How times have changed from the early part of the 20th century, when the department had balked at letting Lois Kimball Mathews Rosenberry, a Harvard PhD under Frederick Jackson Turner teach American history and refuse to let Louise Phelps Kellogg, another history PhD serving as librarian at the State Historical Society and past president of Mississippi Valley Historical Association, now called the Organization of American Historians, teach a course in American history—they wouldn’t let them in. The American Historical Association directory in 2006-07 showed the Madison History Department with fourteen women and thirty-two men as full-time faculty and that’s a very, very big change. 
00:55:24
MB: 	As for membership in professional organizations I currently belong to the Organization of American Historians, the Wisconsin Historical Society, the Minnesota Historical Society, Agricultural History Society, the American Society for Environmental History, and the North American Society for Oceanic History, which interestingly enough considers the Great Lakes as part of their province and has twice had me come and do programs for them.  And now a few words about honors and awards. Here I’m not going to repeat the items mentioned already in the discussion of how my research was funded but here is a partial listing of honors and awards. Distinguished Service Award, University of Wisconsin Extension, 1980; President Agricultural History Society, 1984; Wisconsin Library Association awarded me the Outstanding Achievement Honors for Around the Shores of Lake Michigan, a book that was published in 1986. University of Wisconsin Extension Award for Excellence in Teaching and Scholarship, November 1986; National University Continuing Education Association for two meritorious independent study courses in April ’87; Wisconsin Historic Preservation Review Board appointed by as a historian member by Governor Thompson in 1989 and I served from then until ’94. I received the Van Hise Outreach Award for Excellence in Teaching, University of Wisconsin—Madison in April 1991. 
00:57:12
MB: 	Life after work is the next category in—[laughs].
SP: 	This is probably the longest answer you’ve got from everything that you’ve done since you’ve retired.
MB: 	First of all, family. We have three daughters: Susan, born in 1953; Margaret, born in 1956; and Elli, born in 1959; two grandchildren, one graduating from high school in 2008, we just attended his graduation ceremony in Fort Wayne, Indiana; and Rachel who is finishing her first year in high school this year. Susan is a psychiatric social worker having earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from UW—Madison, she has worked on the front lines since graduation in the mid ’70s, first in Wausau, then in Eau Claire, then at DeKalb [Illinois], and current at the Sinnissippi Mental Health Center near DeKalb. She is highly motivated and very dedicated to helping her clients. Margaret earned her bachelor’s degree here in performing arts, piano. She is a financial planner and broker for Merrill Lynch and continues with her piano, giving a recital every spring. She and her spouse Paul, another UW graduate with a bachelor’s degree in performing arts, flute was his instrument, are both very much musicians at heart. He also works in the financial world as a computer programmer and frequently performs in a variety of situations, church weddings, nightclubs, et cetera, sax is his second instrument. Elli and her spouse Steve both earned bachelor’s degrees here in journalism and both served as picture editors for the Daily Cardinal. Both have worked as newspaper photographer reporters since graduation. Very recently Steve left the newspaper business and took on a job of Development Director for the Fort Wayne Performing Arts Center. Both Elli and Steve teach photography for the Fort Wayne branch of the University of Indiana-Purdue. Elli is working on a master’s degree in journalism and has just co-authored a text for photography students. They are the parents of the two grandchildren. As for work and family, balancing work and family proved to be a very difficult juggling act. I always seemed to be in search of a way to do what I felt was essential for each but I never felt satisfied that I had the right formula. I was extremely fortunate in having two immediate supervisors, Dean Harold Montross and Theodore Shannon, chair of Human Resources Development. Both of them believed that family was important for their faculty and they expected them to look after their needs even if it cut into traditional hours, knowing full well as they did that we worked overtime many, many times on nights and weekends. Also, they were willing for me to take special leave in order to go with the family to Sweden for the fall semester in 1968, and in 1973 to spend time with the family while on a fellowship, thus keeping the family together while Al was at Harvard for that semester. Both of the time in Sweden and in Concord, Massachusetts were very pleasantly memorable learning experiences for all of us. Above all else, I was extremely fortunate in having a husband who wanted me to continue my professional life after marriage and who lent immeasurable help along the way. Our children felt the impact of having two professionally-oriented parents, made the best of it, and turned in to fine adults despite their parents’ shortcomings. During my normal one-month vacation time as the family went on camping trips in the west and to our cottage at Blue Lake near Minocqua, Wisconsin. We acquired the Blue Lake property in 1968 and following our return from Sweden, began construction of the cottage, a process spread over the years. Hiking, swimming, canoeing, were wonderful north woods experiences for the three daughters and all of them still enjoy the beauty of the cottage perched up about ninety feet in the trees above the water’s edge. The Minocqua location made possible extended canoe camping ventures into the Sylvania wilderness and the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore areas as well as visits to the Lac du Flambeau Ojibwa Reservation. When we recently considered selling the property we met a loud chorus of “don’t do it!” [laughs] and indeed they are all planning to spend time there this summer. Are you still working in your field? Yes, I’m still engaged in research and writing in Great Lakes environmental history. Since retirement, I’ve completed the two books I already mentioned, Fishing the Great Lakes and Around Lake Superior, both published by the University of Wisconsin Press, which incidentally also did the Lake Michigan book which I did in 1985. I still do presentations on these topics when requested, I’ve continued to work with University of Wisconsin College Sea Grant Program, the Wisconsin Historical Society, and the Wisconsin Humanities Council to give papers at professional meetings, to write book reviews, and to do some radio and television work. Fun and relaxation in retirement. Walking, caring for, and helping at shows, dog shows, with our two Samoyeds, these sled dogs keep us healthy day by day. I garden and cultivate houseplants, I follow my lifelong interest in music including playing the piano. I attend Badger basketball, cheer on the Cubs, and enjoy the beauty and peace of Blue Lake. 
01:03:18	End of interview

Second interview session (June 16, 2008)
00:00:00
MB: 	You were inquiring about whether or not University Extension still does all of these types of programs that I mentioned that I was involved with in the years that I was there and the answer is no. Some of the programs exist but this kind of program that related to Wisconsin and the surrounding area isn’t there, that was sort of something that I dreamed up, and when I left I was not replaced by a person who continued to do those things. What had happened in the meantime, this state-wide extension had in effect had its feathers plucked and the various campuses in the system began to take on outreach responsibilities and they did not look as seriously at state-wide extension or the possibility of the state-wide extension person that existed in Madison to help them or to do things for them. So now it’s campus by campus and the Madison campus the Division of Outreach and so on, that was part of it, and that came in the mid ‘80s. So it’s no longer- the wonderful thing is that TV and radio is still there and that’s part of University Extension. And I think all of this work has been tremendously affected also by innovation in the media and ways of delivering information that are less costly. So it’s a different world now, that world that I was in was gone.
00:02:04
SP: 	I was wondering, have you been following this—oh, I imagine you have—this work that’s being done on this Great Lakes compact where the various states and Canada are trying to come together?
MB: 	Yes. Very definitely. 
SP: 	Would you talk a little bit about that? Are you optimistic that something good will come out of it?
MB: 	Yeah it seems to—I was just delighted when I read the newspaper the other day and found that Wisconsin at last had signed on. There has been over—by golly—this business of trying to get cooperation goes way back in to the 19th century. And there was an effort to develop cooperation in the 1890s when people began to realize, in the fisheries, when people began to realize that the fisheries were simply being totally ruined by uncontrolled exploitation of the fish population, you know, uncontrolled harvests and so on. The Canadians tried to control, but they’re right next door to the American who aren’t trying to control and the fishermen just go anywhere on the lake and the American fishermen invaded the Canadian waters and so and so on. And finally the Canadians realized that their controls were just not especially effective and they don’t have effective controls at the present time. So the effort was, in the ‘90s, to get cooperation at the national levels by treaty and there was a very important commission that was established by national commission to affect such a possibility. They made an elaborate study, great fieldtrips all around the shared waters, and gathering of information and that was to be the basis, hopefully, of some kind of treaty and agreement to the two countries. It flopped. This effort was tried again early in the 20th century, it was tried again the 1930s, it never got cooperation until we had this invasion of the Sea Lamprey into the Lakes in the 1930s and ‘40s, and then the two countries did cooperate in trying to control that. But you know the fact that these natural areas are politically divided presents just an enormous blockade to getting anything done. And the commercial interests in general have opposed any kind of regulation, and they keep talking, they’re always talking about states’ rights and the sovereignty of the state and this is going to be invaded and so on. Well it has just taken an incredible amount of work to get this particular agreement into shape where it has a chance of being approved by the various parties, and it’s all in terms of water diversion, which is a great issue. And, you know, we’re moving slowly forward, the Canadians signed on right away and then I think we’ve got yet—I think it’s New York, is it New York and Pennsylvania and Michigan or has Michigan signed on in the meantime? I’d have to just check on that, but most of the states have now signed on to this and it’s going to be a matter of, you can’t divert water from the lakes and not return it if some party—except the Canadians, they don’t get this except in the States—unless all the states agree. So there is, you know, a check on that aspect of the degradation of the Lakes, but the degradation of the Lakes is in a very serious problem and is one reason I wrote that book. I hoped that sort of by backdoor I could get people intensely interested in the lake and see just how important it has been, and is, and will be and ought to be protected. 
SP: 	Well and we hear about all of these water problems around other parts of the country, you’d think that would urge people to pay attention to what we have here and we want to keep it. 
MB: 	And there was even some entrepreneur in Canada who within the last couple of decades decided the thing to do was to ship water out of Lake Superior overseas [chuckles] and the Canadians squashed that. 
00:07:32
SP: 	Good. Well I’m very glad that you wrote that book too and—

MB: 	I was just going to say, it really emphasized the important role of the Native Americans in that and the—I should say the native North Americans because the Canadian divided as it is—they have been extremely helpful with the efforts to retain the quality of the Lakes. And the spear fishing thing, in essence, ended up accelerating the efforts of the Ojibwa to help with care of the Lakes and care of the Lakes’ fish population instead of decimating it. 
SP: 	And that’s not a problem anymore right? I mean you don’t read about any—so much—about the conflicts between the fishermen in a lot of these areas.
MB: 	A lot of them aren’t there. That’s the truth, the fish are gone. It’s a sad truth.
SP: 	So it’s only an issue—it’s not an issue because there’s no fish?
MB: 	Well just take for example the Red Cliff Reservation, which is up there, you’re getting up toward the Apostle Islands, yeah that’s fair to say. Anyway, the Red Cliff Reservation people are currently working very hard to get the high command in Washington in the military to help them do something about all of this waste, these waste products of very, very lethal waste products that were dumped into Lake Superior not too far from the water intake for the city of Superior. And they know that this is affecting, you know, the fish population and they depend on the fish as a part of their livelihood. They’re working on hot issues like that, they don’t back away from them, and you know I think what they’ve concluded is, well if you can’t beat them, join them, figure out how these things work and get your legal arm to work on some of this, and I think that’s very fine. And there is an organization of the Ojibwa of Lake Superior at least on the—I don’t think it includes the Canadians—so I think the American Ojibwa are united in an organization to protect the lake. 
00:10:36
SP: 	Are you a fisher?
MB: 	No [laughs].
SP: 	I just wondered after all of that research if you ever were or you had stopped.
MB: 	I’d be afraid to eat them the truth is. There’s just such high mercury levels in the fish and it’s true, sadly enough, for every lake in the state of Wisconsin, every one. We’re kind of out of control with these matters and need to get in control and people—I don’t think people, it seems to be hard to get people excited until something terrible happens. For instance, reserve mining on Lake Superior in the 1980s and ‘90s was refining taconite ore on the shore of Lake Superior. They were refining it and putting all the waste products in the lake--I talk rather considerably about this in the Lake Superior book—and it was found by those down at Duluth that there were asbestos tailings in the water and it was being taken into the city water supply and that people were drinking water that had this substance in it which is considered a carcinogenic. And that particular fight was one of these big ones that got people all stirred up. The other one was that in the early ‘70s—and it happened about the same when the river down on the southern shore of Lake Erie caught on fire--.
SP:	 Oh yes.
MB: 	But you know an incident, the river is on fire, there’s asbestos in the drinking water then people [noise], you know, and the truth is that the spoliation of the Lakes is something that goes way, way back. You can find the beginning of it in the fur trade for heaven’s sake with the decimation of the beaver population and this great in-road upon the hydrography because of the drying up of the wetlands that the beaver created with their beaver dams. So it builds over the years and—
SP: 	Now have you seen—when did you first have your home up by Minocqua?
MB: 	1968.
SP: 	Have you seen a lot of changes up there in forty years?
MB: 	Well I’m sorry to say it’s being Dells-ified. The city of Minocqua, we are not in the city, we’re out in the woods on a lake that is spring-fed and contained, it’s not in a chain, and the water is tested and the DNR is taking very, very good care of the lake, it has been tested recently and things are good all things considered. And people—you know there’s been great wonderful things have happened in terms of handling sewage and the kind of septic tanks that you have and the septic tanks’ inspection, and every two years you have to have such and so done and this properly recorded with DNR officials. So I think people—but there’re still foolish people who are, they come there and they decide we got to have a lawn and so they want to cut down the trees and plant the grass and pour on the fertilizer and so on and so on. I think that you know there’s some slow progress and people are beginning to realize that this isn’t the way to go if you want to keep your lake in good shape. But I think Americans seem to be pretty slow learners on these environmental matters.
SP: 	[Like you say?] until there’s a catastrophe.
MB: 	Yeah, yeah another catastrophe and then poof they’re all ready to reform, and then that dies down and slump back again. And it’s very difficult to regulate intelligently and see that the regulations stay in place, that they’re not slowly eroded. There’s always a conflict between economic interests and interests in preserving the natural environment and that was certainly the case with reserve mining. A big, huge industry and they just fought like tigers to keep dumping these taconite tailings into Lake Superior and it took about ten years in the court to make sure that they established a place to put them on land, I’m not just sure how effective that’s going to be over time because, you know, there’s groundwater, groundwater gets in the lake. There are not easy solutions and it’s kind of constant vigilance and people aren’t too keen about constant vigilance. 
SP: 	Very true. Well, I don’t have any other questions but I don’t want to turn this off if there’s anything else that you want to say.
MB: 	I don’t think so. I think that summarizes.
SP: 	Well I really appreciate this, this was an excellent interview, thank you very much.
MB: 	Oh well thank you, it was my pleasure.
00:16:45
End of interview