REUBEN GOLD THWAITES
Reuben Gold Thwaites was born in Massachusetts in 1853. When twenty-three years of age he came to Madison, Wisconsin, to act as editor of the Wisconsin State Journal. Just ten years later he was made secretary and superintendent of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, in which capacity he served until his death in 1913.
All students of history in the University of Wisconsin knew Mr. Thwaites, for no doubt partly through his influence, instructors in history impressed upon the young men and women in their classes the conception of history as being always in the making. To many a student who had always thought of history as being something written in books this new conception came as a great awakening. He urged upon all with whom he came in contact the importance of recording local events, and he had an extraordinarily keen sense of tendencies and activities in his state that were really vital and significant.
The State Historical Library at Madison contains thousands of newspaper clippings, little pamphlets, letters by obscure people, apparently unimportant legal or official documents that were gathered by Reuben Gold Thwaites, and that now form the priceless sources of the history of the state. The services of such a man to his community cannot be reckoned commercially. The state knows itself better, understands its ideals more thoroughly, and furnishes to its students a fund of incontrovertible facts on which to base their study, because it possessed a citizen like Reuben Gold Thwaites.