The annual address before the State Historical Society at the coming October meeting will be given by Prof. Frederic Logan Paxson of the University of Wisconsin. Plans are being made for a more active participation on the part of local societies in the program of the annual meeting than has been the case in the past. With a reasonable degree of interest on the part of the members of the state and local societies it is believed that a better and more profitable annual meeting can be held than any in recent years.
SOME PUBLICATIONS
Volume XXII of the Society’s Collections, The Journals of Captain Meriwether Lewis and John Ordway, distributed in the summer of 1916, has attracted much attention at the hands of historical editors and others. Of it the Iowa Journal of History and Politics says: “It is perhaps not too much to say that, no publication of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin possesses a wider interest than this book.” The review in the Washington Historical Quarterly concludes: “Those who have collected the works of Lewis and Clark should certainly secure this book. It makes a rich supplement
to any of the other editions.” In similar fashion the review of the book published in the American Historical Review closes with the statement, “The Historical Society of Wisconsin is to be congratulated on the publication of this volume.”
Volume XXIII of the Society’s Collections (Frontier Advance on the Upper Ohio, 1778-79) and Mr. Merk’s Economic History of Wisconsin During the Civil War Decade have been distributed too recently to have attracted much attention at the hands of the reviewers at the time of our going to press. On the part of the newspapers of Wisconsin, however, Mr. Merk’s volume has already evoked much notice and comment. The Milwaukee Sentinel and other papers of the state have republished numerous extracts from the book, while the Chippewa Falls Independent devoted special attention to the chapters on the history of the lumbering industry in Wisconsin. The expected comment of our historical neighbors on these two volumes will be noted in a future number of the Magazine.
The annual volume of Proceedings of the Society for the year 1916 came from the press and was distributed to our members and exchanges in July. The volume is longer than any of its predecessors, and the workmanship of the printer is probably the best of any in the long series of annual volumes put out by the Society. Aside from the business report and other routine proceedings, the book contains eight historical papers. The most interesting and valuable of these is Captain Arthur L. Conger’s study of “President Lincoln as War Statesman,” delivered as the annual address before the Society in 1916. Unless we mistake greatly, this paper will quickly gain recognition as one of the most trenchant studies yet made of Lincoln’s career. Four studies of a biographical character are the reminiscences of Father Chrysostom Verwyst of Bayfield and of Mary Elizabeth Mears, early Wisconsin authoress; “New Light on the Career of Nathaniel Pryor,” sergeant on the exploring expedition of Lewis and Clark; and an account of the military career of Major Earl, noted Wisconsin Civil War scout. A study of “The Beginnings of the Norwegian Press in America” reveals the fact, interesting to citizens of Wisconsin, that this state, rather than its western neighbor, was originally and for long the chief seat of Norwegian development in America. Hence the story of the beginnings of the Norwegian press in the United States is almost wholly a Wisconsin story. Another local study is that of the long-drawn-out “Watertown Railway Bond Fight,” one of the notable legal contests in American history. Finally, and of more general import, is “The Dream of a Northwestern Confederacy,” which recites the story of the rise and decline of the hopes of the Southern people to
draw off the Northwest from the remainder of the Union and in so doing to win the struggle for its disruption.
By the will of Joseph Pulitzer, the noted New York journalist, provision is made for the establishment of an annual prize of $2,000 by the authorities of Columbia University for the best book of the year in American history. It is interesting to note that the first award, announced at the 1917 commencement of Columbia, was made, not to a professional historian but to a busy man of affairs, the French ambassador to the United States, Monsieur J. J. Jusserand, for his volume With Americans of Past and Present Days. The book includes four important and charming historical studies. The longest, “Rochambeau and the French in America,” presents a narrative, based largely on hitherto unused sources, of this able but neglected soldier in the war for our national independence. The other studies deal with “Washington and the French,” “Major L’Enfant in the Federal City,” and “Abraham Lincoln.” The latter paper is particularly interesting as showing the contemporary French estimate of President Lincoln and the popular sentiment in France in favor of the Union. Thoroughly scholarly and charmingly written, the volume is commended as an agreeable companion for a leisure evening.
A second annual prize established by Mr. Pulitzer is one of $1,000 awarded for the best American biography teaching patriotism and service. It was first awarded to Mrs. Laura E. Richards and Mrs. Maud Howe Elliott for their biography of their mother, Julia Ward Howe. The noble career of this talented woman should ever serve as an inspiration to her countrymen. Especially at this time of stress are we grateful for her immortal “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Like M. Jusserand’s book, the work is unreservedly commended to our readers.
One of the most important and scholarly studies in the field of western history to appear in many years is Clarence W. Alvord’s The Mississippi Valley in British Politics: A Study of the Trade Speculation, and Experiments in Imperialism Culminating in the American Revolution. The book is beautifully printed in two volumes by Arthur H. Clark of Cleveland. It is Professor Alvord’s contention that the seeker after the causes leading to the American Revolution will find them chiefly in connection with the policies and efforts of the British ministers to organize the imperial American domain which came to it from France in the Seven Years’ War, rather than in the incidents and events along the Atlantic seaboard to which historians have paid chief attention hitherto.