Episode Details

In this episode, we explore a radical history of wisconsin. If I told you about a state that was, you know, the birthplace of the National Republican Party, a massive hotbed for radical European socialists, a landscape scarred by the deadliest fire in U .S. history, and a place so vehemently anti -war it was nationally reviled as the traitor state during World War I, you probably wouldn't picture a guy standing in the freezing cold wearing a giant wedge of foam cheese on his head. Right. No, you definitely wouldn't. It really is the ultimate bait and switch yeah because the modern caricature of the American Midwest is that it is placid highly predictable and like entirely dairy obsessed yeah totally dairy obsessed yet when you actually crack open the historical sources that image completely shatters so today we are taking you on a deep dive into an absolutely encyclopedic history of Wisconsin which is frankly an incredibly wild the state gets its famous nickname, the Badger State. They weren't honoring the fierce little woodland animal. They were talking about human miners living in holes to survive. Yeah, that's the origin. Wait, was the Badger nickname actually an insult at first? Because it feels a little crazy that a modern state's proudest identity comes from the desperate freezing living conditions of frontier squatters. It absolutely wasn't born out of prestige. It was a marker of a chaotic land grabbing survivalist culture. But that incredibly rough environment had a profound psychological effect on the people who stayed. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who actually grew up in Wisconsin, formulated his famous frontier thesis based on observing this exact dynamic. Ah, right. The theory that the frontier experience is what fundamentally made America different from Europe. Precisely. Turner argued that when you take poor European immigrants and Yankee settlers from New