Wisconsin Death Trip

I love learning about history. The pictures were fascinating. It’s a somber book, but educational, with little bursts of humor to lighten up the feelings. Grateful I didn’t live back then.

Nothing else like this. I can hear my train a-comin'.

My headline is quoted (from memory) from an article (Wikipedia?) about Wisconsin Death Trip, because it says it all.Not a pleasant book - not at all. When it was published, it had something analogous to the effect that Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics had - 'It fell, like a bomb, on the playground of theologians.'Wisconsin Death Trip upset the dominant narrative of western expansion, Manifest Destiny, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder/Rose Wilder Lane story of hardy, self sufficient, and virtuous settlers.Its genius is that there appears to be no interpretation - it is just news articles, primary sources and pictures. Of course, the selection of sources is actually interpretation. But the squalor, misery, and mayhem described will make any sentient reader question our favored view of our nation's history.

If you’re into history and/or Wisconsin history and love old photographs check this book out. It’s well laid out and so interesting. To me it was well worth it.

Ah, the Good Old Days! that time when the men and women were wrapped like a warm blanket in Christian piety. When boys and girls grew up straight and tall, amid swimming holes and Sunday schools, and read aloud in the public schools from the Protestant Bible. When men bore the guns that kept us free on their broad shoulders, and women were demure, graceful, with chaste and untroubled souls.This remarkable collection of photographs --- many depicting funerals and similarly mournful scenes --- and the accompanying anthology of ephemeral journalism will go a long way towards showing that this, like any other lost Eden, never really existed. These people had other virtues, of course: they lived in the presence of death; they cultivated a sort of stoicism in the face of hard lives made harder by the rise of national capitalism.It seems that people in rural Wisconsin were heirs to the same failures that all flesh is heir to. People committed adultery back then, and bore children out of wedlock. People went mad back then, and often expressed their madness in violence. There was drunkenness, grinding loneliness, indifference to neighbours, and murder. They coped with problems, too, that we have managed to conquer: most notably, epidemic disease, and wholly inadequte health care. It is good to remember this when this period is portrayed as a golden age of piety and patriotism.

I read the book years ago and loaned it to out and it was never returned and when I saw it on Amazon I was very excited and ordered it immediately. Wisconsin Death Trip provides great insight as to back in the day when lack of knowledge or understanding persons with symptoms of a diseased brain and that there may have been an actual physical cause and that maybe it could be treated. It seems it was believed "crazy" persons were possessed by an evil spirit.Crude treatments attempted were evtremely dangerous.Public education programs should include mandatory teaching of at least basic understanding of brain disorders.and chemistry involved. Wisconsin Death Trip would provide great entertainment and some insight as well..Thank you Amazon!

My family on my mother's side came from this area so I was very intersted in learning a little about the area and the time. The photos show an excellent portrayal of what times must have been like back then. Although some of the newspaper clippings were from other counties throughout the state, the book did mention that there were as many deaths, suicides, etc. in the ONE county as there were in the entire state. That is what made this so interesting, why this one area had so much trouble compared to the rest of the state. There were intersting excerpts from the mental institution as well. I ordered the book so I could look at the photos and read the articles at my lesiure. I do wonder what the documentaty movie would be like and thought about ordering it.

I've been searching for this book for so long I thought it must be out of print, so I was extremely happy to find it on Amazon. As is pointed out in some other reviews, it paints a pretty grim portait of the Not So Good Old Days, and it's not for the faint-hearted. Still worth buying, but DO NOT buy the paperback. I was extremely disappointed in the overall quality of the book. It started falling apart the very first day I got it, and now it's a nothing more than a sheaf of pages.

An interesting conversation piece.

What an odd book, snippets from local and state newspapers around end of 19th century all about death by fair means and foul. A compelling read I couldn't put it down. The only thing that would have improved it for me would be names to identify all the fabulous photos of the people of that place and time. Would highly recommend this book for an unusual but very interesting read.

as advertised.

I bought this book because I saw a documentary of the same name.It intrigue me a lot and the book has not been disappointing... great pictures and stories!

the book is absolutely amazing. pairing the photos (without captions , so that the reader forms their own narrative!) with the excerpts from local newspapers over two decades was *genius*. it tells us that, no matter where or when we live, humans are strange and weird sh** always happens, and it’s SO FASCINATING!if you’re into history and are interested in human nature, especially the more macabre aspects, i highly recommend this classic!the only negative (and why it lost a star) is that this edition does have a *very* flimsy cover; if i were the publisher i might have gone with something slightly heavier to better support a book of this size, but really, that’s just a quibble.