Status
Available
Call number
Publication
University of New Mexico Press (2000), Edition: Reprint, 148 pages
Description
First published in 1973, this remarkable book about life in a small turn-of-the-century Wisconsin town has become a cult classic. Lesy has collected and arranged photographs taken between 1890 and 1910 by a Black River Falls photographer, Charles Van Schaik.
User reviews
LibraryThing member Treeseed
Wisconsin Death Trip is a unique historical perspective, or as its author, Michael Lesy says, "an exercise in historical actuality." It is an "alchemy" as he puts it, that allows us to experience the past at a gut level, a gestalt, something we feel and understand on levels that are bigger than the
The book is comprised of many black and white photos that were preserved from several thousand glass negative plates taken between the years of 1890 and 1910 by a photographer in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. It also contains text that is taken from the newspaper accounts of two journalists also from Black River Falls. The journalists subscribed to a state wire service so the accounts come from all over Wisconsin, including many from the area in which I currently live. It contains excerpts from the intake journal of the state mental institution, as well.
In the Introduction, Levy tells us, "None of the accounts are fictitious. Neither pictures nor the events were, when they were made or experienced, considered to be unique, extraordinary, or sensational."
He further states, "The people who looked at the pictures once they were taken weren't surprised, and the people who read about the events weren't shocked."
The photos and the text are like two separate streams that flow in and around each other, complimenting each other in an organic way, but not a prescribed way. The little snips of stories from the newspaper reveal a constantly repeated theme to which the faces and hands of the people in the photographs give testimony. You don't so much learn their stories as you absorb them. You sense the patterns of life during this time period in ways that would be impossible with a traditional history book.
The death trip is the commonplace presence of poverty, suicide, insanity, danger, violence, ignorance, disease, alcoholism, grief, deprivation, loneliness and boredom that were the weft in the weave of rural life at the turn of the 20th century. This book unveils the hardships that were seen as routine and to which no especial emotional response was displayed if even felt. It implies the guilt and sorrow that the diseases like diphtheria, small pox and cholera left in their wake, when they stalked the countryside taking the children and leaving the adults. How does someone manage to love a child that has every reasonable chance of falling to disease or farm accident, and who is more likely to end up in a miniature coffin in the parlor than he is to grow up? How does your mind keep from breaking when you cannot feed the ones who do live. Ponder these things and feel them and you are on the death trip into the darkness of the good ol' days.
My sister-in-law loaned me Wisconsin Death Trip when it was first published in 1973 and it creeped me out. I was young and inexperienced and the notion of a death trip seemed entirely foreign. This book seemed like a voyeuristic freak show to me back then. I glanced over the written accounts and photographs, skipping around, and ultimately missing out on the opportunity it brilliantly presents to go back in time and realize what was happening not only in people's physical lives but in their emotions and in their minds.
Life has dealt with me since I first read this book so when it came out in paperback in 2000 and I read it again, perhaps I was more seasoned, shall we say, and I was able to relate to its powerful observations from the standpoint of someone who herself, has struggled with the capriciousness of life, who has seen the random insanity that lives side by side with the mundane.
This book is a time machine indeed and can take us to the lives of people in ways that the usual historical texts do not. Rather than walking the streets of ghost towns in our minds, trying to imagine life, here we find ourselves perched on the horse-hair settee in the parlor, looking at the infant in her coffin, during the last of several funerals that week, breathing diphtheria air. We are cinched into our corsets over hot cook stoves and vats of lye soap, coerced by Calvinism into judgment of the frailties of others on one hand and acceptance of our own miseries on the other. There's no place this side of madness to even release a scream.
The second time around, I appreciated the brilliance of this book's author. This book is history but it is also art. It is psychology and sociology. It's the genealogy notes that you won't find in the middle of your family Bible. This book's lessons seep in through the pores of your skin. You smell the lessons. You cringe and poke at the lessons with the stick of your mind. No one here will tell you what it is that you should learn. You find yourself walking around in the rural Mid-west of 1890-1910 and seeing it for yourself. The conclusions are Lesy's but you come to feel that they are your own as well, seen with your own two eyes.
Excerpts like these are just the tips of the iceberg that this book contains.
"In a family consisting of 3 maiden sisters and 2 bachelor brothers named Niedtke in the town of Liberty, near Appleton, 2 sisters and a brother have gone insane within the past few weeks, one of the sisters being a school teacher. Saturday the insane brother became violent and was taken to the asylum. The two sisters are being cared for at home."
"Thomas Galt died at his home in this city Friday night last from the effects of the Ackerman anti-dipsomania gold cure which he was taking. He was 37...he contracted the drink habit and it so obtained the mastery of him that he was much of the time incapacitated for labor."
"An old man was found in a brush shanty a mile south of Peshtigo. He was unable to move owing to hunger and exposure. He came from Canada a month ago in search of work."
By digesting the many accounts we come to feel the creeping paranoia and obsessive-compulsive behaviors that resulted from the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethic. We stand in the shoes of people being unnaturally pressed and formed into fine upstanding American citizens despite the pressures and terrors on the road of progress. We see the corpses of the ones who buckled under the strain.
This book tells the story of rural decay. It strips the Sunday Best from our ancestors and tells their stories in a way that deserves to be heard all the more because it does not whitewash or otherwise hide the pain and the madness that were an integral part of our forebear's lives. The hardness of our grandmother's life has inevitably trickled into our own and so to know ourselves we must seek out hers.
The parade of tiny coffins that passed through my grandmother's parlor as her siblings succumbed to diphtheria had a direct effect on how my mother was loved and reared and her paranoia shaped my life. Our lives come clearer when we step through the mists of time, picking up the subtle, untold aspects of our history, examining the chaff as well as the wheat.
Wisconsin Death Trip could just as easily be called The Heartland Death Trip. It is fascinating, yes, creepy, and most definitely a part of our trip wherever that may lead.
Show More
book itself. The book is comprised of many black and white photos that were preserved from several thousand glass negative plates taken between the years of 1890 and 1910 by a photographer in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. It also contains text that is taken from the newspaper accounts of two journalists also from Black River Falls. The journalists subscribed to a state wire service so the accounts come from all over Wisconsin, including many from the area in which I currently live. It contains excerpts from the intake journal of the state mental institution, as well.
In the Introduction, Levy tells us, "None of the accounts are fictitious. Neither pictures nor the events were, when they were made or experienced, considered to be unique, extraordinary, or sensational."
He further states, "The people who looked at the pictures once they were taken weren't surprised, and the people who read about the events weren't shocked."
The photos and the text are like two separate streams that flow in and around each other, complimenting each other in an organic way, but not a prescribed way. The little snips of stories from the newspaper reveal a constantly repeated theme to which the faces and hands of the people in the photographs give testimony. You don't so much learn their stories as you absorb them. You sense the patterns of life during this time period in ways that would be impossible with a traditional history book.
The death trip is the commonplace presence of poverty, suicide, insanity, danger, violence, ignorance, disease, alcoholism, grief, deprivation, loneliness and boredom that were the weft in the weave of rural life at the turn of the 20th century. This book unveils the hardships that were seen as routine and to which no especial emotional response was displayed if even felt. It implies the guilt and sorrow that the diseases like diphtheria, small pox and cholera left in their wake, when they stalked the countryside taking the children and leaving the adults. How does someone manage to love a child that has every reasonable chance of falling to disease or farm accident, and who is more likely to end up in a miniature coffin in the parlor than he is to grow up? How does your mind keep from breaking when you cannot feed the ones who do live. Ponder these things and feel them and you are on the death trip into the darkness of the good ol' days.
My sister-in-law loaned me Wisconsin Death Trip when it was first published in 1973 and it creeped me out. I was young and inexperienced and the notion of a death trip seemed entirely foreign. This book seemed like a voyeuristic freak show to me back then. I glanced over the written accounts and photographs, skipping around, and ultimately missing out on the opportunity it brilliantly presents to go back in time and realize what was happening not only in people's physical lives but in their emotions and in their minds.
Life has dealt with me since I first read this book so when it came out in paperback in 2000 and I read it again, perhaps I was more seasoned, shall we say, and I was able to relate to its powerful observations from the standpoint of someone who herself, has struggled with the capriciousness of life, who has seen the random insanity that lives side by side with the mundane.
This book is a time machine indeed and can take us to the lives of people in ways that the usual historical texts do not. Rather than walking the streets of ghost towns in our minds, trying to imagine life, here we find ourselves perched on the horse-hair settee in the parlor, looking at the infant in her coffin, during the last of several funerals that week, breathing diphtheria air. We are cinched into our corsets over hot cook stoves and vats of lye soap, coerced by Calvinism into judgment of the frailties of others on one hand and acceptance of our own miseries on the other. There's no place this side of madness to even release a scream.
The second time around, I appreciated the brilliance of this book's author. This book is history but it is also art. It is psychology and sociology. It's the genealogy notes that you won't find in the middle of your family Bible. This book's lessons seep in through the pores of your skin. You smell the lessons. You cringe and poke at the lessons with the stick of your mind. No one here will tell you what it is that you should learn. You find yourself walking around in the rural Mid-west of 1890-1910 and seeing it for yourself. The conclusions are Lesy's but you come to feel that they are your own as well, seen with your own two eyes.
Excerpts like these are just the tips of the iceberg that this book contains.
"In a family consisting of 3 maiden sisters and 2 bachelor brothers named Niedtke in the town of Liberty, near Appleton, 2 sisters and a brother have gone insane within the past few weeks, one of the sisters being a school teacher. Saturday the insane brother became violent and was taken to the asylum. The two sisters are being cared for at home."
"Thomas Galt died at his home in this city Friday night last from the effects of the Ackerman anti-dipsomania gold cure which he was taking. He was 37...he contracted the drink habit and it so obtained the mastery of him that he was much of the time incapacitated for labor."
"An old man was found in a brush shanty a mile south of Peshtigo. He was unable to move owing to hunger and exposure. He came from Canada a month ago in search of work."
By digesting the many accounts we come to feel the creeping paranoia and obsessive-compulsive behaviors that resulted from the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethic. We stand in the shoes of people being unnaturally pressed and formed into fine upstanding American citizens despite the pressures and terrors on the road of progress. We see the corpses of the ones who buckled under the strain.
This book tells the story of rural decay. It strips the Sunday Best from our ancestors and tells their stories in a way that deserves to be heard all the more because it does not whitewash or otherwise hide the pain and the madness that were an integral part of our forebear's lives. The hardness of our grandmother's life has inevitably trickled into our own and so to know ourselves we must seek out hers.
The parade of tiny coffins that passed through my grandmother's parlor as her siblings succumbed to diphtheria had a direct effect on how my mother was loved and reared and her paranoia shaped my life. Our lives come clearer when we step through the mists of time, picking up the subtle, untold aspects of our history, examining the chaff as well as the wheat.
Wisconsin Death Trip could just as easily be called The Heartland Death Trip. It is fascinating, yes, creepy, and most definitely a part of our trip wherever that may lead.
Show Less
LibraryThing member j-b-colson
This book had considerable impact on photographers and scholars, not all of whom approved of its approach. Lesy took all his material from the collection of one local photographer and from reports of the same local's newspaper. The news clips record the unfortunate and disastrous consequences of
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the human condition. Lots of fires and murders. The photographic record is typical of a highly competent small town late 19th century artist who often left the studio to record the belongings and doings of his customers. Sometimes Lesy creates mirror images or montages of his historic photographs rather than giving them straight. Lesy makes his point - not all was idyllic in this supposed bucolic time and place. Show Less
LibraryThing member SignoraEdie
Amazing compilation of news items and photos supporting the premise that all is not rosy in the rural parts of America in the late 1800's. Recounts depression, suicide, abuse. This was the catalyst for the writing of the novel, "The Reliable Wife."
LibraryThing member petervanbeveren
Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy, based on a collection of late 19th century photographs by Jackson County, Wisconsin, photographer Charles Van Schaick – mostly taken in the city of Black River Falls – and local news reports from the same period. It emphasizes the harsh aspects of
The book was adapted into a film in 1999
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Midwestern rural life under the pressures of crime, disease, mental illness, and urbanization.The book was adapted into a film in 1999
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Subjects
Awards
National Book Critics Circle Award (Finalist — Biography/Autobiography — 1985)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1973
Physical description
148 p.; 11.09 x 8.51 inches
ISBN
0826321933 / 9780826321930