Forwarded - with permission - please pass on - Last spring you asked us to notify you when Turning Points in Wisconsin History, our newest digital collection, would be ready. This is that notice: you'll be able to start using it at http://www.wisconsinhistory.org in about two weeks. The week of December 1st you'll be able to examine precious documents about Wisconsin's past in the convenience of your home, office, or classroom, any time you like. This initial installment of Turning Points will contain: - hundreds of rare books, manuscripts, photographs, museum objects, newspaper articles, speeches, maps, posters, and other original historical artifacts; - an explanation of each of those sources telling where it came from, and why it's important; - an online Dictionary of Wisconsin History that identifies and describes nearly 1,000 key people, places, and events; - 100 reference maps showing a wide variety of data about our past; - 24 essays giving the basic facts about pivotal developments in Wisconsin history. The topics that these resources document were chosen in a poll last spring, during which more than 100,000 votes were cast. Everything at Turning Points is free, and can be printed, copied and downloaded for educational use any time you like. Some highlights of this first segment: - chapters of an original Jesuit Relation from 1663 with reports from Fr. Rene Menard, the first missionary to reach Wisconsin; - a handwritten letter by Louis Joliet, describing his 1673 Mississippi voyage with Jacques Marquette and his narrow escape from death; - an original French map from 1755 showing trading posts and missions among Wisconsin Indian nations; - the Wisconsin travels of Jonathan Carver, first Englishman to write about our state; - a handwritten letter by a young wife caught up in the Black Hawk War in 1832: - 28 letters from Milwaukee between 1836 and 1846, when it grew from a minor French outpost to a bustling American metropolis; - speeches and documents by 19th-century Menominee and Ojibwe leaders, and the texts of all Wisconsin treaties; - memoirs of fur trader Pierre Paquette, Gov. Nelson Dewey, dairyman William D. Hoard, inventor Stephen M. Babcock, suffragist Olympia Brown, and many other Wisconsin men and women. You can view the manuscripts as original handwritten documents or in transcripts, and you can read early French books from their original pages, as typed texts, or translated into English. You can zoom in or out on maps and illustrations to capture details or grasp the big picture. You can click for help or email us from any page (we're usually able to answer the same day). Right now Turning Points is strongest on early Wisconsin history. After this initial release, we'll add more primary sources, explanations, dictionary terms, and essays every day until we've brought the collection up through the late 20th century. If there's a Wisconsin history topic you need to teach or write about that isn't complete yet on the Turning Points site, drop us a note (the address is below) and we'll do our best to quickly mount the sources you need. So make a note to visit wisconsinhistory.org the week of December first for a healthy, post-Thanksgiving taste of Wisconsin history. And feel free to tell your friends and colleagues to do the same. Sincerely, Michael Edmonds and Erika Janik Turning Points project Library-Archives Division Wisconsin Historical Society turningpoints@whs.wisc.edu __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Meet the all-new My Yahoo! - Try it today! http://my.yahoo.com