The Wisconsin magazine of history: Volume 1, number 2, December 1917

              The Frontier a World Problem 1
by Carl Russell Fish
Only by a study of local history can we hope really to understand the development of human society.  The historian like the scientist must base his knowledge on what can be seen through a microscope.  Wisconsin, from the time of its formation as a state, has realized this, and has steadily confirmed itself in the opinion.  This institution, which it founded in the days of its youth and scant resources, it has supported with a liberality, public and private, growing as its wealth has grown.  Of late years, a corps of local societies, city and county, have been forming about the central institution.  The University has directed its students to the study of the localities from which they have come, and stores in its stacks the facts which they glean.  No one of the newer states of the country knows itself so well as Wisconsin, and if, as is so often the case, acquired knowledge seems merely to reveal the knowledge still necessary for real understanding, we have carefully developed plans to extend it still more widely and intensively.
Yet how insignificant any locality seems today, when practically all are plunged into the same calamity, when the resources of all are concentrated in one struggle.  Races and breeds, nationalities and castes are merged together on the same battle-field.  Their similarities of plight and object dominate their differences, the protective barriers each erected to preserve that distinctiveness so dear to human nature seem leveled, and history has become world history.  Men thrown thus physically into the maelstrom find themselves intellectually also torn from their safe anchorages and adrift they know not where.  What does the individual count for, what
1 Delivered as the annual address before the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, October 25, 1917.