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Petitions consist of an introductory narrative by a citizen or group of citizens describing a topic of local interest and signed by a number of community members. Throughout the nineteenth century, Wisconsin citizens directly petitioned the territorial, and later, state legislature to approve, reject, and edit the legal decisions and policies that affected their lives. Some petitions are similar to “form letters” where nearly identical text is prepared and a blank space is included for signatures. Most citizen petitions are tri-folded legal-size documents and remain tied in their original bundles or envelopes. Some petitions are a single page, while others are several pages fastened together. These petitions are mostly handwritten in blue and iron gall ink; most petitions comprise a title page, the petition itself, and signature pages.
Citizens used petitions to advocate for the causes they considered for personal and public benefit, or protest against decisions they found damaging to their communities. These early petitions reveal what settlers wished to achieve for their families and communities and the ways in which they hoped to connect Wisconsin to the expanding commerce and intellectual life of the United States.
For this site, I assembled scanned pages into an Item Set which serves as the container for the image Items. Metadata for the petitions themselves are recorded in the Item Set metadata. My resource template contains 14 metadata elements from Dublin Core. I followed Professor Iris Lee's lead and changed some labels to more accurately reflect the content of the data to a user (i.e. "Alternative title" changed to "Original title"). I also added "Language," "Publisher-Electronic," and "Publication Date-Electronic," as well as maps.
Because my images are catalogued in CONTENTdm, I used Dublin Core to be consistent with the controlled headings used by WHS.
The original “Petitions, Remonstrances, and Resolutions” record series is available in the Archives Reading Room at WHS’ headquarters in Madison. The collection is arranged in chronological order, and there under by petition number. The material series contains over twice as many items than are available online, as only the first copy of a repeating item is scanned (for example, the record series contains multiple petitions for a second Constitutional Convention— only one copy is online). The work of flattening, scanning, and describing these petitions was funded by the National Historical Publications & Records Commission of the National Archives.