2019. This section includes saved posts written during graduate school. All Things Plankinton includes posts about classes I took during graduate school as well as history about my hometown, Plankinton, in Aurora County, South Dakota, and the Plankinton family of Milwaukee.
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This site is a place to discuss my history projects. I’m using this as a practical experience to learn new technology tools for creating digital histories. Oh, yes. I’m a graduate student at UW-Milwaukee studying public history. We’ll see how this goes!
I’m currently working on my master’s thesis to study rural women in a small county in South Dakota in the frontier era, 1880-1920. I’m writing about the research process as I work to implement a methodology using Zotero.
When I created this site, I was on a mission to create the Plankinton history. That included John Plankinton, a wealthy business man and one of the early industrialists in Milwaukee in the later half of the nineteenth century; his daughter Elizabeth, a wealthy patron of the arts and rejected bride, and the town of Plankinton, for which no history has been written. I’ve since broadened the place history to include all of Aurora County, where Plankinton is the county seat. I’ve been writing a local newspaper column about the county history and have uploaded a few of those stories to this site under the tab It Happened Right Here.
RPJ Histories - Ruth Page Jones 