March 2021
March 5, 2021
A Banana’s Journey to La Crosse, Part 1 Like last month, we’re going to look at the history of a commodity this March: bananas. In this first activity, let’s explore bananas in early 20th century La Crosse. How did they travel here? Who brought them here? Where did people buy them? What did they look like? To get started, let’s begin with the end of the journey (La Crosse) and, in activity 2, we’ll work backwards to the bananas’ origins (Central America). How did they travel here? La Crosse’s downtown waterfront district was historically full of warehouses where commodities coming…
March 19, 2021
In the first half of the 20th century, La Crosse residents gained access to bananas courtesy of wholesalers like John C. Burns (from activity #1). The significant distance between midwestern consumers in La Crosse and the tropical regions where bananas were grown, however, often meant that consumers knew little about the political or environmental contexts their bananas came from. The tropical origins of bananas also shaped the ways the fruit was incorporated into American popular culture. So for Activity #2, we invite you to investigate some of these larger contexts—(1) political, (2) environmental, and (3) popular culture—that shaped early and…
[La Crosse] History Club 