PBS Wisconsin partners with the Wisconsin Historical Society to build community through shared history.

History can be misunderstood as something distant — preserved behind glass or tucked away in an archival vault. For nearly 30 years, PBS Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Historical Society have worked in extraordinary collaboration to make Wisconsin’s heritage immediate, accessible and personal.

Launched during Wisconsin’s 1998 sesquicentennial celebration, this collaboration has transformed how we encounter our past. Working together with each other and community partners, these organizations have produced some of the state’s most treasured documentaries, series and educational initiatives — weaving the diverse threads of Wisconsin’s story into a collective experience.

A foundation in shared storytelling

The collaboration began with Sesquicentennial Minutes — a series of 52-second television segments combining interviews, manuscripts and archival imagery to reveal signature moments in the state’s history. It soon expanded into the multi-part Wisconsin Stories documentary series, which explored how varied populations transformed both the land and themselves while shaping the region.

From those early projects, the relationship between these two storied organizations grew into a model of how state historical societies and public media organizations can work together to better serve the public.

Landmark series with statewide reach

Since 2003, Wisconsin Hometown Stories has chronicled 17 communities — from Green Bay to La Crosse, Appleton to Door County — offering a deeply local lens on the state’s evolution. Wisconsin War Stories preserves firsthand veteran accounts from World War II, Korea and Vietnam, culminating in the landmark “LZ Lambeau” event at Lambeau Field, which brought together 70,000 Vietnam veterans and their families in 2010. Launched in 2014, Tribal Histories features Native storytellers sharing oral traditions in ancestral landscapes.

Innovating for the next generation

Today, the collaboration continues to evolve through new approaches and technologies. The Look Back, an exciting new video collection for 4th- through 9th-grade learners, explores artifacts and their context from Wisconsin’s history. Recent productions like Shipwrecks! and Wisconsin Lighthouses combine documentary storytelling with immersive 3D environments to make Wisconsin’s history more accessible and engaging for every audience.