Jump to: Selected Subcollections | Technical Note | Related Materials
About the The Human Ecology Collection
Human ecology is an academic discipline that deals with the relationship between humans and their natural, social and created environments. Human ecology investigates how humans and human societies interact with nature and with their environment. The Human Ecology Collection brings together, in digital form, primary and secondary materials relating to human ecology.
More Information about Selected Subcollections
Jump to: All Sewn Up | Carson Gulley | Home Economics to Human Ecology | Playing House
All Sewn Up: Millinery, Dressmaking, Clothing and Costume
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Carson Gulley Cookbook Collection
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Home Economics to Human Ecology: A Centennial History at the University of Wisconsin - Madison
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Playing House: Homemaking for Children
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Technical Note
Please note that full-text searching for the electronic-facsimile texts in our collections is based on uncorrected OCR (Optical Character Recognition) results. While such text is often highly accurate, it will contain errors that may affect your search results. In particular, texts with the following characteristics are particularly prone to error (in some cases, accuracy for such texts is so low that we have decided not to attempt to provide full-text searching):
- Hand-written texts;
- Texts that contain diacritics;
- Texts that contain non-Latin scripts;
- Texts that contain obsolete characters (including the "long S" [looks like an "f"]);
- Texts that are printed in a font in which the letters are difficult for the software to differentiate.
Related materials:
- The Arts Collection
- Digital Library for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture
- Global Perspectives on Design and Culture
- Publishers' Bindings Online, 1815-1930: The Art of Books

This digital collection includes millinery, dressmaking, clothing and costume books from the UW-Madison collections. These books from the first half of the 20th century (1907 – 1940’s) include the history of clothing, styles of dress, fashion drawing, and design and construction of hats, clothing and costumes. Items in this collection will appeal to vintage clothing collectors, those studying costume design, fashion, and women’s history, and those who just enjoy reminiscing about days gone by.
Carson Gulley (1897-1962) gained such legendary status as a chef on the UW-Madison campus that both a building and a pie were named for him. Carson Gulley Commons, located at 1515 Tripp Circle, was named for the man who had served as head chef there from 1927 until 1954. Carson Gulley was the first person of color for whom a UW-Madison campus building was named. It was also the first time in the long practice of naming campus buildings that the name of a civil service employee rather than a faculty member or administrator had been so honored.
Home Economics to Human Ecology: A Centennial History at the University of Wisconsin - Madison is a digital collection of photographs and ephemera illustrating aspects of the past 100 years at the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Note: This subcollection is currently an independent collection.
American domestic advice or homemaking manuals emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and served to advise the housewife in the care and upkeep of the home and its contents and occupants. While most of these manuals were written to assist the "woman of the house", others aimed at educating young girls, the homemakers of the future. This collection includes digitized versions of books from the UW-Madison collections spanning 1877 to the 1930's. These books provide instruction on a wide range of topics including cooking, cleaning, laundry, household management and occupational training for young maids. Through them, young girls could learn among other things, the proper way to make a bed, polish the silver, decorate a table, and prepare and serve a nice meal.