Showing 301-320 of 440 Entries
Author: Joseph B. Walzer
Tanning magnates Guido Pfister and Frederick Vogel, Sr. migrated separately to the United States from the German Kingdom of Württemberg in the mid-1840s. Both worked briefly at the tannery of Vogel’s cousin in Buffalo, New York, before moving to Milwaukee in 1847. In Milwaukee, Pfister opened a leather retail store on Market Street Square and…
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Author: Donald Pienkos
People of Polish immigrant origins and ancestry have made up the second largest European origin and ancestry grouping in Milwaukee since the 1880s, after the far greater population of German immigrants and their descendants. Millions of Poles wound up emigrating from every region of their country from the 1850s onward in quest of work opportunities…
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Author: Donald Pienkos
Milwaukee’s first Polish Fest was a four day event held in 1982 over Labor Day weekend on the city’s Summerfest grounds. Organized on a shoestring by Conrad Kaminski and Adrian Choinski but with the enthusiastic involvement of hundreds of volunteers, it and the 1983 Polish Fest that followed were enormous successes, attracting nearly 50,000 patrons…
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Author: Donald Pienkos
By the mid-1880s, Milwaukee’s mushrooming Polish language speaking immigrant population was estimated at 30,000 in a city of 200,000. Recognizing the possibilities of a newspaper for its members, the twenty-five year old Michael Kruszka, along with several aspiring, headstrong, and radical colleagues, founded a series of publications. The first in 1885 was a tiny publication,…
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Author: Matthew J. Prigge
Pollution—of the water, air, and land—is an unfortunate but constant feature of Milwaukee’s history. Much of the city’s pollution has been the result of commerce and industry. However, the growth in Milwaukee’s population also contributed to the problem, particularly in terms of contamination from sewage and wastewater. While the worst of Milwaukee’s pollution problems seem…
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Author: Peter Roller
Milwaukee has been a vibrant, distinctive center for popular music since the earliest years of the twentieth century. Styles widely popular with performers, listeners and dancers in Milwaukee changed with different eras, but live music remained essential to local cultural life—deriving from the gemütlichkeit principle of well-being through balanced work and recreation instilled by the…
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Author: Aaron Kinskey
The powwow has a prominent role in Milwaukee’s cultural life through the Indian Summer Festival, founded in 1986. The contest powwows in the Indian Summer Festival take place over three days and bring in hundreds of Native Americans each year from across the country, as well as many non-native spectators. The term powwow likely comes…
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Author: Jenna Himsl
Although Presbyterian churches counted only a little more than 8,000 members in the Milwaukee area as of 2010, Presbyterians have played a significant role in shaping the city. A Presbyterian congregation was among the earliest founded in Milwaukee, and famous early Milwaukee Presbyterians included meatpacking magnate John Plankinton, Mayor William Pitt Lynde, and mapmaker Silas…
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Author: Michael Doylen
PrideFest Milwaukee is an annual summer festival celebrating local LGBT community and culture. It has roots in the Pride celebrations held in New York and elsewhere in June 1970 to mark the first anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. Milwaukee’s earliest Pride event was held in January 1971 and included a small rally at the Milwaukee…
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Author: Joseph B. Walzer
Tied largely to newspaper and magazine publishing, Milwaukee’s printing industry formed in the decade prior to the city’s charter and matured into one of the city’s largest industries, becoming a national industry center through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1836, Daniel Richards established Milwaukee’s first printing operation near the current corner of Old World…
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Author: Dennis Pajot
Milwaukee has been an important baseball location in professional baseball since the 1870s. It has never been the hub of mid-western baseball and certainly never could be with Chicago’s close proximity. The last quarter of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century often found Milwaukee in the thick of major league baseball…
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Author: Matthew J. Prigge
Trading cash for sex, either with streetwalkers or at brothels, is a practice as old as Milwaukee itself and, despite law and crusades against it, survives to this day, primarily men buying sex from women. The earliest references to prostitution in Milwaukee date back to the early 1850s, as articles appeared in the Milwaukee Sentinel…
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Author: Diane Buck
In its broadest sense, public art is an expression in art of any kind existing in public space. This entry describes only standing works of art in the open air. All public art is meant to encourage community engagement. It can include non-objects such as dance and theater; however, those expressions, as well as pieces…
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Author: James K. Nelsen
Public education is the system in which states and localities own and operate schools. These schools are paid for at public expense and are open to all children in a school district or community. Each district is governed by an elected school board. The school board sets broad policies, appoints a superintendent and other administrators,…
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Author: Anne Dressel
Over 40 public libraries have been established in the Milwaukee metropolitan region since 1878, when the Milwaukee Public Library first opened its doors. Early library development in the region took place during the American Public Library Movement, which swept across much of the United States, including Wisconsin, in the late 19th through the early 20th…
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Author: William I. Tchakirides
The Public Service Building, designed by Herman J. Esser, opened in 1905 in order to coordinate Milwaukee’s transportation and energy provisions. The Beaux-Arts Neoclassical structure functioned as the MILWAUKEE ELECTRIC RAILWAY AND LIGHT COMPANY’S main office, central terminal, and training facility. The company’s horsecar and, later, electric streetcar network served Milwaukee’s neighborhoods and suburbs until…
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Author: Brian Mueller
Milwaukee’s publishing industry dates from the founding of the city and has achieved its greatest success in the magazine business. A century after the city’s founding, it ranked within the top ten of all American cities when it came to publishing. Dominated by ethnic newspapers and religious periodicals in its early years, Milwaukee became home,…
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Author: William Velez
The Puerto Rican community in Milwaukee dates from the early 1950s when workers were recruited to the city’s foundries and tanneries through the Chicago office of the Puerto Rican Department of Labor. As the economy in Puerto Rico shifted from agriculture to manufacturing in the 1940s, thousands of farm workers were displaced. Island political leaders…
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Author: Joseph B. Walzer
Headquartered in Sussex, Quad/Graphics is an international printing giant, focused primarily on magazine and catalogue printing, with multiple plants in the Milwaukee area. Operating from 1971 to the present, Quad/Graphics was a relatively late-bloomer in Milwaukee’s printing industry but became a national industry leader in the late-twentieth century. After graduating from Columbia Law School, Harry…
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Author: John D. Buenker
Racine County was forged out of the original Milwaukee County on December 7, 1836. From the end of the Civil War to the 1950s, it ranked second in Wisconsin only to its northern lakeshore neighbor in total population, industrial development, and ethno-cultural diversity. Several of its manufacturing establishments achieved national—and even international—status. For several decades,…
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