Showing 341-360 of 440 Entries
Author: Joseph B. Walzer
The Schlitz Brewing Company (1849-1982) was one of Milwaukee’s industrial brewing giants. Marketed as “the beer that made Milwaukee famous,” Schlitz was an important innovator in the national brewing industry and the largest brewery in the United States for a significant part of the twentieth century. The Schlitz Brewing Company originated in August Krug’s pioneer…
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Author: Brian Mueller
The first Scots came to Milwaukee in the 1810s as fur traders. James Murray arrived in 1835 and became the first permanent Scottish settler in the city. A renaissance man of sorts, Murray was a painter, glazier, and real estate broker. As a Presbyterian, he played a role in founding the First Presbyterian Church in…
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Author: Michael Gonzales
Scouting has played an important role in the lives of young people in the Milwaukee area since the national movement began in the early twentieth century. Viewing scouting as a vehicle to teach skills and instill values, a variety of local organizations, including schools, churches, synagogues, civic groups, and firehouses have sponsored scout “troops.” Most…
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Author: Bill Reck
Milwaukee’s Serb population dates to the late nineteenth century, when Serbs seeking industrial employment immigrated to Milwaukee and other cities along Lake Michigan’s waterfront, including Racine, Kenosha, and Chicago. This early Serb population arrived in Milwaukee as part of a larger movement of peoples from the Austro-Hungarian controlled areas of the Balkans, such as Slavonia,…
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Author: Angela Fritz
The first American settlement house was established in New York City in 1886. In contrast to existing charitable organizations that dispensed material aid and advice to the needy, in settlement houses reformers lived in the neighborhoods they served with cultural programming and community amenities. College-educated men and women joined the settlement house movement around the…
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Author: Jenna Himsl
In 2010, over 2,800 Seventh-day Adventists worshipped in the greater Milwaukee area. Known for keeping the Saturday Sabbath, the Adventist faithful meet in thirteen minister-led churches and lay companies in the metropolitan area. Among these congregations, Central Seventh-day Adventist, in Milwaukee’s North Point neighborhood, is notable for its location in an Alexander Eschweiler-designed mansion. Milwaukee…
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Author: Kathleen Foss
Sewage is a variable liquid comprising material from a variety of sources, including, but not limited to: human waste; industrial waste; runoff from household and manufacturing processes; animal waste and road runoff; and rainwater. Sewage that requires processing through chemical and biological means to eliminate toxins and germs is considered “sanitary sewage”; that consisting of…
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Author: Matthew J. Prigge
The World Health Organization defines sexual health as “a state of physical, emotional, mental and social well-being in relation to sexuality” and emphasizes “it is not merely the absence of disease, dysfunction or infirmity.” In the context of Milwaukee’s history, the main focus of policies and practices surrounding sexual health, however, concerns the prevention and…
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Author: Matthew Costello
Sheepshead is a popular American card game that originated in Central Europe during the eighteenth century. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the first major wave of European immigrants arrived in the United States. While the city of Milwaukee attracted immigrants of all kinds, Germans quickly became the largest immigrant population in the city;…
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Author: Jenna Himsl
While there is no authoritative count of American Sikhs, the Pew Research Center concluded that in 2012 about 200,000 Sikhs (a conservative estimate), primarily of Indian descent, lived within the United States. As signs of faith and social solidarity, many Sikhs adopt the names “Singh” (lion) for men and “Kaur” (princess) for women. A monotheistic…
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Author: Alan Borsuk
Sister Joel Read, SSSF, was the central figure in transforming Alverno College on Milwaukee’s South Side from a small, religious-oriented institution run by the School Sisters of Saint Francis into a pioneer in programs serving non-traditional students and measuring student success in innovative ways. During her thirty-five years as president of Alverno, Read became a…
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Author: Michael Gonzales
Sixteenth Street Community Health Centers (SSCHC) have provided free and affordable health care services to low-income patients since 1969. That year, neighborhood organizers opened a small, volunteer-run health clinic at the corner of South 16th Street and West Greenfield Avenue. Since its earliest days, SSCHC has worked to serve the needs of the South…
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Author: Bill Reck
The Milwaukee area’s Slovak population dates from the 1880s, when economic dislocation at home and nationalist resistance to the Magyarization policies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire prompted immigrants to come to the United States in search of jobs and a better life. At the time, labor agents from American industrial plants, including southeast Wisconsin’s Patrick Cudahy…
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Author: Brian Mueller
Living in tight-knit communities in southern Milwaukee, West Allis, and Cudahy, Milwaukee Slovenian immigrants constructed an assortment of churches, fraternal orders, and cultural institutions that preserved their traditions while they also adapted to America. The earliest Slovenes arrived in Wisconsin in the 1870s when Slovenia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the migration continued…
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Author: William McMahon
Metropolitan Milwaukee boasts a rich history of youth, amateur, and semiprofessional soccer programs. It can even lay claim to holding the first recorded match in the United States, a challenge between Carroll College students and Waukesha youths in 1866. By the early twentieth century, clubs in the city of Milwaukee formed among immigrants in ethnic…
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Author: Tula Connell
Many German immigrants came to Milwaukee in the mid-nineteenth century influenced by the doctrines of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, and Ferdinand Lassalle. And in the process, they came to form the core of Milwaukee socialists. Holding their early meetings in German, this informal socialist Vereinigung (or association) initially did not expand to the wider community.…
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Author: Jenna Himsl
Members of the Society of Friends, also known as Quakers, were among the early Yankee-Yorker settlers in Southeastern Wisconsin in the 1830s. Over a century later, the current Milwaukee Monthly Meeting—the Society of Friends congregation in Milwaukee—was founded. The Milwaukee Friends Meeting, like its counterpart in Madison, arose from the pacifist movements of the 1920s…
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Author: Bethany Harding
Milwaukee co-founder Laurent Solomon Juneau was born on August 9, 1793 at Repentigny, a small farming village near Montreal. Juneau entered the fur trade as a teenager, working (perhaps) for the Hudson’s Bay Company before becoming an independent agent based in Prairie du Chien. In 1818 the young voyageur met Jacques Vieau, a well-established trader…
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Author: John Vietoris
Established in 1908, St. Benedict the Moor Mission was the principal focus of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee’s early ministry to African Americans. Its school was one of the few boarding schools for African American children in the country. While priests and sisters formed good Catholics, they also nurtured strong, knowledgeable, and confident individuals able to…
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Author: Matthew J. Prigge
St. Catherine’s Residence was established in 1894 to provide temporary housing to the large numbers of young women moving from rural areas to Milwaukee for jobs or schooling. The home, originally located at 1131 Sycamore Street (later West Michigan St.), was first known as St. Catherine’s Home for Working Girls. It was administered by the…
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