Showing 81-100 of 440 Entries
Author: John M. McCarthy
Civil defense was adopted as an important policy in postwar Milwaukee by Mayor Frank Zeidler. In 1948, fearing atomic warfare, Zeidler helped create the Civil Defense and Disaster Committee, and in 1952, city officials created the Department of Civil Defense. Milwaukee gained notoriety for comprehensive civil defense efforts which included over 3,000 volunteer “block wardens,”…
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Author: William Dalhk
The Milwaukee civil disorder of 1967, often referred to as a riot, began on the evening of Sunday, July 30. By the following morning, confrontations on the city’s streets had essentially ended. Its brevity was the result of rapid, muscular responses by Milwaukee police, Mayor Henry Maier, and Wisconsin governor Warren Knowles, who sent in…
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Author: Kevin D. Smith
Milwaukee’s Civil Rights Movement was the culmination of longstanding efforts by African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and their white allies to improve social, political, and economic prospects for non-white Milwaukeeans. During the 1860s, a small group of African Americans struggled to win the franchise. With the arrival of thousands of Southern migrants during the Great…
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Author: James Marten
The Clement J. Zablocki VA Medical Center is the direct descendant of the Northwestern Branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers (NHDVS), established by Congress in 1865 to care for Union soldiers who had suffered disabling wounds or illnesses due to their service in the Civil War. The home was funded partly by…
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Author: Bethany Harding
Clement J. Zablocki (1912-1983) represented Milwaukee’s South Side as a Democrat in the Wisconsin state senate from 1943 to 1948 and in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1949 to 1983. Of Polish ancestry, Zablocki was a lifelong devotee of his community and his Catholic faith. He attended St. Vincent DePaul Parish School, Marquette University…
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Author: Michael Gonzales
The Children’s Outing Society was formed in 1906 by Florence Friend, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Black Kander, and other women from the Personal Relief Society, a social service organization active in Milwaukee’s Jewish community. The Society changed its name to the Children’s Outing Association (COA) in 1930. COA’s initial purpose was to improve the physical well-being of…
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Author: Joseph B. Walzer
Fish have long been an important part of Milwaukee’s diet and culture, perhaps most notably in the “Friday night fish fry.” The city’s commercial fishing industry expanded to meet the needs of local customers but never developed larger markets as did peers in other parts of the Great Lakes. Native American communities subsisted on fish…
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Author: Karen W. Moore
Milwaukee attained its official municipal status in 1846. As with many fundamental urban changes of the era, the catalyst for transformation from village to city was a series of social crises and territorial fights. In little more than a decade, Milwaukee had grown from a mere trading post to a community that would reach 20,000…
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Author: Joseph B. Walzer
The Communist Party of America organized in the United States in 1919 was a split-off from the Socialist Party after the Russian Revolution. It was affiliated with the Communist International, often called the Third International, which advocated for world communist revolutions to overthrow capitalism. The Communist Party of Wisconsin organized as a statewide branch of…
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Author: Laura Rominger Porter
Descended from New England Puritanism, Congregationalism arrived in Wisconsin in 1830 with a mission to the Stockbridge Indians. Congregational ministers soon multiplied, aided by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and the American Home Missionary Society (AHMS). Although Wisconsin’s early Congregationalists cooperated with their better-funded Presbyterian counterparts, local Congregational churches quickly asserted their…
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Author: Paul G. Hayes
The modern movement toward environmental protection in Milwaukee was rooted in the frontier settlement’s first efforts to control water pollution to protect public health. From this beginning, the dynamic interplay of time, technology, science, commerce, and population growth resulted in a gradual expansion of this narrow focus to the conservation of natural resources, starting with…
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Author: Joseph B. Walzer
Milwaukee’s county roads originated in Indian trails that wound through the region. In the early nineteenth century, these routes became important channels for fur traders, settlers, and the U.S. military and mail service. A particularly important trail connected Fort Howard in Green Bay to Fort Dearborn in Chicago, cutting past the trading posts of Jacques…
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Author: Bill Reck
Milwaukee’s Croatian community dates to the first decade of the twentieth century. United States Census figures indicate that in 1910, over 3,000 Croatians and Serbs, identified by mother tongue and grouped together at that point, lived in the city. Despite their rural backgrounds, early Croatian Milwaukeeans worked in the city’s industrial sector in the city…
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Author: Michael Pulido
In the spring of 1993, approximately 400,000 people fell victim to what Milwaukeeans have since referred to as “Crypto.” At least sixty-nine people—mostly people suffering from AIDS—died in this Cryptosporidium outbreak, which would become country’s largest waterborne disease epidemic on record. These numbers do not include those who visited Milwaukee and drank the water before…
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Author: Raul Galvan
Cubans began to appear in the Milwaukee area in noticeable numbers several years after the triumph of the Castro Revolution on January 1959. When Castro began to align himself with the Soviet Union, many Cubans on the island began to make plans to send their children out of the country in the Operation Peter Pan…
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Author: Jenna Himsl
Located in Milwaukee County, just east of Milwaukee’s southernmost portion, the suburban city of Cudahy was named for city founder and meatpacker Patrick Cudahy. Cudahy is bordered by St. Francis to the north, General Mitchell International Airport to the west, Lake Michigan to the east, and Oak Creek and South Milwaukee to the south. The…
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Author: Joseph B. Walzer
Operating in the Milwaukee area from 1888 to the present, the Patrick Cudahy Corporation is one of Milwaukee’s historic meatpacking giants. The company originated in the packing firm of John Plankinton, a successful enterprise due in large part to the lucrative partnerships that he established with other budding packing moguls from the early 1850s through…
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Author: Lisa Lamson
The Milwaukee Curling Club (MCC), established in 1845, is the oldest continuous curling club in the United States. Curling, brought to the area by Scottish immigrants, was initially played on the Milwaukee River. James Murray served as the first president of the organization. Milwaukee curlers joined the Grand National Curling Club of America in 1867…
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Author: Bill Reck
Immigrants from Bohemia and Moravia, called the “Czech Homelands” by the key scholar of Milwaukee’s Czech community, were one of the first ethnic groups to settle in the Milwaukee area in the middle of the nineteenth century. Then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, today these lands form the Czech Republic, the western-most Slavic nation in…
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Author: Tom Strini
Milwaukee’s tradition of performance has been nurtured by a mix of professional companies focused on modern dance and ballet. Because dance has been marginal in Milwaukee’s arts economy, educational institutions such as the Wisconsin College of Music and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts (UWM) have been crucial to sustaining the field…
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