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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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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;… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

  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… Read More

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… Read More

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.… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More