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Many of the earliest Mexicans to settle in Midwestern cities of the United States arrived from Mexico in the late 19th century to work maintaining the tracks for U.S. railroads. In Milwaukee, the earliest known Mexican resident was Rafael Baez, a musician who arrived from Puebla, Mexico in 1884 and was the organist and music… Read More

MGIC Investment Corporation is the publicly traded parent company of the Mortgage Guaranty Insurance Corporation (MGIC). With roughly 550 Milwaukee-based employees and offices throughout the country, MGIC is the one of the nation’s largest private mortgage insurers. Despite losses due to the subprime mortgage crisis of the early twenty-first century, MGIC has reemerged profitable. The… Read More

Milwaukee Inner-City Congregations Allied for Hope (MICAH) was founded in 1988, launching locally a new generation of congregation-based community organizing. An affiliate of the national Gamaliel Foundation, MICAH draws its organizing principles from the tradition of Saul Alinsky and his Industrial Areas Foundation. MICAH’s approach is to organize through member congregations (rather than the umbrella… Read More

The Midtown neighborhood is in the City of Milwaukee. Its boundaries are North Avenue to the north, Highland Avenue to the south, and Twentieth Street to the east. Highland Avenue was Milwaukee’s first boulevard. The neighborhood’s western boundary has traditionally been a railroad track that runs from about Thirtieth Street and North Avenue to Thirty-Seventh… Read More

The Miller Brewing Company is one of Milwaukee’s historic brewing giants, operating in the city from 1855 to the present. A relatively late bloomer compared to other local rivals, Miller was an important innovator in national beer marketing, a significant developer of light beer, and the last of the city’s brewing giants remaining from the… Read More

Miller Park serves as the home of the Milwaukee Brewers and bears the name of its primary sponsor, the MillerCoors brewing company. Located west of downtown, Miller Park features North America’s only fan-shaped retractable roof and houses a retro-style asymmetrical playing field designed to benefit hitters and baserunners. Miller Park was the site of the… Read More

Milorganite is a commercial fertilizer made by the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD) from the bacterial remains of the wastewater treatment process. Before the twentieth century, Milwaukeeans disposed of sewage in area waterways. After many years of debate over sanitation, the Milwaukee Sewerage Commission was created in 1913 to address the problem. The Commission’s first… Read More

Milwaukee has been home to the Milwaukee Admirals since 1970. After memberships in the United States Hockey League and International Hockey League, the Admirals joined the American Hockey League (AHL) in 2001. Previously affiliated with the National Hockey League’s Chicago Blackhawks and Vancouver Canucks, the Admirals became the minor league affiliate of the Nashville Predators… Read More

The Milwaukee Area Labor Council (MALC) traces its roots to the late nineteenth century and the affiliation of Milwaukee trade unions to the then newly-formed American Federation of Labor (AFL). As of 2015, 52,000 union members from over 140 Milwaukee locals in Milwaukee, Ozaukee, and Washington counties affiliate under the umbrella of the MALC. Waukesha… Read More

As Milwaukee Area Technical College enters its second century as one of the Midwest’s largest two-year technical colleges, constant updates and changes continue to be the hallmark of the school, echoing the words of Robert L. Cooley, the institution’s founder, who proclaimed in 1912 that “the needs of the students shall determine the curriculum.” The… Read More

The Milwaukee Art Museum is the largest art museum in Wisconsin. The 341,000 square-foot museum is home to 30,000 works; its world-renowned collections include strengths in “American decorative arts, German Expressionist works, folk and Haitian art, and American art after 1960.” While the institution’s current manifestation as the Milwaukee Art Museum is relatively new, dating… Read More

The Milwaukee Ballet Company formed in 1970, joining several other resident performing arts groups and rounding out Milwaukee’s cultural repertoire. The idea for a professional local company originated with Roberta Boorse. Boorse, a former guest dancer for the ballet and part-time instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, ran her own dance academy in West Allis… Read More

The Milwaukee Braves were unique among professional sports franchises. When owner Lou Perini moved his National League baseball club from Boston to Milwaukee in March 1953, the Braves became the first major league ball club to change cities in half a century. The shift initiated a series of westward migrations by teams and provided the… Read More

Numerous baseball teams have used the “Brewers” moniker in Milwaukee since the 1880s. The Milwaukee Brewers (1902-1952) of the minor league American Association departed upon the arrival of the major league Braves franchise. The present-day Milwaukee Brewers joined the American League in 1970, when the Seattle Pilots relocated to Milwaukee, and shifted to the National… Read More

The Milwaukee Bucks joined the National Basketball Association in 1968 and won the league championship three years later—setting a record for the shortest time from entering the league to becoming world champions. The team has won thirteen division titles and played in the conference finals twice. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Junior Bridgeman, Bob Lanier, Jon McGlocklin, Sidney… Read More

From approximately 1900 to 1930, the bungalow was a popular house type throughout the United States. The term “bungalow” was borrowed from nineteenth century English usage and the form from the British Indian colonial adaption of a Bengali house. Within America, regional variations of the one- to one-and-a-half story house with a large porch developed… Read More

The Milwaukee Chamber Orchestra (MCO) grew out of the Villa Terrace Serenades, an outdoor summer series that began in 1970 at the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum. Stephen Colburn, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra’s principal oboist, organized and conducted those programs, which featured his fellow MSO wind players. In 1974, Colburn launched the MCO as a… Read More

Founded in 1994 by former music educator and Vice President for choral publications at Hal Leonard Corporation Emily Holt Crocker, the Milwaukee Children’s Choir (MCC) is a music education and performance non-profit organization serving children and youth from the ages of four to eighteen in the Greater Milwaukee area. MCC includes six choral divisions: Songbirds,… Read More

Milwaukee County is the most populous county in Wisconsin. It has 947,735 residents as of the 2010 federal census. The county consists of nineteen municipalities, including ten cities and nine villages. There are eighteen public school districts in the county. As a political entity, Milwaukee County was established by the Michigan Territorial Legislature on September… Read More

For over 130 years, Milwaukee County provided health care at the county grounds in Wauwatosa. What began as poor relief for the area’s growing population in the nineteenth century developed into Milwaukee County General Hospital, a core institution within the Milwaukee Regional Medical Center. In 1995 rising costs and other challenges led to its privatization.… Read More