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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… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

Professional wrestling, distinguished from other forms of wrestling by its tacit fakery and showmanship, has provided performance art for the masses in Milwaukee for more than a century. The modern American pastime emerged as a spectator sport in the second half of the nineteenth century as strongman acts in touring carnivals. These small-time shows looked… Read More

Due to efforts by the temperance movement in general and groups like the Anti-Saloon League in particular, alcohol consumption became a political issue following the American Civil War. Aided by growing anti-German sentiment following the outbreak of World War One, the prohibition movement—or a ban on the production, sale, importation, and transportation of alcohol—gained support… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

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,… Read More

Milwaukee has proven exceptional in its reform-minded approach to public health since it established a Board of Health in 1867. Later efforts to improve public health began after the city’s rapid population growth in the late nineteenth century (by 1910 Milwaukee was the twelfth largest city in the United States, with a population of 373,857).… Read More

While Milwaukee had a visionary public housing mission in the first half of the twentieth century, the vision diminished as market forces and racial politics came to the fore after World War II. Milwaukee’s first two public housing projects were built for the working class. Garden Homes, completed in 1923, included both single-family homes and… Read More

Over forty 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… Read More

The term public policy describes decisions by government that affect you as a citizen. To use the contemporary jargon of strategic planning and performance measurement, public policy is the output of government, different from inputs and outcomes. So, we might talk about the Waukesha County Executive proposing to the County Board a new public policy… Read More

Milwaukee’s Public Policy Forum is a non-partisan, government watchdog group that since its 1913 founding has continuously provided independent, non-partisan research and analysis of local municipalities’ activities and public policy issues. From its founding until today, the group has wielded great influence with local governments and in the media. The Forum earned a reputation for… Read More

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… Read More

The Department of Public Works is one of the largest administrative divisions of Milwaukee’s city government, but this was not always so. Even after the city incorporated in 1846, officials only gradually expanded government services to meet the needs of citizens. By 1871, the city had no water works, few paved streets, and a very… Read More

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,… Read More

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… Read More

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… Read More

The mineral resources of southeast Wisconsin are derived primarily from the Silurian and Devonian bedrock, which dates back to more than 350 million years ago, and various glacial deposits, which were emplaced about 13,000 to 15,000 years ago as glaciers retreated from the Midwest. Silurian Dolostone is the dominant quarried rock, coming from the near… Read More

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,… Read More