Constructing the “Fresh Coast”: Water and the Reinvention of the Post-Industrial City

April 23, 2025.Reading time 36 minutes.

Editor’s note: This is the seventh post in our theme for April 2025, The City Aquatic. For additional entries in the series, see here. By Michael Carriere On December 3, 2008, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett appeared at a day-long symposium on “concentrated poverty” in America, held at the Federal Reserve in Washington, D.C. Barrett told […]

Harnessing the Memory of Freeway Displacement in the Cream City

April 12, 2021.Reading time 22 minutes.

Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of articles during April that examine the construction of the Interstate Highway System over the past seven decades. The series, titled Justice and the Interstates, opens up new areas for historical inquiry, while also calling on policy makers and the transportation and urban planning professions to […]

Accounting for Medical Examiners in Historical Autopsies of the Carceral State

April 1, 2021.Reading time 18 minutes.

By Will Tchakirides Following three nights of unrest in the Twin Cities last May, Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman charged Minneapolis patrolman Derek Chauvin with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter of George Floyd. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison upgraded the charges to second-degree murder and charged the other three officers who watched Floyd’s killing with […]

Member of the Week: Amanda I. Seligman

September 15, 2020.Reading time 14 minutes.

Amanda I. Seligman Professor University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee @AmandaISeligman Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? My central goal in teaching urban history is to help students to read the history of the American city in the landscapes they see. Editing the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee (EMKE) gave me the chance to extend that mission […]

Prisons, Rehabilitation, and Suburbanization: Building the Local Carceral State in Metropolitan Milwaukee, 1950-1958

August 29, 2019.Reading time 27 minutes.

Our fourth entrant into the Third Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest, Ian Toller-Clark, takes us back to the Midwest to examine the life cycle of the Wisconsin School for Boys. In the 1950s, the prison fell into aged disrepair at the same time that Milwaukee’s suburbs were in their infancy. Would it be […]

Digital Summer School 2019: Religion, Community, and Milwaukee

July 10, 2019.Reading time 13 minutes.

Editor’s note: With the July 4th holiday behind us and summer in full swing, The Metropole brings you our second annual Digital Summer School, our effort to highlight digital humanities projects focusing on urban history. First up, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor Chris Cantwell and the digital project Gathering Places, Religion and Community in Milwaukee. Why did you […]

“What I Did This Summer”: Drinking Urban History in Wisconsin

September 13, 2018.Reading time 25 minutes.

By Brian Goldstein and Theresa McCulla As a family of historians who study the city, we are hardly unusual in the way we travel: we like to experience places new and old through food and drink. Less typical, however, is that one of us gets paid to do this. Theresa, as the historian of the […]

Digital Summer School: The Encyclopedia of Milwaukee

June 28, 2018.Reading time 14 minutes.

In our second installment of Digital Summer School, Amanda Seligman, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee historian and co-founder of the online project the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee (EMKE), discusses the challenges, triumphs, and goals of the EMKE. Twitter handle for EMKE: @MkeEncyclopedia Why did you establish this digital project and who is your audience? Urban history encyclopedias have been […]