Cream City Chronicles is a collection of lively stories about the people, the events, the landmarks, and the institutions that have made Milwaukee a unique American community. These stories represent the best of historian John Gurda's popular Sunday columns that have appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel since 1994. Find yourself transported back to another time, when the village of Milwaukee was home to fur trappers and...

"John Gurda's South Side Milwaukee family loved potluck dinners. "From the Jell-O salads at the start of the line through the hot dishes in the middle and on to the pumpkin bars at the end, the food was always hearty, abundant, and certifiably homemade," he writes. Drawing from Gurda's long-running Sunday Milwaukee Journal Sentinel column, Brewtown Tales was prepared in the spirit of those fondly remembered meals. The main dish is Milwaukee history,...

"A Crowded Hour: Milwaukee During the Great War examines the social, political, and economic challenges that scarred and dramatically changed the city during and after World War I. Pro-war patriots considered Milwaukee's loyalties doubly suspect because of its large German-American population and strong Socialist Party. Consequently, Milwaukeeans endured intense efforts, some bordering on the paranoid or absurd, to enforce 100 percent Americanism...

"Water has been so critical to Milwaukee's development that imagining the community without it is virtually impossible. Milwaukee was literally built on water -- along the shores of Lake Michigan and its three main rivers, the Milwaukee, Menomonee, and Kinnickinnic, and on top of countless tons of landfill that raised the entire city out of the wetlands in the 1850s. Water was also the driving force behind many elements of Milwaukee's evolution, for...

With the migration of African American sharecroppers to northern cities in the first half of the 20th century, the African American population of Milwaukee grew from fewer than 1,000 in 1900 to nearly 22,000 by 1950. Most settled around a 12-block area along Walnut Street that came to be known as Milwaukee�s Bronzeville, a thriving residential, business, and entertainment community. Barbershops, restaurants, drugstores, and funeral homes were started...

"Milwaukee's eight hundred street names offer fascinating glimpses into the city's rich heritage; from French fur traders to Yankee speculators, from wealthy German tycoons of the Gay Nineties to African American leaders of the 20th century. In this unique book you can read about Tom Mason, who started a war that gave the Upper Peninsula to Michigan; the bitter six-year religious controversy sparked by the naming of Santa Monica Boulevard; "Uncle...