German-American Urban Culture	Breweries of Wisconsin

University Of Wisconsin Press

Even the earliest European explorers to the Americas collected objects made by native people. The ongoing fascination with the artistic and cultural expressions of American Indian people is documented historically, along with a close look at seven midwestern collections. The wide array of art encompassed is handsomely illustrated, and includes pottery, weavings, basketry, beadwork, and carvings.
January 1988
72 pp.      6 color photos, 116 b/w photos     8 1/2 x 11
ISBN 0-932900-18-6 Paper $19.95  Buy

This series of booklets captures the history of many of the largest immigrant communities in Wisconsin, enhanced by photos from the State Historical Society of Wisconsin's iconographic collections.
December 1984
40 pp.      illus.     6 x 9
ISBN 0-87020-223-5   Paper $3.95  Buy

Germans in Wisconsin
Second Edition Richard H. Zeitlin

Wisconsin has the highest percentage (almost 54%)
of German Americans of any state in the nation

This best-selling book, first published in 1977, traces Wisconsin's German population from territorial days to the arrival of the intellectual "48ers" before the Civil War; helping found the Republican, Progressive, and various socialist and workers' parties; their roles as farmers and city folk, businesspeople and factory workers; and the devastating effect
of the World Wars on German American culture. Today's ethnic culture, with its beer, brats, and polka bands, bears little relationship to the real thing in Germany, but has become distinctly "Wisconsin."

Richard H. Zeitlin is director of the Wisconsin Veterans Museum.

September 2000; 56 pp. photos, map, chart 6 x 9; ISBN 0-87020-324-X  Paper $5.95  Buy

The 19th-century arts scene

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and continuing well into the twentieth century, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was home to a remarkably vibrant and complex German-language intellectual scene. Peter C. Merrill documents the contributions of Milwaukee's most notable German-speaking writers and their works, including plays and operettas, prose, poetry, serial novels, and Feuilleton contributions. In these essays, Merill discusses these writers and the cultural context in which they worked. He emphasizes in particular the important German-language theaters of Milwaukee, tracing their history up to the renovation of the magnificent Pabst Theater in 19XX. Merrill concludes with an overview of German-American urban culture in the city.

Peter C. Merrill is professor emeritus of languages and linguistics at Florida Atlantic University. A native of Chicago, he has written extensively on German-American artistic and literary culture. He is the author of German-American Artists in Early Milwaukee, also published by the Max Kade Institute for German American Studies and distributed by the University of Wisconsin Press, and of German-American Painters in Wisconsin. 150 pp. (est.)    40 B/W ILLUS   6 x 9
ISBN 0-924119-03-9  Paper $19.95  Buy

Just the "beer" facts

Wisconsin license plates hail the state as "America's Dairyland." It would be equally appropriate if the plates read "America's Beer Garden," because Wisconsin and beer-brewing are virtually synonymous. The state has given this country more of its most prominent national brands?Miller, Blatz, Schlitz, and Pabst, to name but a few?than any other region. But within Wisconsin, beer-making has been a thriving industry as well, from cottage size to colossus, and it would be a brave person who would start a tavern argument in favor of, say, Garten Brau, knowing that loyal defenders of Point or Huber, Leinenkugel's or Chippewa Pride, Rhinelander or Miller, were all around. Indeed, there have probably been more beers born in Wisconsin than whiskies in Scotland. This book is their story.

It is the story first of the European immigrants who brought master brewing skills to the frontier in the early nineteenth century and of the origin and growth of the modern industrial giants. Between 1840 and 1960 Wisconsin saw a rich history of growth (and decline), of technological innovation, of the emergence of parallel industries from agriculture to advertising, of movements such as Prohibition and the Anti-Saloon league, of the struggle between the independents and the conglomerates, and of colorful personalities in Wisconsin's history who enlivened the scene: Joseph Huber, Valentine Blatz, the Miller and Pabst families, and all the others. All are brought vividly to life in these pages.

Foremost, however, this is a Wisconsin story: tiny rural communities that became brewing metropolises, pioneers who built fortunes and traditions that are part of Wisconsin culture to this day, the evolution of the taverns, the brewery buildings themselves as period artifact and art form, and the consumers whose thirst for beer made the whole story possible.

Beautifully illustrated throughout, with a sixteen-page full-color portfolio of the wonderful promotional art unique to beer, Breweries of Wisconsin also includes a list of every brewery and beer in the state's history and quiz items to heighten your enjoyment (or start good-natured arguments!). If you're from Wisconsin (or not), if you're a connoisseur or a collector of beer memorabilia, or if you just want to know the real story behind that mug in your hand, this book's for you!

Jerry Apps is professor of adult and continuing education at the university of Wisconsin?Madison and the author of more than twenty professional and popular books, among them Barns of Wisconsin and Mills of Wisconsin and the Midwest.

October 1992; 288 pp.      16 color pages; 100 b/w illus.     7 x 10
ISBN 0-299-13370-2   Cloth $28.95  Buy
ISBN 0-299-13374-5   Paper $18.95  Buy