What Made Milwaukee Famous

Hello.

Welcome to What Made Milwaukee Famous, the new history blog here on the brand new expressmilwaukee.com. My name is Matthew J. Prigge and I’ll be your host. I have been a semi-regular contributor to the Shepherd since 2011 and have published a number of articles elsewhere, most of them on topics involving Milwaukee history. My second book is coming out this winter from the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. It’s called Milwaukee Mayhem: Murder and Mystery in the Cream City’s First Century, and I will be talking a bit more about the project as a release date nears. In the summer, I am a tour guide for the Milwaukee Boat Line and in the winter I go to classes at UW-Milwaukee, hoping they will give me a PhD sometime before the earth crashed into the sun. I’m a Pisces.

So, now that we’re not strangers anymore, we can get on with the show. My historical interests range from the bizarre to the morbid. That book I mentioned earlier is a collection of the strangest and goriest stories I could dug up from Milwaukee’s past. I’ve found local histories in general, and Milwaukee’s histories in particular, to be too shy in their approach to such topics – murder, crime, vice, and the like – as though to highlight these things is a kind of slur on the city, especially in a city whose most famous resident was a serial killer and cannibal.

This is not to say I’ll focus only on the blood-n-guts topics. But this blog – in my greatest hopes for it – will be get into the stuff that others have ignored, either by thinking it too negative, too weird, or just not important enough. My only allegiance here will be to the weird and lost stories that hide all over this great, big city… the stuff that made Milwaukee what it is today – famous, if you will – but have since been forgotten. So enjoy, and feel free to hit me up with any ideas or comments.

Until then… play us off, Jerry Lee….