WAK HIS 204: Introduction to Public History

The Research Library of the Milwaukee County Historical Society has a wide variety of information about the history of the City of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County. The library contains more than 3,000 separate manuscript collections from various businesses, organizations and families/individuals – some of whom are among Milwaukee’s earliest settlers. The photograph collection is also housed in the research library and includes more than one million photographs. Limited online collections.

For more than 100 years the WCHSM has dedicated itself to preserving and sharing the county’s cultural heritage. The artifact and archival collection includes more than 18,000 objects, 250,000 images, millions of archival materials, and innumerable stories that make up the community of Waukesha County. Research Center appointments can be scheduled on Friday mornings only.

Collections include decorative arts, clothing and textiles, domestic life and folk arts, toys dolls and sports that include the history of Milwaukee. Almost all collections are not digitized.

Extensive collection of artifacts from the late 1800s through 1970 that recently relocated from a museum in downtown Milwaukee to the Cedarburg History Museum.

Includes both an online searchable collection of digitized photographs as well as a finding aid for un-digitized photographs in the Library's collections. Includes Milwaukee's "Remember When" collection.

Formerly known as Wisconsin Historical Images (WHI), over 90,000 images are available online, and we continue to add over 8,000 images per year to the online resource. Digitized images include the full range of materials available in our physical collections. Image holdings are particularly strong in daily life from the turn of the century to the 1970s.

Note: searches can be refined by century/decade/year using filter on the left. Suggested searches include "TAVERN and INTERIOR" or "STORE and INTERIOR" and then narrow to the 1930s and 1940s. Additional keywords (e.g. "games", "furnishings", "decor", "clothing", or "drinking") can be searched on as well.