WHAT LIES BENEATH; UNCOVERING THE HEALTH OF MILWAUKEE’S PEOPLE, 1880-1929 Brigitte M. Charaus, B.A., M.A. Marquette University, 2010 The true measure of a city's health is the health of its people. To truly understand how Milwaukee came to be known as the “healthiest city” in 1930, one must examine the health needs of common Milwaukeeans from 1880 to 1929. This study seeks to complement Judith Leavitt's pioneering work on public health in Milwaukee by presenting a picture, not of the politics of health reform, but of the personal side of health in the city. Through an extensive examination of records including, but not limited to, coroner's reports, hospital records, personal correspondence, newspapers, cemetery data, and institutional records, a picture of the overall health of the city's population emerges. These records speak of the urban environment and its effects on everyday people. Communicable diseases, tragic accidents, suicides, physical examinations, venereal diseases, housing problems, and occupational hazards are only a portion of the health story that Milwaukee created at the turn of the last century. While political and institutional histories are essential, the story told here focuses on the people of Milwaukee and their experiences. While the city would dramatically grow and change during the twentieth century, its people remained its most valuable asset. As a city initially defined by German, Polish, and Italian immigrants, today Milwaukee has significant Hispanic and Hmong communities. The immigrant groups have changed but the challenges of living in the urban environment remain the same. The health of the city as a whole, as well as of its everyday citizens, is a strong indicator of its general economic, social, and physical health. Sick citizens create a sick city, both on a biologic level and an economic level. By bettering their individual health, the health of the overall city improves. The lessons and challenges that Milwaukeeans faced in the early twentieth century provide insight and models for Milwaukeeans of the twenty-first century. While breweries will make Milwaukee famous, it is her citizenry that makes the city prosper.

What Lies Beneath: Uncovering the Health of Milwaukee's People, 1880-1929

If meaningful change is to take place with regard to homelessness, future research must take on the difficult task of critically examining and evaluating the cultural ideal of home. For it is against that taken-for-granted, progress-driven idealization that our definition and management of homelessness begin. In this paper the historical contexts within which home and homelessness have been defined in the United States are traced, and the degree to which they are conceptually and functionally connected is shown, It is argued that we must examine the basic premises embedded in the home ideal, because this ideal is used as the standard against which homelessness is observed and treated. At root, the home ideal is found to be exclusive, arbitrary, ambiguous, and open to manipulation. Hence, contemporary homelessness must be understood within the culturally guided and historically contingent contexts that home and homelessness have been defined in the United States.

Home and Homelessness in the United States: Changing Ideals and Realities:

The lawn as material practice is historically grounded in a complex of influences that has given rise to its dominance as the appropriate landscaping form in urban and suburban North America for private green space. This occurs as a variety of ecological concerns challenge the continuation of the lawned landscape. The inability of such critique to displace this dominance attests to the ideological naturalization of the lawn. This paper examines current and historical factors that sustain the lawn's dominance and presents two interrelated findings. The first is the "social machinery" that delineates the informal and formal arrangements for upholding and monitoring landscaping practices. The second are residential property holders' perspectives on the importance of the lawn, and associations between residential yard practices and professed environmental concerns. Apparently, the lawn retains enough symbolic and material value to withstand critique, a quality that removes it from the geography of environment...

Contesting natural(ized) lawns: a geography of private green space in the niagara region

Americans' expressed preferences for housing suggest that they prefer to own single-family homes surrounded by other single-family homes. Yet such preferences manifest in housing market behavior or attitudes fail to account for the multidimensional complexity of the housing bundle and the predictability of housing bundle packages found within the market. This research examines how people actually evaluate the myriad of attributes associated with the housing bundle. It explores how a sample of Syracuse metropolitan residents evaluate particular housing and neighborhood characteristics. Applying the factorial survey method, this article examines the values placed on characteristics when people solely evaluate housing structures, the character and composition of neighborhood, and composite descriptions of housing and neighborhood. This study reveals no clear preferences for home ownership. Preferences for particular types of housing and for particular neighborhood compositions were modified when people evalu...

Castles in the Sky Measuring Housing and Neighborhood Ideology

The recent proliferation of telecommunications services has turned the idea of universal service into a serious problem, because there is little consensus about what should constitute a “bare essential” package. Scholars addressing this problem have sought to develop a new definition for universal service which can provide a framework for formulating appropriate public policies. The analysis presented in this article suggests that this approach is a misdirected effort. In the United States, incremental processes are likely to have a greater chance of success than those based on a master plan.

David P. Handlin

Papers

The American home : architecture and society, 1815-1915