Thanks to the city's large industrial base, factories quickly retooled and mobilized for wartime production. Locals sacrificed their lives for the cause. Through past interviews and archival materials, author Meg Jones reveals these and other patriotic stories.

Milwaukeeans greeted the advent of World War II with the same determination as other Americans. Everyone felt the effect of the war, whether through concern for loved ones in danger, longer work hours, consumer shortages, or participation in war service organizations and drives. Men and women workers produced the essential goods necessary for victory—the vehicles, weapons, munitions, and components for all the machinery of war. But even in wartime there were labor conflicts, fueled by the sacrifices and tensions of wartime life. A City at War focuses on the experience of working men and women in a community that was not a wartime boom town. It looks at the stands of the CIO and the AFL against low wartime wages, and at women in unionized factories facing the perceptions and goals of male workers, union leaders, and society itself. Here is a social history of wartime Milwaukee and its workers as they laid the groundwork for a secure postwar future.

Long before Japanese bombs rained down on Pearl Harbor, Milwaukee was the "Machine Shop to the World." Thanks to the city's large industrial base, factories quickly retooled and mobilized for wartime production. Harley-Davidson produced thousands of military motorbikes, and Falk Corporation churned out gears that turned the propellers on hundreds of ships. Locals sacrificed their lives for the cause--Mayor Carl Zeidler went missing at sea, USS Arizona captain Franklin Van Valkenburgh refused to leave the bridge of his burning battleship and Mildred Harnack joined the Nazi resistance movement and was executed on direct orders from Hitler. Embedded with German and American troops, Milwaukee journalists H.V. Kaltenborn, Louis Lochner and Dickey Chapelle sent dispatches from the front lines. Through past interviews and archival materials, author Meg Jones reveals these and other patriotic stories.

Other historians have tended to treat black urban life mainly in relation to the ghetto experience, but in Black Milwaukee, Joe William Trotter Jr. offers a new perspective that complements yet also goes well beyond that approach. The blacks in Black Milwaukee were not only ghetto dwellers; they were also industrial workers. The process by which they achieved this status is the subject of Trotter's ground-breaking study. This second edition features a new preface and acknowledgments, an essay on African American urban history since 1985, a prologue on the antebellum and Civil War roots of Milwaukee's black community, and an epilogue on the post-World War II years and the impact of deindustrialization, all by the author. Brief essays by four of Trotter's colleagues--William P. Jones, Earl Lewis, Alison Isenberg, and Kimberly L. Phillips--assess the impact of the original Black Milwaukee on the study of African American urban history over the past twenty years.

Comprehensive look inside Wisconsin's 38 branch camps that held 20,000 Nazi and Japanese prisoners of war during World War II.

The Polish Experience through World War II explores Polish history through the lives of people touched by the war. The touching and terrible experiences of these people are laid bare by straightforward, first-hand accounts, including not only the hardships of deportation and concentration and refugee camps, but also the price paid by the officers killed or taken as prisoners during WWII and the families they left behind. Ziolkowska-Boehm reveals the difficulties of these women and children when, having lost their husbands and fathers, their travails take them through Siberia, Persia, India, and then Africa, New Zealand, or Mexico. Ziolkowska-Boehm recounts the experiences of individuals who lived through this tumultuous period in history through personal interviews, letters, and other surviving documents. The stories include Krasicki, a military pilot who was on of around 22 thousand Polish killed in Katyn; the saga of the Wartanowicz family, a wealthy and influential family whose story begins well before the war; and Wanda Ossowska, a Polish nurse in Auschwitz and other German prison camps. Placed squarely in historical context, these incredible stories reveal the experiences of the Polish people up through the second World War.

Long before Japanese bombs rained down on Pearl Harbor, Milwaukee was the "Machine Shop to the World." Thanks to the city's large industrial base, factories quickly retooled and mobilized for wartime production. Harley-Davidson produced thousands of military motorbikes, and Falk Corporation churned out gears that turned the propellers on hundreds of ships. Locals sacrificed their lives for the cause--Mayor Carl Zeidler went missing at sea, USS Arizona captain Franklin Van Valkenburgh refused to leave the bridge of his burning battleship and Mildred Harnack joined the Nazi resistance movement and was executed on direct orders from Hitler. Embedded with German and American troops, Milwaukee journalists H.V. Kaltenborn, Louis Lochner and Dickey Chapelle sent dispatches from the front lines. Through past interviews and archival materials, author Meg Jones reveals these and other patriotic stories.