Foundation Speaker Series: Milwaukee on Tap with John Gurda

Join Milwaukee historian John Gurda as he kicks off this year's Foundation Speaker Series with Milwaukee on Tap: How We Became the Beer Capital of the World.

Good water, abundant ice, and a huge German population made Milwaukee a logical center of the brewing trade. Within a single generation the city housed some of the largest brewers in America. Although beer was its most important product for only one year—1890—the “amber nectar” shaped Milwaukee’s character and cemented its image in the national consciousness. Join historian John Gurda for a lively look back at the beverage that made Milwaukee famous.

John Gurda is a Milwaukee-born writer and historian who has been studying his hometown since 1972. He is the author of twenty-three books, including The Making of Milwaukee, the first full-length history of the community published since 1948, and Milwaukee: City of Neighborhoods, a geographic companion that has quickly become the standard work on grassroots Milwaukee. Together the books total more than 900 pages and feature 2,000 illustrations. The Making of Milwaukee was the basis for an Emmy Award-winning documentary series that premiered on Milwaukee Public Television in 2006.

 Gurda’s undergraduate degree is a B.A. in English from Boston College, and he holds an M.A. in Cultural Geography and an honorary Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In addition to his work as an author, Gurda is a frequent speaker on Milwaukee topics and for twenty-nine years was the local history columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The common thread in all of his work is an understanding of history as “why things are the way they are.”