THE story of the growth of Milwaukee to metropolitan
stature transcends local interest not alone because of the
city's nationwide reputation for honest and effective municipal
administration nor because of the Germanic and socialistic in-
gredients of its culture which in the popular mind have differ-
entiated it from the other major cities of the nation. The town-
site promotion in its early history demonstrates an important,
if frequently neglected, aspect of the westward movement of
population in the United States. Its evolution from Deutsch-
Athen to American metropolis reveals the role of the city both
in the transmission of ideas from the Old World and in their
transformation in the New. And inasmuch as its rise to metro-
politan proportions coincided almost exactly with the occur-
rence of this phenomenon in the wider nation, the city's ad-
justments to the problems of urban living reflect the details
of a significant and pervasive contemporaneous activity in the
United States at large. In short, its experience recapitulates
in many ways the as yet unwritten history of the city in Ameri-
can life.

The attempt to delineate the broad span of city building
within the limits of a single volume has been deliberate. By
so doing it is possible to disclose the outlines of the evolving
urban entity with a clarity that rarely results when the concern
is with all-inclusive institutional and biographical detail. Such
compression has imposed the necessity of selection and general-
ization, practices which present especial hazards in the writing
of urban history. This follows from the scarcity of monographic
studies in the local field and from the want of available per-
sonal papers, a situation which exists in part because of the in-

-ix-