EDUCATION COMPANION GUIDE Sponsored by DEAR EDUCATORS AND PARENTS, Welcome to THE QUEST FOR SOLOMON’S TREASURE, a brand-new online treasure hunt with First Stage! Over the next seven exciting episodes, you will not only have the opportunity to watch the mystery unfold virtually, but to join along and solve the mystery yourself. This companion guide will help you keep track of your clues, learn about the history of Milwaukee, and provide you with activities and tips to make your treasure hunt fun and successful. Enclosed in this enrichment guide is a range of materials and activities intended to help you discover connections within the play through the curricula. It is our hope that you will use the experience of attending the theater and seeing THE QUEST FOR SOLOMON’S TREASURE with your students as a teaching tool. Use this guide to best serve your children — pick and choose, or adapt, any of these suggestions for discussions or activities. We encourage you to take advantage of the enclosed student worksheets—please feel free to photocopy the sheets for your students, or the entire guide for the benefit of other teachers. Enjoy the show! Julia Magnasco Education Director (414) 267-2971 [email protected] HOW TO BE AN EFFECTIVE DETECTIVE To help Frannie and her friends solve the mystery and discover Solomon Juneau’s treasure, you will need to do some sleuthing of your own. Here are some quick tips to get the most out of your online searches: 1. SEARCH SPECIFICALLY: Save yourself time by using the most specific words or combination of words possible when you search online. For example, if you type in the word “Milwaukee” in your Google search bar, you will get 300,000,000 results, which means plenty of information, but lots of digging through unrelated pages. However, if you type in “Solomon Juneau Milwaukee Founder”, your search results will be narrowed down greatly, and you will be much more likely to find what you are looking for. 2. GET RID OF UNHELPFUL TERMS: Juneau’s treasure is the prize for solving this mystery, but the city of Juneau is also the capitol of Alaska. If your searches keep bringing up unrelated topics, you can remove those results from your search by using the minus sign on your keyboard. For example, if you search “Juneau – Alaska”, all results that include the word “Alaska” will no longer appear in your results. 3. FIND WHAT YOU NEED FAST: Now that you’ve gotten strong results on your search, it is time to look closer at the information you’ve found- but where to start? If you are having a hard time finding the answers that your search results promised, you can use the Ctrl+F (Windows) or Command+F (Mac) shortcuts on your keyboard to look for the information you need on the web page. 4. SEARCH HIGH AND LOW: Not finding what you need? Try using a different search engine! Not all search engines think alike- and a new perspective may be just the thing you need to crack the case. 5. FACT AND FICTION: Not all searches are successful, and that is okay — but it’s also important that you don’t follow a cold trail too far. Make sure that the information you are reading is accurate and that your sources are reliable. You can do this by using fact-checking websites such as snopes.com, by checking the page for a list of sources, and by reading closely to determine if your page is based on facts or opinions. 3 PRE-SHOW QUESTIONS 1. The Quest for Solomon’s Treasure is a play about a treasure hunt that takes place in Milwaukee, and explores several important events and people of our city’s history. What sort of facts do you know about the city of Milwaukee? What famous people do you know about? Where did you learn this information? 2. The characters in our play each use their own unique abilities try to help discover Solomon Juneau’s treasure. What special skills do you have that might be helpful on a treasure hunt? 3. The play takes place throughout the entire city, and visits a large number of Milwaukee’s neighborhoods. What neighborhood or town do you live in? What are things that you enjoy about the area that you live in? What are some things that you might like to change about it? 4 EPISODE 1 To put to rest my family’s shame I invite you now to play a game In the heart of Cream City to be sure Where the pugilist adds their weapon to her The fight for equality is indeed laborious But take a tour of the work that is royally Victorias The boy who could not walk became the man who would not fall. In his footsteps a tiger would come to call On your way to view work with a name Like that tiger who fell to the Pharoah’s shame. 5 A BRIEF HISTORY OF MILWAUKEE Adapted from: https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS1607 Wisconsin’s largest city lies on Lake Michigan, where the Milwaukee, Menomonee and Kinnickinnic Rivers come together. People had lived there for more than 13,000 years before the first Europeans arrived. At that time Milwaukee was neutral ground shared by several American Indian tribes. Fr. Jacques Marquette left the first written record of it in 1674, and other French explorers referred to it in 1679, 1681 and 1698. The earliest mention of Europeans is a reference by Lt. James Gorrell to an unnamed fur trader at Milwaukee in 1762; at least four others traded there before 1800. In 1763, Milwaukee bands of Potawatomi, Ottawa, Ojibwe and Menominee joined Pontiac’s Rebellion against the British, and 15 years later they supported the colonies during the American Revolution. The city’s modern history began in 1795 when fur trader Jacques Vieau (1757-1852) built a post along a bluff on the east side, overlooking the Milwaukee and Menomonee rivers. Vieau was a seasonal resident, and in 1818 transferred his Milwaukee assets to his son-in-law, Solomon Juneau (1793-1856). Juneau is generally considered not only the city’s first permanent white resident but also its founder. In 1822 Solomon Juneau built the first log cabin in Milwaukee and two years later, the first frame building. In 1831 he became an American citizen and began to learn English, and in 1833 he partnered with Morgan Martin (1805-1887) to develop a village on the east side. In 1835 Juneau and Martin laid out streets, platted lots, and began selling them to new settlers. Over the next two decades Juneau served as Milwaukee’s postmaster and mayor, built its first hotel and courthouse, started its first newspaper, and backed almost every public improvement. Between 1835 and 1850, Milwaukee’s population grew from a handful of fur traders to more than 20,000 settlers. Three separate villages were started: Juneau’s, east of the Milwaukee River and north of the Menomonee; Byron Kilbourn’s across from Juneau’s, on the west bank of the Milwaukee; and Walker’s Point, across the Menomonee from the other two. In 1846 they incorporated into a single city. By then Milwaukee rivaled Chicago in size, wealth and potential, but in 1848 the Illinois city secured railroad and telegraph connections that enabled it to eclipse Milwaukee. 6 A BRIEF HISTORY OF MILWAUKEE CONT. Between 1846 and 1854, a wave of German immigrants arrived, bringing with them expert industrial skills, refined culture, liberal politics, and Catholicism. Milwaukee soon became a center of foundry, machinery, and metal-working industries, as well as a center for brewing and grain trading. During the last third of the 19th century, visitors often commented on Milwaukee’s refined German culture, European elegance, and prosperity (while usually overlooking the laborers who produced its wealth with the toil of their hands). On Oct. 28, 1892, a fire in the Irish third ward wiped out sixteen square blocks, leaving 2,000 immigrant working-class residents homeless. During the first half of the 20th century, Milwaukee became known for its “sewer socialism.” City leaders sought to clean up neighborhoods and factories with new sanitation systems, municipally- owned water and power systems, community parks, and improved educational opportunities. Victor Berger (1860-1929) became the symbol of Milwaukee socialism by organizing voters into a highly successful political organization based on Milwaukee’s large German population and active labor movement. During the 1930s the city was hit especially hard by the national depression: the number of people with jobs fell by 75% and 20% of residents needed direct relief from the government. The number of strikes increased sevenfold between 1933 and 1934, and conditions only improved when World War Two demanded huge amounts of factory goods between 1941 and 1945. During the war, many African-Americans from Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee and elsewhere in the South came to work in Milwaukee’s factories, and most stayed to raise their families after the war. By the 1960s Milwaukee was 15 percent African-American, but most black residents were clustered in a near-north neighborhood that suffered from unemployment, poverty, and segregation. Local statutes, real estate agents, and lending institutions conspired to keep African-American citizens confined to the inner city, and segregated neighborhoods produced segregated schools. Two decades of struggle by black leaders such as Vel Phillips (b.1924) and Lloyd Barbee (1925- 2003), supported by white allies like Fr. James Groppi (1930-1985), were needed to force city officials to obey federal desegregation laws.