Abstract: The last several years have seen truly remarkable advances in our understanding of the Milky Way Galaxy, from the identification of stellar streams and stellar ensembles associated with the formation history of our Galaxy to the identification and characterization of thousands of stellar clusters to the development of remarkably accurate three-dimensional maps of the distribution of interstellar dust out to three kiloparsecs from the Sun. A lot of these advances are due to the availability of high precisions parallaxes and proper motions from the ESA Gaia mission and VLBI BeSSeL program; large-scale programs of stellar spectroscopy and advances in angular resolution and sensitivity of surveys of the gas and star forming content of the Milky Way are also major contributing factors. The net effect of all of these changes is to turn the Milky Way into an excellent laboratory for studying the physical processes by which galaxies convert their gas into stars; this is occuring at the same moment as JWST observations are providing astounding external views of the same processes in nearby galaxies. In this colloquium, I will review the history of attempts to ascertain the structure of the Galaxy, highlight some of the key things we’ve learned about our Galaxy over the last few years, and provide a preview of things to come.