Few things bother me more than the negative stereotypes that portray Detroit as a deserted city in ruins - a crime-infested, neglected place where residents don’t care about their connections to the city’s history or its future. Detroit is a proud, living city. As a historical archaeologist at Wayne State University, I’ve been on the front lines of leading community-based archaeology projects in Detroit for the past decade. These projects involve advocacy for more inclusive historic preservation efforts, youth training initiatives, collaborative exhibits, and lots of interactions with the media and public. I view historical archaeology as a tool for serving local community interests, unearthing underrepresented histories, and addressing the legacies of social justice issues.
I wrote...
Detroit Remains: Archaeology and Community Histories of Six Legendary Places
Detroit Remains: Archaeology and Community Histories of Six Legendary Places presents six archaeological case studies of legendary Detroit institutions – Little Harry speakeasy, the Ransom Gillis house, the Blue Bird Inn jazz club, Gordon Park, the Grande Ballroom, and the Halleck Street log cabin – to trace the contours of the city’s underrepresented communities and their relationships to the local currents of capitalism and social justice over the course of the past century. I combine rigorous historical archaeological research with narrative storytelling to breathe life back into the forgotten or underappreciated accomplishments of everyday Detroiters.
My stories illustrate how they exercised power in shaping their communities in ways that have left lasting, tangible remains. This is the first historical archaeology book focused on Detroit, and one of the few to foreground the archaeology of the Great Migration era (ca. 1915-1970).
Detroit is a city shaped by social movements. Even in the city’s darkest times of violent uprisings, outmigration, and bankruptcy, ordinary Detroiters remained committed to transformative change - banding together to challenge issues of racial injustice, housing access, food sovereignty, workers’ rights, and accountable governance. A People’s Atlas of Detroit is community-based scholar-activism at its best.
The brilliantly illustrated collection of maps, essays, photographs, poetry, and interviews is the outcome of a multi-year project involving over fifty residents from all walks of life who are at the forefront of local social justice initiatives. Through its combination of radical cartography, historical perspectives, and firsthand reflections, APeople’s Atlas elevates the voices of the underrecognized people who are actively charting courses for a more equitable urban future.
In recent years, Detroit has been touted as undergoing a renaissance, yet many people have been left behind. A People's Atlas of Detroit, edited by Linda Campbell, Andrew Newman, Sara Safransky, and Tim Stallmann comes from a community-based participatory project called Uniting Detroiters that sought to use collective research to strengthen the organizing infrastructure of the city's long-vibrant grassroots sector and reassert residents' roles as active participants in the development process. Drawing on action research and counter-cartography, this book aims to both chart and help build movements for social justice in the city.
If one were to travel in a time machine back to the early 1700s, to the French colony of Detroit, they’d arrive at a village inhabited by mixed French-indigenous families, where women were power-brokers and family ties were the basis for structuring business relationships. The village would be totally unrecognizable to those of us who have been taught to envision French colonial Detroit as a male-dominated outpost, where European soldiers and fur traders operated in the service of the Crown. Historian Karen Marrero digs deep into the archives to assemble an account that completely reorients our understandings of the cultural landscape and gender dynamics of early Detroit.
Drawing on a vast array of sources – from colonial records and oral histories to songs and indigenous stories – Detroit’s Hidden Channels is a remarkably inclusive history thatunearths the enduring role French women and indigenous people played in the city’s development, even decades after French rule ended.
French-Indigenous families were a central force in shaping Detroit's history. Detroit's Hidden Channels examines the role of these kinship networks in Detroit's development as a site of singular political and economic importance in the continental interior.
Situated where Anishinaabe, Wendat, Myaamia, and later French communities were established and where the system of waterways linking the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico narrowed, Detroit's location was its primary attribute. While the French state viewed Detroit as a decaying site of illegal activities, the influence of the French-Indigenous networks grew as members diverted imperial resources to bolster an alternative configuration of…
Slavery and its legacy is a northern problem too. Detroiters were slaveholders, but that is a fact that we’ve collectively spent decades, if not centuries, denying and neglecting. Tiya Miles’ gripping history of slavery and freedom reveals the stories of the enslaved Native and African American people who were present in Detroit since the city’s initial decades of European colonization. Her historical narratives, crafted from meticulous archival research, reintroduce readers to the long-forgotten people whose coerced labor laid the foundation for the city’s physical infrastructure and scaffolded the livelihoods of its free residents. The Dawn of Detroit is a stark reminder of how the roots of contemporary inequities run deep through the city’s history.
In this paradigm-shifting book, celebrated historian Tiya Miles reveals that slavery was at the heart of the Midwest's iconic city: Detroit. Miles has pieced together the experience of the unfree - both native and African American - in the frontier outpost of Detroit, a place wildly remote yet at the centre of national and international conflict. The result is fascinating history, little-explored and eloquently told, of the limits of freedom in early America, one that adds new layers of complexity that completely change our understanding of slavery's American legacy.
Detroit 1967 is a compilation of twenty essays and reflections about the racially-charged uprising that began on July 23, 1967 and was, at the time, the deadliest civil disturbance in United States history. Until this volume was published during the uprising’s 50th anniversary year, there were few, if any, attempts by scholars to confront the falsehoods that confused understandings of the events and their lasting consequences. Fifty years on, there is no consensus about exactly how the uprising started. In fact, we’re not even at a point of agreement on what to call the events. The terms “rebellion”, “riot”, “uprising”, “disturbance”, and “insurrection” are used differentially, often according to one’s race, age, and place of residence. Detroit 1967 is one of the first conversations about the uprising to cross racial and generational lines, and to recognize the experiences of those involved on both sides. The volume is a critical first step towards healing the wounds of conflict, which are still visible on the city’s landscape and present in the inter-generational memories of local and Metro-area residents.
From Motown to techno, twentieth-century Detroit was an incubator for world-famous popular music, yet the city has not followed the lead of Memphis and New Orleans by investing in preserving its music heritage sites. Meanwhile, memories of the city’s once-vibrant music scenes are fading as the generations who experienced them pass. The Grande Ballroom: Detroit’s Rock ‘N’ Roll Palace is a tribute to the fierce ingenuity, creativity, and activism of Detroit’s music-loving baby boomers. Between 1966 and 1972 the ballroom was the city’s most iconic counterculture music venue. Local legends Iggy Pop and the MC5 took to the Grande’s psychedelic stage alongside soon-to-be world-famous groups, including Led Zeppelin, the Who, and Fleetwood Mac. In 2003, as the long-vacant building fell into a seemingly irreversible state of decay, musician and local historian Leo Early established the Friends of the Grande group.
Now with over 2,000 members, Early and the Friends have worked tirelessly to gather firsthand accounts of concerts, commemorate the musical and activist heritage of the Grande, and preserve the building itself – which, thanks to their efforts, is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The firsthand stories Early presents about the Grande’s rock ‘n’ roll heydayare written with such high-resolution detail that readers will feel like they’ve shared in the epic “Grande Experience”.
In the 1920s, a jewel of Detroit entertainment arose on the Westside--the Grande Ballroom. The venue flourished under the ownership of infamous gambler Harry Weitzman and management of dance scion Paul Strasburg. The advent of rock "n" roll pushed the ballroom into hard times, but in 1966, local schoolteacher and disc jockey Russ Gibb resurrected it with the promise of live rock music. The new psychedelic ballroom style attracted scores of suburban baby boomers and helped launch the careers of local legends like the MC5, Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper and Ted Nugent. Soon the ballroom's prestige attracted international acts like…
I’m a professional historian and life-long lover of early American history. My fascination with the American Revolution began during the bicentennial in 1976, when my family traveled across the country for celebrations in Williamsburg and Philadelphia. That history, though, seemed disconnected to the place I grew up—Arkansas—so when I went to graduate school in history, I researched in French and Spanish archives to learn about their eighteenth-century interactions with Arkansas’s Native nations, the Osages and Quapaws. Now I teach early American history and Native American history at UNC-Chapel Hill and have written several books on how Native American, European, and African people interacted across North America.
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed.
A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread…
10,000+ authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them.
Browse their picks for the best books about
Michigan,
Detroit,
and
rock music.
