Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age
by Kevin Boyle
from Holt Paperbacks
In 1925, Detroit was a smoky swirl of jazz and speakeasies, assembly lines and fistfights. The advent of automobiles had brought workers from around the globe to compete for manufacturing jobs, and tensions often flared with the KKK in ascendance and violence rising. Ossian Sweet, a proud Negro doctor-grandson of a slave-had made the long climb from the ghetto to a home of his own in a previously all-white neighborhood. Yet just after his arrival, a mob gathered outside his house; suddenly, shots rang out: Sweet, or one of his defenders, had accidentally killed one of the whites threatening their lives and homes.
And so it began-a chain of events that brought America's greatest attorney, Clarence Darrow, into the fray and transformed Sweet into a controversial symbol of equality. Historian Kevin Boyle weaves the police investigation and courtroom drama of Sweet's murder trial into an unforgettable tapestry of narrative history that documents the volatile America of the 1920s and movingly re-creates the Sweet family's journey from slavery through the Great Migration to the middle class. Ossian Sweet's story, so richly and poignantly captured here, is an epic tale of one man trapped by the battles of his era's changing times.
When Evil Came to Good Hart
by Mardi Link
from University of Michigan Press/Regional
"The murder mystery that has confounded and fascinated people for over forty years has been given a whole new life. When Evil Came to Good Hart is a well-researched and well-written piece of nonfiction that holds the reader in its spell, just as it has the many writers, reporters, and law officers who have puzzled over it. My highest praise for Mardi Link's book is to say that it reads like a good novel, a real page-turner."
—Judith Guest, author of Ordinary People and The Tarnished Eye
When Evil Came to Good Hart is a new look into an old story---the cold-case file of the murders of a wealthy Detroit-area family in their northern Michigan cabin in 1968.
In this page-turning true-life whodunit, author Mardi Link details all the evidence to date. She crafts her book around police and court documents and historical and present-day statements and interviews, in addition to exploring the impact of the case on the community of Good Hart and the stigma that surrounds the popular summer getaway. Adding to both the sense of tragic history and the suspense, Link laces her tale with fascinating bits of local and Indian lore, while dozens of colorful characters enter and leave the story, spicing the narrative.
During the years of investigation of the murders, officials considered hundreds of tips and leads as well as dozens of sources, among them former secretaries who worked for murder victim Dick Robison; Robison's business associates; John Norman Collins, perpetrator of the "Co-Ed Murders" that took place in Washtenaw County between 1967 and 1969; and an inmate in federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, who said he knew who killed the Robison family.
Despite the exhaustive investigative efforts of numerous individuals, decades later the case lies tantalizingly out of reach. It is still an unsolved cold case, yielding, in Link's words, forty years worth of "dead-end leads, anonymous tips, a few hard facts, and countless cockamamie theories."
The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton Studies in American Politics)
by Thomas J. Sugrue
from Princeton University Press
Once America's "arsenal of democracy," Detroit over the last fifty years has become the symbol of the American urban crisis. In this reappraisal of racial and economic inequality in modern America, Thomas Sugrue explains how Detroit and many other once prosperous industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty. He challenges the conventional wisdom that urban decline is the product of the social programs and racial fissures of the 1960s. Probing beneath the veneer of 1950s prosperity and social consensus, Sugrue traces the rise of a new ghetto, solidified by changes in the urban economy and labor market and by racial and class segregation.
In this provocative revision of postwar American history, Sugrue finds cities already fiercely divided by race and devastated by the exodus of industries. He focuses on urban neighborhoods, where white working-class homeowners mobilized to prevent integration as blacks tried to move out of the crumbling and overcrowded inner city. Weaving together the history of workplaces, unions, civil rights groups, political organizations, and real estate agencies, Sugrue finds the roots of today's urban poverty in a hidden history of racial violence, discrimination, and deindustrialization that reshaped the American urban landscape after World War II.
In a new preface, Sugrue discusses the ongoing legacies of the postwar transformation of urban America and engages recent scholars who have joined in the reassessment of postwar urban, political, social, and African American history.
Lake Michigan Rock Picker's Guide
by Bruce Mueller
from University of Michigan Press/Petoskey
Michigan: A History of the Wolverine State
by Willis F. Dunbar
from Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Weird Michigan (Weird)
by Linda S. Godfrey
from Sterling
Michigan Trees, Revised and Updated: A Guide to the Trees of the Great Lakes Region
by Burton V. Barnes
from University of Michigan Press/Regional
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Detroit Tigers: Heart-Pounding, Jaw-Dropping, and Gut-Wrenching Moments from Detroit Tigers History (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) (The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly)
by George Cantor
from Triumph Books
The Tigers have won four world championships, have had two managers die in one season, have played ball while their city rioted around them, and have played host to some of the best and worst players in Major League Baseball. From losing three World Series in a row in the early 1900s to their unlikely trip to the World Series in 2006, from Denny McLain to Magglio Ordonez, and from Boss Schmidt to Kenny Rogers, the Detroit Tigers have always been a mix of good, bad, and ugly.
Their stories are collected here in a volume that Tigers fans everywhere will be sure to enjoy.
A University for the 21st Century
by James J. Duderstadt
from University of Michigan Press
Mighty Fitz: The Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald
by Michael Schumacher
from Bloomsbury USA
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