BiblioVault - Books about Michigan

Washtenaw County Bike Rides

A Guide to Road Rides in and around Ann Arbor

Joel D. Howell

University of Michigan Press, 2009

Washtenaw County Bike Rides is ideal for people who are new to the county, are new to bike riding, or simply want to expand their repertoire of rides. All routes described in the book start or end in Washtenaw County and have been selected with a preference for rides outside of the city. All the routes are paved. Joel Howell details the roads, the areas that require caution, the difficulty of the rides, and routes that can be extended for longer rides.

Includes routes and maps for Dixboro, Dexter-Chelsea, Gallup Park, Hell, Huron River Drive, Manchester, Waterloo, East Lansing, and more, as well as an overview map and ride log.

Joel D. Howell is a physician, medical historian, and avid biker who has personally ridden all of the trails featured in the book. He lives in Ann Arbor.

"Two of the strongest predictors of an active lifestyle are convenient access to exercise opportunities, and pleasant and beautiful exercise environments. Joel Howell's book has solved both of these factors with a collection of some of the most beautiful and accessible biking (and running!) routes in the upper Midwest."
---Thomas L. Schwenk, M.D., Chair of Family Medicine, University of Michigan

"This book includes all the main biking routes making it a 'must have' for any cyclist new to the Ann Arbor area. There are also great tidbits of local lore and super photographs that make it a welcome addition to the libraries of cyclists who have ridden these roads countless times."
---Mark Lovejoy, President, Ann Arbor Velo Club

"Howell has performed a genuine service for county residents and visitors. Get moving, Washtenaw!"
---Kenneth Warner, Dean, University of Michigan School of Public Health

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Waterfront Porch

Reclaiming Detroit's Industrial Waterfront as a Gathering Place for All

John H. Hartig

Michigan State University Press, 2019

Detroit was the epicenter of the fur trade era, an unparalleled leader of shipbuilding for one hundred years, the Silicon Valley of the industrial age, and the unquestioned leader of the arsenal of democracy. This unique history depicts Detroit as a city of innovation, resilience, and leadership in responding to change, and examines the current sustainability paradigm shift to which Detroit is responding, pivoting as the city has done in the past to redefine itself and lead the nation and world down a more sustainable path. This book details the building of a new waterfront porch alongside the Detroit River called the Detroit RiverWalk to help revitalize the city and region and promote sustainability practices. It is a story of one of the largest, by scale, urban waterfront redevelopment projects in the United States, and gives hope and proves that Detroit and its metropolitan region have a bright future.

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We Are Left without a Father Here

Masculinity, Domesticity, and Migration in Postwar Puerto Rico

Eileen J. Suárez Findlay

Duke University Press, 2015

We Are Left without a Father Here is a transnational history of working people's struggles and a gendered analysis of populism and colonialism in mid-twentieth-century Puerto Rico. At its core are the thousands of agricultural workers who, at the behest of the Puerto Rican government, migrated to Michigan in 1950 to work in the state's sugar beet fields. The men expected to earn enough income to finally become successful breadwinners and fathers. To their dismay, the men encountered abysmal working conditions and pay. The migrant workers in Michigan and their wives in Puerto Rico soon exploded in protest. Chronicling the protests, the surprising alliances that they created, and the Puerto Rican government's response, Eileen J. Suárez Findlay explains that notions of fatherhood and domesticity were central to Puerto Rican populist politics. Patriarchal ideals shaped citizens' understandings of themselves, their relationship to Puerto Rican leaders and the state, as well as the meanings they ascribed to U.S. colonialism. Findlay argues that the motivations and strategies for transnational labor migrations, colonial policies, and worker solidarities are all deeply gendered.

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We Kept Our Towns Going

The Gossard Girls of Michigan's Upper Peninsula

Phyllis Michael Wong

Michigan State University Press, 2022

WITH A FOREWORD BY LISA M. FINE, MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY—Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is known for its natural beauty and severe winters, as well as the mines and forests where men labored to feed industrial factories elsewhere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But there were factories in the Upper Peninsula, too, and women who worked in them. Phyllis Michael Wong tells the stories of the Gossard Girls, women who sewed corsets and bras at factories in Ishpeming and Gwinn from the early twentieth century to the 1970s. As the Upper Peninsula’s mines became increasingly exhausted and its stands of timber further depleted, the Gossard Girls’ income sustained both their families and the local economy. During this time the workers showed their political and economic strength, including a successful four-month strike in the 1940s that capped an eight-year struggle to unionize. Drawing on dozens of interviews with the surviving workers and their families, this book highlights the daily challenges and joys of these mostly first- and second-generation immigrant women. It also illuminates the way the Gossard Girls navigated shifting ideas of what single and married women could and should do as workers and citizens. From cutting cloth and distributing materials to getting paid and having fun, Wong gives us a rare ground-level view of piecework in a clothing factory from the women on the sewing room floor.

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We, Too, Are Americans

African American Women in Detroit and Richmond, 1940-54

Megan Taylor Shockley

University of Illinois Press, 2003

During World War II, factories across America retooled for wartime production, and unprecedented labor opportunities opened up for women and minorities. In We, Too, Are Americans, Megan Taylor Shockley examines the experiences of the African American women who worked in two capitols of industry--Detroit, Michigan, and Richmond, Virginia--during the war and the decade that followed it, making a compelling case for viewing World War II as the crucible of the civil rights movement.

As demands on them intensified, the women working to provide American troops with clothing, medical supplies, and other services became increasingly aware of their key role in the war effort. A considerable number of the African Americans among them began to use their indispensability to leverage demands for equal employment, welfare and citizenship benefits, fair treatment, good working conditions, and other considerations previously denied them.

Shockley shows that as these women strove to redefine citizenship, backing up their claims to equality with lawsuits, sit-ins, and other forms of activism, they were forging tools that civil rights activists would continue to use in the years to come.

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West to Far Michigan

Settling the Lower Peninsula, 1815-1860

Kenneth E. Lewis

Michigan State University Press, 2001

West to Far Michigan is a study of the lower peninsula's occupation by agriculturalists, whose presence forever transformed the land and helped to create the modern state of Michigan. This is not simply a history of Michigan, but rather a work that focuses on why the state developed as it did. Although Michigan is seen today as an industrial state whose history is couched in terms of the fur trade and the international rivalry for the Great Lakes, agricultural settlement shaped its expansion. Using a model of agricultural colonization derived from comparative studies, Lewis examines the settlement process in Michigan between 1815 and 1860. This period marked the opening of Michigan to immigrants, saw the rise of commercial agriculture, and witnessed Michigan's integration into the larger national economy.
Employing numerous primary sources, West to Far Michigan traces changes and patterns of settlement crucial to documenting the large-scale development of southern Michigan as a region. Diaries, letters, memoirs, gazetteers, and legal documents serve to transform the more abstract elements of economic and social change into more human terms. Through the experiences of the early Agriculturists process, we can gain insight into how their triumphs played out in communities within the region to produce small-scale elements that comprise the fabric of the larger cultural landscape.

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What the River Knows

An Angler in Midstream

Wayne Fields

University of Chicago Press, 1996

At the age of forty-two, Wayne Fields set upon a sort of pilgrimage when he waded the near twenty-mile stretch of a small river in northern Michigan with fly rod in hand. He emerged with a beautiful and poignant memoir, a meditation on families and aging, and a whimsical response to what time, and streams, and those we care about bring into our lives.

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When Evil Came to Good Hart

Mardi Link

University of Michigan Press, 2008

"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

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."

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When Evil Came to Good Hart, 10th Anniversary Edition

Mardi Link

University of Michigan Press, 2018

In this page-turning true-life whodunit, author Mardi Link looks into the cold-case files of the murders of a wealthy Detroit-area family in their northern Michigan cabin in 1968, detailing and reviewing 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 as an unsolved cold case.

This edition, published at the 50th anniversary of the murder, includes a new Afterword by Mardi Link. In it, Link discusses information that’s come to light since the book’s original publication and reflects on how the Robison murders might have been handled differently today.

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Wicked Takes the Witness Stand

A Tale of Murder and Twisted Deceit in Northern Michigan

Mardi Link

University of Michigan Press, 2015

On a bitterly cold afternoon in December 1986, a Michigan State trooper found the frozen body of Jerry Tobias in the bed of his pickup truck. The 31-year-old oil field worker and small-time drug dealer was curled up on his side on the truck’s bare metal, pressed against the tailgate, clad only in jeans, a checkered shirt, and cowboy boots. Inside the cab of the truck was a fresh package of expensive steaks from a local butcher shop—the first lead in a case that would be quickly lost in a thicket of bungled forensics, shady prosecution, and a psychopathic star witness out for revenge.

Award-winning author Mardi Link’s third book of Michigan true crime, Wicked Takes the Witness Stand, unravels this mysterious and still unsolved case that sucked state police and local officials into a morass of perjury and cover-up and ultimately led to the separate conviction and imprisonment of five innocent men. This unbelievable story will leave the reader shocked and aching for justice.

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The Wolf and Furton Sites

Macomb County, Michigan

Emerson F. Greenman

University of Michigan Press, 1939

In this report, Emerson F. Greenman describes the 1936 archaeological excavations at the Wolf and Furton sites, both in Macomb County, Michigan, on the shore of Lake St. Clair. Greenman and his team found refuse pits with associated animal bones; human burials; and artifacts, including pottery and stone tools.

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Women at Michigan

The "Dangerous Experiment," 1870s to the Present

Ruth Bordin

University of Michigan Press, 2001

Women at Michigan traces the fascinating history of women at at the University of Michigan, from the first reluctant admission of women students in the 1870s (which one male administrator referred to as "the dangerous experiment") to the tumultuous post-World War II period and from the radical changes of the 1960s and 1970s to the present. The hurdles that women who pursued higher education at Michigan and elsewhere faced may surprise those who observe the relative freedom of women on college campuses today.

Women at Michigan was written by well respected historian Ruth Bordin, whose own career was impeded by the gender inequality of the era and who unfortunately died before seeing this book in print. Her study is grounded in historical detail. While drawing upon the larger historiography of women's higher education to round out its story, the book shows Michigan to be one case among many. Women at Michigan is richly illustrated with archival photographs depicting women's experience at the University of Michigan--as students, faculty, administrators, and staff--through the years.

Historian Ruth Bordin was author of A Pictorial History of The University of Michigan; Frances Willard: A Biography; and Alice Freeman Palmer: The Evolution of a New Woman. Martha Vicinus is Professor of English and History, University of Michigan. Kathryn Kish Sklar is Distinguished Professor of History, Binghamton University. Lynn Weiner is a historian and Associate Dean, Roosevelt University.

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Wounded Warrior

The Rise and Fall of Michigan Governor John Swainson

Lawrence M. Glazer

Michigan State University Press, 2010

Few people today remember John Swainson. As a teenage soldier he lost both legs in a WWII landmine explosion. Back in the United States, following a meteoric political rise in the Michigan State Senate, Swainson was elected as Michigan's youngest governor since Stevens T. Mason.
In 1970 Swainson was elected to the Michigan Supreme Court, becoming one of the few public officials to have served in the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of state government. Then, in 1957, he was indicted on federal charges of bribery and perjury, and convicted of lying to a federal grand jury. Forced to leave the state Supreme Court and disbarred from practicing law, he became a pariah, sinking into depression and alcoholism. He virtually disappeared from public view.
Lawrence M. Glazer re-examines the FBI's investigation of Swainson and delves into his 1975 trial in detail. He reveals new information from eye-witnesses who never testified and, in a poignant coda, relates the little-known story of Swainson's rehabilitation and return to public life as a historian.

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Writing Ann Arbor

A Literary Anthology

Laurence Goldstein, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 2005

Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan have always been natural settings for the writing life, offering perennial inspiration to the many artists, poets, locals, and students who have called the city and the classroom home. Writing Ann Arbor collects fiction, essay, poetry, memoir, and drama by Max Apple, Charles Baxter, Sven Birkerts, Donald Hall, Robert Hayden, Tom Hayden, Jane Kenyon, Thomas Lynch, Ross Macdonald, Frank O'Hara, Marge Piercy, Dudley Randall, Ruth Reichl, Elwood Reid, Bob Ufer, Wendy Wasserstein, and Nancy Willard, among many others.

The anthology is eclectic and engaging, with many wonderful surprises: an essay on the Underground Railroad in Ann Arbor; one on basketball legend Cazzie Russell; an essay by Arthur Miller; an excerpt from Joyce Carol Oates's All the Good People I've Left Behind; a selection from Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table by food writer and Gourmet magazine editor Ruth Reichl; and much more.

This is more than a series of portraits of Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan; it is a miniature time capsule, a look into the shifting cultural currents of the last two centuries from some of the greatest thinkers and writers of those times.

Poet and literary scholar Laurence Goldstein is Professor of English at the University of Michigan and Editor of the Michigan Quarterly. He is the author of three books of poetry and several books of literary criticism, including The American Poet at the Movies.

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