At the start of the Ford Motor Company in 1903, the Dodge Brothers supplied nearly every car part needed by the up-and-coming auto giant. After fifteen years of operating a successful automotive supplier company, much to Ford's advantage, John and Horace Dodge again changed the face of the automotive market in 1914 by introducing their own car. The Dodge Brothers automobile carried on their names even after their untimely deaths in 1920, with the...

Though it was located far away from Southern battlefields, Detroit churned with unrest during the American Civil War. The city's population, including a large German and Irish immigrant community, mostly aligned with anti-war Democrats while the rest of the state stood with the pro-Lincoln Republicans. The virulently anti-Lincoln and anti-Black Detroit Free Press fanned the city's flames with provocative coverage of events. In "Old Slow Town": Detroit...

In 1886, 11-year-old Mihaela embarks on a journey from Croatia to the Keweenaw Peninsula, also known as Michigan's Copper Country. Mihaela's papa had made the trip two years beforehand in order to work the copper mines so that he could send money back home, but a painful eye disease has left him vulnerable in a new land and in need of the skills of his wife, an expert healer. And so Mihaela, her mother, and two younger brothers leave their family...

A Lincoln Legacy: The History of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan by David Gardner Chardavoyne with Hugh W. Brenneman, Jr. provides the first and only comprehensive examination of the history of the United States federal courts in the Western District of Michigan. The federal courts were established by the U.S. Constitution to adjudicate disputes involving federal laws, disputes between litigants from different states involving...

Born in Tennessee in 1890, Dorothy May was the middle daughter of Addie Jackson, a married African-American housekeeper at one of the white boardinghouses in town, and Tom Mitchell, a commanding white attorney from a prominent family. We follow Dorothy May's experiences with race relations and class division, both as a child and later as a teacher. Dorothy May, choosing between her career and marriage to a man she barely knows, moves to Detroit. --...