Livonia Preserved: Greenmead and Beyond tells the story of Greenmead and the Livonia Historical Village and other historic resources through photographs and other ephemera. The story begins with Livonia's earliest attempts to preserve its history at Quaker Acres, how it came into being, and the buildings that were moved to the site. These early efforts were expanded to a 100-acre farm complex-called Greenmead-acquired by the city in 1976. In addition to stories surrounding the Greenmead Historical Park, Livonia Preserved features other interesting structures and sites, such as Henry Ford's Newburg Mill, the Wilson Barn, the Felician Motherhouse, historic cemeteries, and private homes. Each of these represents a unique piece of Livonia history.

At the turn of the 20th century, the township of Livonia was largely a rural community populated with farms, dirt roads, and a number of cheese factories. A few decades later, as the auto industry boomed in Detroit, white-collar workers sought places to raise their families outside of the city, and neighborhoods in Livonia went up seemingly overnight. The result was the creation of a quintessential American suburban city, one in which urban and rural lifestyles converged and formed a new kind of community. This book celebrates Livonia's development from the 19th to the 21st century, as it evolved from wilderness into a city that is routinely rated as one of the best places to raise a family in the United States.

Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction An electrifying story of the sensational murder trial that divided a city and ignited the civil rights struggle 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.