Chartered 18 years before Michigan's admission to the Union, Oakland County developed as a microcosm of the state: diverse, entrepreneurial, and prosperous. The unbridled success of the automotive industry in neighboring Detroit quickly spread north where well-to-do industry leaders located. This vibrant community produced a quality of life rivaled by few other places. This book displays pivotal "Then and Now" scenes depicting the history of Oakland County, many with national impact.

Poetry. African American Studies. "If to imagine the city is to imagine the human psyche, as it is in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, then Wendy S. Walters's TROY, MICHIGAN approximates a psyche flattened by middle class desires, racist anxieties, and inexplicably terrifying violence. Walters's quiet, haunting utterances are beautifully precise mappings of the measure of a city's weight and thereby its dark (or darkened) soul. In the wake of reading, I am reminded of Kipling's refrain, 'Lest we forget' a warning, a kind of boogeyman emergent from a landscape's shiny surface. Walters's TROY, MICHIGAN simply could not be better." Dawn Lundy Martin"