The Straight Detroit: America's Premiere Legacy City gives readers a variety of in-depth perspectives on this great American city and the economic, social, political, and cultural considerations that have shaped and continue to shape it. This carefully curated anthology includes rigorous works covering topics such as the experiences of early settlers and Native Americans, the racial tensions that resulted from disparate ethnic communities pouring from the South into a gainful employment-rich city, and severe housing shortages faced by newcomers. This focus on newcomers and their experiences in Detroit is a running theme throughout the anthology, which also broadly explores the early history of the city, its industrial decline, race relations, urban planning and administration, community development, and the city's future, among other selected topics. The Straight Detroit features relevant, contemporary, and penetrating scholarship from a wide-ranging set of authors writing in diverse academic and cultural disciplines. Equal parts textbook, historical exploration, critical examination, and testament of love for the city and its people, it is ideal for courses in urban studies, history, or sociology. Jeffrey T. Horner is senior lecturer in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at Wayne State University. His course offerings include introduction to urban studies, cities and regions, and urban studies research. He has also developed and instructed specialized graduate courses on Detroit. His writing has appeared in the Journal of the American Planning Association, the Journal of Housing Research, Newsweek, MacLean's, and CityLab. He has authored study guides, expert reports, and memoranda for local and national organizations including the City of Detroit Planning Department and the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. He has contributed to national and international media stories on Detroit, including NPR, Al Jazeera, and the BBC.

The Straight Detroit: America's Premiere Legacy City gives readers a variety of in-depth perspectives on this great American city and the economic, social, political, and cultural considerations that have shaped and continue to shape it. This carefully curated anthology includes rigorous works covering topics such as the experiences of early settlers and Native Americans, the racial tensions that resulted from disparate ethnic communities pouring from the South into a gainful employment-rich city, and severe housing shortages faced by newcomers. This focus on newcomers and their experiences in Detroit is a running theme throughout the anthology, which also broadly explores the early history of the city, its industrial decline, race relations, urban planning and administration, community development, and the city's future, among other selected topics. The Straight Detroit features relevant, contemporary, and penetrating scholarship from a wide-ranging set of authors writing in diverse academic and cultural disciplines. Equal parts textbook, historical exploration, critical examination, and testament of love for the city and its people, it is ideal for courses in urban studies, history, or sociology.

"Whether urban or rural dweller, academic or practitioner, the reader takes from Gallagher a deeper appreciation of both the challenges and opportunities that exist within our cities, challenges and opportunities that will ultimately impact our country."-Jay Williams, mayor of Youngstown, Ohio, from the foreword --Book Jacket.

An explosive exposé of America’s lost prosperity by Pulitzer Prize­–winning journalist Charlie LeDuff “One cannot read Mr. LeDuff's amalgam of memoir and reportage and not be shaken by the cold eye he casts on hard truths . . . A little gonzo, a little gumshoe, some gawker, some good-Samaritan—it is hard to ignore reporting like Mr. LeDuff's.” —The Wall Street Journal “Pultizer-Prize-winning journalist LeDuff . . . writes with honesty and compassion about a city that’s destroying itself–and breaking his heart.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A book full of both literary grace and hard-won world-weariness.” —Kirkus Back in his broken hometown, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie LeDuff searches the ruins of Detroit for clues to his family’s troubled past. Having led us on the way up, Detroit now seems to be leading us on the way down. Once the richest city in America, Detroit is now the nation’s poorest. Once the vanguard of America’s machine age—mass-production, blue-collar jobs, and automobiles—Detroit is now America’s capital for unemployment, illiteracy, dropouts, and foreclosures. With the steel-eyed reportage that has become his trademark, and the righteous indignation only a native son possesses, LeDuff sets out to uncover what destroyed his city. He beats on the doors of union bosses and homeless squatters, powerful businessmen and struggling homeowners and the ordinary people holding the city together by sheer determination. Detroit: An American Autopsy is an unbelievable story of a hard town in a rough time filled with some of the strangest and strongest people our country has to offer.

A New York Times Notable BookA powerfully candid memoir about growing up white in Detroit and the conflicted point of view it produced. Raised in Detroit during the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, Paul Clemens saw his family growing steadily isolated from its surroundings: white in a predominately black city, Catholic in an area where churches were closing at a rapid rate, and blue-collar in a steadily declining Rust Belt. As the city continued to collapse—from depopulation, indifference, and the racial antagonism between blacks and whites—Clemens turned to writing and literature as his lifeline, his way of dealing with his contempt for suburban escapees and his frustration with the city proper. Sparing no one—particularly not himself—this is an astonishing examination of race and class relations from a fresh perspective, one forged in a city both desperate and hopeful.

A young college grad buys a house in Detroit for $500 and attempts to restore it—and his new neighborhood—to its original glory in this “deeply felt, sharply observed personal quest to create meaning and community out of the fallen…A standout” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Drew Philp, an idealistic college student from a working-class Michigan family, decides to live where he can make a difference. He sets his sights on Detroit, the failed metropolis of abandoned buildings, widespread poverty, and rampant crime. Arriving with no job, no friends, and no money, Philp buys a ramshackle house for five hundred dollars in the east side neighborhood known as Poletown. The roomy Queen Anne he now owns is little more than a clapboard shell on a crumbling brick foundation, missing windows, heat, water, electricity, and a functional roof. A $500 House in Detroit is Philp’s raw and earnest account of rebuilding everything but the frame of his house, nail by nail and room by room. “Philp is a great storyteller…[and his] engrossing” (Booklist) tale is also of a young man finding his footing in the city, the country, and his own generation. We witness his concept of Detroit shift, expand, and evolve as his plan to save the city gives way to a life forged from political meaning, personal connection, and collective purpose. As he assimilates into the community of Detroiters around him, Philp guides readers through the city’s vibrant history and engages in urgent conversations about gentrification, racial tensions, and class warfare. Part social history, part brash generational statement, part comeback story, A $500 House in Detroit “shines [in its depiction of] the ‘radical neighborliness’ of ordinary people in desperate circumstances” (Publishers Weekly). This is an unforgettable, intimate account of the tentative revival of an American city and a glimpse at a new way forward for generations to come.

Detroit Livestells the story of a city fighting for survival. Robert Mast's interviews with numerous Detroit activists and observers depict people from all walks of life who share a common commitment to the rejuvenation of their home. Despite a mass exodus from the city of over 800,000 citizens and more than 70 percent of business and industry over the last 40 years, Detroit's activists continue to organize, to demonstrate, to speak out, and to lend one another support. The compilation of these interviews provides an exchange of ideas between progressives who were and are deeply involved in the multitude of struggles for equality and liberation, from the 1930s through the 1990s. Their stories highlight the contributions and resourcefulness of working class and minorities, the struggles of women, the role of the clergy, the African American experience, and the battle to maintain quality education and social services. Represented is the collective body of Detroit progressives—including city and suburban dwellers, writers, lawyers, city officials, professors, union members, clergy, housing and welfare reformers, racial activists, and community organizers. Author note:Robert H. Mastis Coordinator of the Pittsburgh Oral History Project and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at Clarion University in Pennsylvania.

An enthralling literary tour-de-force that pays tribute to Detroit's legendary neighborhood, a mecca for jazz, sports, and politics, Black Bottom Saints is a powerful blend of fact and imagination reminiscent of E.L. Doctorow's classic novel Ragtime and Marlon James' Man Booker Award-winning masterpiece, A Brief History of Seven Killings. From the Great Depression through the post-World War II years, Joseph “Ziggy” Johnson, has been the pulse of Detroit’s famous Black Bottom. A celebrated gossip columnist for the city’s African-American newspaper, the Michigan Chronicle, he is also the emcee of one of the hottest night clubs, where he’s rubbed elbows with the legendary black artists of the era, including Ethel Waters, Billy Eckstein, and Count Basie. Ziggy is also the founder and dean of the Ziggy Johnson School of Theater. But now the doyen of Black Bottom is ready to hang up his many dapper hats. As he lays dying in the black-owned-and-operated Kirkwood Hospital, Ziggy reflects on his life, the community that was the center of his world, and the remarkable people who helped shape it. Inspired by the Catholic Saints Day Books, Ziggy curates his own list of Black Bottom’s venerable "52 Saints." Among them are a vulnerable Dinah Washington, a defiant Joe Louis, and a raucous Bricktop. Randall balances the stories of these larger-than-life "Saints" with local heroes who became household names, enthralling men and women whose unstoppable ambition, love of style, and faith in community made this black Midwestern neighborhood the rival of New York City’s Harlem. Accompanying these “tributes” are thoughtfully paired cocktails—special drinks that capture the essence of each of Ziggy’s saints—libations as strong and satisfying as Alice Randall’s wholly original view of a place and time unlike any other.

As seen on the Today Show: This true story of an unforgettable mother, her devoted daughter, and their life in the Detroit numbers of the 1960s and 1970s highlights "the outstanding humanity of black America" (James McBride). In 1958, the very same year that an unknown songwriter named Berry Gordy borrowed $800 to found Motown Records, a pretty young mother from Nashville, Tennessee, borrowed $100 from her brother to run a numbers racket out of her home. That woman was Fannie Davis, Bridgett M. Davis's mother. Part bookie, part banker, mother, wife, and granddaughter of slaves, Fannie ran her numbers business for thirty-four years, doing what it took to survive in a legitimate business that just happened to be illegal. She created a loving, joyful home, sent her children to the best schools, bought them the best clothes, mothered them to the highest standard, and when the tragedy of urban life struck, soldiered on with her stated belief: "Dying is easy. Living takes guts." A daughter's moving homage to an extraordinary parent, The World According to Fannie Davis is also the suspenseful, unforgettable story about the lengths to which a mother will go to "make a way out of no way" and provide a prosperous life for her family -- and how those sacrifices resonate over time.

Metropolitan Detroit is home to one of the largest and most diverse Arab communities outside the Middle East. Arabic-speaking immigrants have been coming to Detroit for more than a century, yet the community they have built is barely visible on the landscape of ethnic America. Arab Detroit brings together the work of twenty-five contributors to create a richly detailed portrait of Arab Detroit. Memoirs and poems by Lebanese, Chaldean, Yemeni, and Palestinian writers anchor the book in personal experience, and more than fifty photographs drawn from family albums and the files of local photojournalists provide a backdrop of vivid, often unexpected images. Students and scholars of ethnicity, immigration, and Arab American communities will welcome this diverse collect on.