From The Books Back Cover: Welcome to Detroitland, where award-winning journalist Richard Bak brings to life episodes from roughly a century of Detroit's colorful history. Bak tackles familiar names like Frank Murphy, the Purple Gang, the Lone Ranger, "Potato Patch" Pingree, and Charles Lindbergh. He also introduces little-known Detroit characters like the Black Legion, Detroit's own version of the Ku Klux Klan: Jonny Miler, the man who walloped Joe Louis in the Brown Bomber's first-ever amateur fight; patrolman Ben Turpin, the terror of Black Bottom criminals; Sophie Lyons, legendary "Queen of the Underworld" and Detroit philanthropist; and Shorty Long, Brenda Holloway, the Velvelettes, and other forgotten Motown artists of the 60's.

Containing some of the leading voices on Detroit's history and future, Mapping Detroit will be informative reading for anyone interested in urban studies, geography, and recent American history.

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.

This book addresses the questions of what went wrong with Detroit and what can be done to reinvent the Motor City. Various answers to the former-deindustrialization, white flight, and a disappearing tax base-are now well understood. Less discussed are potential paths forward, stemming from alternative explanations of Detroit's long-term decline and reconsideration of the challenges the city currently faces. Urban crisis-socioeconomic, fiscal, and political-has seemingly narrowed the range of possible interventions. Growth-oriented redevelopment strategies have not reversed Detroit's decline, but in the wake of crisis, officials have increasingly funnelled limited public resources into the city's commercial core via an implicit policy of "urban triage." The crisis has also led to the emergency management of the city by extra-democratic entities. As a disruptive historical event, Detroit's crisis is a moment teeming with political possibilities. The critical rethinking of Detroit's past, present, and future is essential reading for both urban studies scholars and the general public.

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Readers of Detroit history and urban studies will be drawn to and enlightened by these powerful essays.

Winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize Winner of the American Book Award Winner of the Merle Curti Social History Award Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize Winner of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award (Nonfiction) Finalist for the John Hope Franklin Prize Finalist for the Harriet Tubman Prize Finalist for the Cundill History Prize A New York Times Editor’s Choice selection “If many Americans imagine slavery essentially as a system in which black men toiled on cotton plantations, Miles upends that stereotype several times over.” —New York Times Book Review “[Miles] has compiled documentation that does for Detroit what the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Writers’ Project slave narratives did for other regions, primarily the South.” —Washington Post “[Tiya Miles] is among the best when it comes to blending artful storytelling with an unwavering sense of social justice.” —Martha S. Jones in The Chronicle of Higher Education “A necessary work of powerful, probing scholarship.” —Publisher Weekly (starred) “A book likely to stand at the head of further research into the problem of Native and African-American slavery in the north country.” —Kirkus Reviews From the MacArthur genius grant winner, a beautifully written and revelatory look at the slave origins of a major northern American city Most Americans believe that slavery was a creature of the South, and that Northern states and territories provided stops on the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves on their way to Canada. In this paradigm-shifting book, celebrated historian Tiya Miles reveals that slavery was at the heart of the Midwest’s iconic city: Detroit. In this richly researched and eye-opening book, Miles has pieced together the experience of the unfree—both native and African American—in the frontier outpost of Detroit, a place wildly remote yet at the center of national and international conflict. Skillfully assembling fragments of a distant historical record, Miles introduces new historical figures and unearths struggles that remained hidden from view until now. The result is fascinating history, little explored and eloquently told, of the limits of freedom in early America, one that adds new layers of complexity to the story of a place that exerts a strong fascination in the media and among public intellectuals, artists, and activists. A book that opens the door on a completely hidden past, The Dawn of Detroit is a powerful and elegantly written history, one that completely changes our understanding of slavery’s American legacy.

Intense attention has been paid to Detroit as a site of urban crisis. This crisis, however, has not only yielded the massive devaluation of real estate that has so often been noted; it has also yielded an explosive production of seemingly valueless urban property that has facilitated the imagination and practice of alternative urbanisms. The first sustained study of Detroit’s alternative urban cultures, The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit initiates a new focus on Detroit as a site not only of urban crisis but also of urban possibility. The Guide documents art and curatorial practices, community and guerilla gardens, urban farming and forestry, cultural platforms, living archives, evangelical missions, temporary public spaces, intentional communities, furtive monuments, outsider architecture, and other work made possible by the ready availability of urban space in Detroit. The Guide poses these spaces as “unreal estate”: urban territory that has slipped through the free- market economy and entered other regimes of value, other contexts of meaning, and other systems of use. The appropriation of this territory in Detroit, the Guide suggests, offers new perspectives on what a city is and can be, especially in a time of urban crisis.