Working detroit: the making of a union town

Babson recounts Detroit's odyssey from a bulwark of the "open shop" to the nation's foremost "union town." Through words and pictures, Working Detroit documents the events in the city's ongoing struggle to build an industrial society that is both prosperous and humane.

Babson begins his account in 1848 when Detroit has just entered the industrial era. He weaves the broader historical realties, such as Red Scare, World War, and economic depression into his account, tracing the ebb and flow …

In fitting memory: the art and politics of Holocaust memorials

In Fitting Memory, a critical survey of Holocaust memorials and monuments in Europe, Israel, and the United States, focuses on the archeological remains at the original sites of Nazi terror that constituted the first postwar memorials. The Holocaust is defined here as the collective designation for the Nazi mass murder of Jews, Gypsies, and the handicapped, and for the related persecution of Soviet prisoners of war and other ideological opponents. Featuring text and photographs, the book shows h…

All our yesterdays: a brief history of Detroit

All Our Yesterdays is an accurate account based on extensive historical research when initially published in 1969, and is written in such a style as to make interesting and historical snapshot of the history of the city of Detroit.

The authors recount the founding of the town by the French, control by the British, and growth as an American city. These episodes are recounted in the words and deeds of the people who lived and worked here, men like Judge Woodward, Father Gabriel Richard, a…

Uppermost Canada: the Western District and the Detroit frontier, 1800-1850

The publication of this volume in a freely accessible digital format has been made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation through their Humanities Open Book Program.

From new Zion to old Zion: American Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine, 1917-1939

American Aliyah (immigration to Palestine) began in the mid-nineteenth century fueled by the desire of American Jews to study Torah and by their wish to live and be buried in the Holy Land. His movement of people-men and women-increased between World War I and II, in direct contrast to European Jewry’s desire to immigrate to the United States. Why would American Jews want to leave America, and what characterized their resettlement? From New Zion to Old Zion analyzes the migration of American Jew…

Survival and regeneration: Detroit’s American Indian community

Survival and Regeneration captures the heritage of Detroit's colorful Indian community through printed sources and the personal life stories of many Native Americans. During a ten-year period, Edmund Jefferson Danziger, Jr. interviewed hundreds of Indians about their past and their needs and aspirations for the future. This history is essentially their success story.

In search of new opportunities, a growing number of rural Indians journeyed to Detroit after World War II. Destitute rese…

No haven for the oppressed: United States policy toward Jewish refugees, 1938-1945

No Haven for the Oppressed is the most thorough and the most comprehensive analysis to be written to date on the United States policy toward Jewish refugees during World War II. Friedman draws upon many sources for his history, significantly upon papers which have only recently been opened to public scrutiny. These include State Department Records at the National Archives and papers relating to the Jewish refugee question at the Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park. Such documents serve as the foun…

John Jacob Astor: business and finance in the early republic

John Jacob Astor was the best-known and most important American businessman for more than a half-century. His career encompassed the country's formative economic years from the precarious days following the American Revolution to the emergence of an urban-centered manufacturing economy in the late 1840s. Change was the dominant motif of the period, and Astor either exemplified the varied economic, social, and political changes in his business career or he directly affected the course of event…

Jewish agricultural utopias in America, 1880-1910

Brook Farm, Oneida, Amana, and Nauvoo are familiar names in American history. Far less familiar are New Odessa, Bethlehem-Jehudah, Cotopaxi, and Alliance—the Brook Farms and Oneidas of the Jewish people in North America.

From Sofia to Jaffa: the Jews of Bulgaria and Israel

Within two years of the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, an astounding 45,000 of Bulgaria’s 50,000 Jews left voluntarily for Israel. This mass exodus was remarkable considering that Bulgaria was the only Axis power to prevent the deportation of its Jews to the death camps during World War II.
After their arrival in Israel, the Jews of Bulgaria were recognized as a model immigrant group in a fledgling state attempting to absorb hundreds of thousands of newcomers from more than eig…

For our soul: Ethiopian Jews in Israel

Between 1977 and 1992, practically all Ethiopian Jews migrated to Israel. This mass move followed the 1974 revolution in Ethiopia and its ensuing economic and political upheavals, compounded by the brutality of the military regime and the willingness—after years of refusal—of the Israeli government to receive them as bona fide Jews entitled to immigrate to that country. As the sole Jewish community from sub-Sahara Africa in Israel, the Ethiopian Jews have met with unique difficulties. Based on f…

The iron hunter

Originally published in 1919, The Iron Hunter is the autobiography of one of Michigan's most influential and flamboyant historical figures: the reporter, publisher, explorer, politician, and twenty-seventh governor of Michigan, Chase Salmon Osborn (1860-1949). Making unprecedented use of the automobile in his 1910 campaign, Osborn ran a memorable campaign that was followed by an even more remarkable term as governor. In two years he eliminated Michigan's deficit, ended corruption, and produced t…

American Jewry and the Holocaust: the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1939-1945

In this volume Yehudi Bauer describes the efforts made to aid European victims of World War II by the New York-based American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, American Jewry's chief representative abroad. Drawing on the mass of unpublished material in the JDC archives and other repositories, as well as on his thorough knowledge of recent and continuing research into the Holocaust, he focuses alternately on the personalities and institutional decisions in New York and their effects on the …

United States Jewry, 1776-1985. volume II. the Germanic period

In United States Jewry, 1776–1985, the dean of American Jewish historians, Jacob Rader Marcus, unfolds the history of Jewish immigration, segregation, and integration; of Jewry’s cultural exclusiveness and assimilation; of its internal division and indivisible unity; and of its role in the making of America. Characterized by Marcus’s impeccable scholarship, meticulous documentation, and readable style, this landmark four-volume set completes the history Marcus began in The Colonial American Jew,…

Songquest: the journals of Great Lakes folklorist Ivan H. Walton

Ivan H. Walton was a pioneering folklorist who collected the songs and stories of aging sailors living along the shores of the Great Lakes in the 1930s. His collection is unique in the annals of Great Lakes folklore. It began as a search for songs but broadened into a collection of weather signs, shipboard beliefs, greenhorn tales, and stories of the intense rivalry between sailors and the steamboat men who replaced them. Edited by Joe Grimm, Songquest: The Journals of Great Lakes Folklorist Iva…

Marketing identities: the invention of Jewish ethnicity in Ost und West

Marketing Identities analyzes how Ost und West (East and West), the first Jewish magazine (1901-1923) published in Berlin by westernized Jews originally from Eastern Europe, promoted ethnic identity to Jewish audiences in Germany and throughout the world. Using sophisticated techniques of modern marketing, such as stereotyping, the editors of this highly successful journal attempted to forge a minority consciousness. Marketing Identities is thus about the beginnings of "ethnicity" as we k…

On Jewish folklore

On Jewish Folklore spans a half-century of scholarly inquiry by the noted anthropologist and biblical scholar Raphael Patai. He essays collected in this volume, some of which are presented for the first time in English translation, provide a rich harvest of Jewish customs and traditional beliefs, gathered from all over the world and from ancient to modern times.

The life and work of Ludwig Lewisohn. Volume II. “this dark and desperate age”

An imposing literary figure in America and Europe during the first half of the twentieth century, Ludwig Lewisohn (1882–1955) struggled with feelings of alienation in Christian America that were gradually resolved by his developing Jewish identity, a process reflected in hundreds of works of fiction, literary analysis, and social criticism.

Queen of the Lakes

This book is an account of the ships that have borne the name "Queen of the Lakes," an honorary title indicating that, at the time of its launching, a ship is the longest on the Great Lakes. In one of the most comprehensive books ever written on the maritime history of the lakes, Mark L. Thompson presents a vignette of each of the dozens of ships that have held the title, chronicling the dates the ship sailed, its dimensions, the derivation of its name, its role in the economic development of…

Seasons of grace: a history of the Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit

Seasons of Grace is a history of the Catholic Church and community in southern lower Michigan from the 1830s through the 1950s. More than a chronicle of clerical successions and institutional expansion, the book also examines those social and cultural influences that affected the development of the Catholic community.