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Introduction: Modern Borderlands
by
Nora Faires
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Surrounded by four of the Great Lakes, Michigan occupies a distinct space in a transnational region marked by centuries of cultural, economic, environmental, political, and social interaction. To explore this facet of the state's history, the Michigan Historical Review has devoted its Spring and Fall 2008 issues to studies of the "Borderlands." These special issues feature thirteen articles by scholars from both Canada and the United States, the Spring issue focusing on the early period, this issue on the modern era. Offering a variety of perspectives and investigating a range of topics, the authors of these articles share a commitment to reaching across political boundaries and conceptual categories to situate the history of Michigan within broader contexts. Their research refines and deepens our knowledge of the state and its transnational region, adding texture and nuance to familiar stories and offering new narratives of the diverse peoples who have occupied the lands and traversed the waters of the Great Lakes basin over more than two centuries. These issues aim to contribute to the emerging body of scholarship that understands borderlands as both tangible and intangible spaces where boundaries are drawn and redrawn, with myriad effects.1 As the articles in both issues suggest, Michigan, whose two peninsulas have borders with Canada (specifically the province of Ontario) and with three substantial midwestern states (Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin) and whose lakes and rivers connect to a broad expanse within North America and ultimately to the Atlantic Ocean, offers an especially rich field for such investigations, whether in the seventeenth century or the twenty-first. |
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The six essays in the previous issue spanned developments from the mid-1700s through the inauguration of Michigan statehood in 1837. The seven articles in this issue also cover a broad chronology, reaching back to the waning years of Michigan as a territory and forward to the contemporary period. During these two centuries, Michigan saw great transformations in its economy, demography, society, politics, environment, and culture. Nowhere were these changes more evident than in Detroit—a small settlement gathered around a fort at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a thriving regional commercial and industrial hub by the onset of the Civil War, the world's leading center of automobile manufacturing six decades later, and, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a city struggling to overcome years of capital flight, deindustrialization, population loss, infrastructural decay, and the bitter legacies of racial discrimination and conflict. The contents of this issue reflect Detroit's prominence in the state and the transnational Great Lakes basin during the modern era. Four essays offer case studies set in the city and its environs, tracing elements of the Detroit region's past from territorial days through the heyday of automobile production (1920s-1950s) to the post-Vietnam era. A fifth locates Detroit as a node within the vast fur-trading empire of the early nineteenth century; a sixth considers it as a key site of enduring international exchange. Only one of the seven articles, focusing on Native Americans in Michigan's northern counties, makes no mention of Detroit. Yet even here, the city's swift rise during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries serves as an implicit backdrop for the narrative: the dynamism of urban centers such as Detroit and Chicago spurred the timber boom that transformed land use and altered the lives of the Anishnabeg in the Upper Peninsula. |
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