In 1777 Normand MacLeod, a British army officer, assumed the post of town major of Detroit, then a British colony on the frontier of late eighteenth-century America. Although it was not in the forefront of action in the American Revolution, the fort at Detroit had an important role because its strategic location made it a point of interest to military leaders on both sides.Detroiters, under the leadership of Captain Normand MacLeod, played a role in the War for Independence that is described in detail in this journal. During the bitter winter of 1778-79, MacLeod led a party of Detroit Volunteer Militia in advance of Henry Hamilton's main force. Hamilton was attempting to hold Fort Sackville (modern Vincennes, Indiana) against George Rogers Clark and his troops.MacLeod was a shrewd and witty reporter. His diary, published for the first time in this volume, details the daily routine of the arduous midwinter military campaign. He describes daily life within the walls of the fort at Detroit, the military adventures planned within those walls, and the rumors, the gossip, and the personal relationships within the community.Offering an unprecedented personal glimpse of Detroit life in the years 1778-79, the diary preserves the flavor of one bitter winter of the American Revolution of special significance for historians of Michigan and Detroit. It is presented in an attractive clothbound volume suitable as a gift for history buffs, a volume which will be treasured by the collector.William A. Evans's introduction to the journal places MacLeod's expedition in the context of Hamilton's strategy and provides a biographical account of MacLeod himself that has not been available previously.Norman MacLeod (1731?-1796) is now a relatively minor figure in American history, but he was a man of some position and power in the early life of Detroit. Born in Scotland, he came to the American colonies as an ensign in the famous Black Watch regiment. He remained primarily a military man throughout his American career, first transferring to the Eightieth Regiment (Gage's Light Infantry), and eventually holding posts at Ontario and as town major, the chief executive officer of the garrison, at Detroit. He also tried his hand at farming and was for a time a partner in a fur-trading company. In 1796 he died in Montreal as he had lived, a loyal subject of the British crown.

Detroit to Fort Sackville, 1778-1779: The Journal of Normand Macleod : From the Burton Historical Collection

Normand MacLeod

Biographies & Memoirs

Wayne State Univ Pr (T)

Architecture of Alden B. Dow

History

Sidney K. Robinson

Americas

Luke Karamazov (Great Lakes books)

Was it because they were subconsciously trying to kill the drunken, violent man that was their father that brothers Luke Karamazov and Tommy Searl from Kalamazoo became serial murderers?
Addressing this and other questions, author Conrad Hilberry presents an unusually vivid and detailed portrait of two contrasting psychological types in this account. In 1964, Luke confessed to a five-week murder spree in which he killed five men. Tommy was convicted of the rape and murder of four women in 1972.
Hilberry investigates the relationship between the brothers, as well as their feelings about their parents, about the prison staff, and about the woman who has been married to each of them. With the drama of fiction, the resulting story is bizarre, somewhat grisly, but always psychologically revealing.

Luke Karamazov (Great Lakes Books)

Conrad Hilberry

The Detroit area boasts many fine examples of stained glass representing a variety of periods and styles. The European stained glass collection at teh Detroit Institute of Arts ranks amongst the most important in the United States. Churches and synagogues contain panels from notable designsers and studios, and exquisite glass can also be found in many public and private buildings like the Detroit Public Library, Cranbrook House, the Guardian Building, and the David Whitney, Jr., house.  Discovering Stained Glass in Detroit contains sixty examples of the area's stained glass treasures, each stunningly presented in full color. Author Nola Huse Tutag accompanies each illustration with an explanatory text. Line drawings illustrate the buildings where the panels are located. The windows represent works by designers such as Louis Comfort Tiffany, Charles J. Connick, Frank Lloyd Wright, Henry Matisse, as well as those from European and American studios.

Discovering Stained Glass in Detroit

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Nola Huse Tutag

Antiques & Collectibles

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 events. In this biography of John Jacob Astor, John Denis Haeger uses Astor's life and his career as a merchant, fur trader, and land speculator as vehicles for examining several important themes and issues in American economic and urban development between 1790 and 1860. Haeger addresses, in fascinating detail, the complexity of Astor's business endeavors, his extensive connections with the country's dominant political figures, and the "modern" business strategies and managerial techniques that he used to build his business empire. Astor was clearly not a business revolutionary who radically altered an existing system. He was, however, an entrepreneur who exerted a profound change on an industry. He fascinated his contemporaries precisely because he so mirrored his age and its changing business and economic patterns. He grasped the greater size and complexity of an emerging commercial economy in post-Revolutionary America and adopted strategies and structures that transformed the fur and China trades. His investment in city real estate, stocks, bonds, and even a western city made him part of America's evolution into an urbanindustrial society. For his era, John Astor's career was remarkable for its modernity, vision, and reflection of American economic and political values. More than just a personal biography, John Jacob Astor combines economic theories with a fascinating narrative that demonstrates, like no other book has, Astor's impact on the early republic.John Denis Haeger is a professor of history, assistant vice president for research, and dean in the School of Graduate Studies at Central Michigan University. He is a founder and former editor of Michigan Historical Review and the author of The Investment Frontier. Haeger earned his PH.D. from Loyola University in Chicago.

John Jacob Astor: Business and Finance in the Early Republic (Great Lakes Books)

John D. Haeger

Historical

As David Wagoner wrote in the earlier volume, The Third Coast, "A Michigan poet may be undistinguishable from an Illinois poet or an Arizona poet (except for subject matter), but the publication of this anthology serves to underline one layer of regional cultural strength, even though these are not 'regional poets:" Over a decade later, Contemporary Michigan Poetry is testimony that Michigan poetry continues to flourish. Preserving the mood and texture of Michigan in the 1980s, this new collection includes the best recent work by the state's most accomplished poets.Among the fifty-three contributors are Charles Baxter, Alice Fulton, Jim Harrison, Janet Kaufmann, Josie Kearns, Thomas Lynch, John R. Reed, and Stephen Tudor. Each of the editors is also a contributor to this sampling of poems. Styles range from understated to extravagant, from closely observed to freely imagined. Poems are as varied as the Michigan landscape.Remarkable in its scope and quality, Contemporary Michigan Poetry offers an arresting look at Michigan life and a special glimpse at the preoccupations that possess residents on the Third Coast.

Contemporary Michigan Poetry: Poems from the Third Coast (Great Lakes Books (Paperback))

Literature & Fiction

Michael Delp

History & Criticism

A Small Bequest

A Small Bequest is the comic account of two city boys and their summer expedition through Michigan's Upper Peninsula in 1934. What begins as an innocent camping trip becomes a disaster of hilarious proportions for author Ed Love and his best friend, George French.Exploring Grandfather Perry's legacy-two sections of land in the sothwest quadrant of Luce County-the boys are beset by porcupines and poison ivy, blowouts and breakdowns and soon realize that the north woods scrub is no place for Eagle Scouts. Love is a keen observer of the American scene, and A Small Bequest is his witty reminder that all is not beautiful in the wilderness.

Edmund G. Love

In 200 black-and-white photographs, Detroit Images captures another side of Detroit's celebrated renaissance. Reaching beyond the superficial, familiar views of the city's downtown skyscrapers, ethnic restaurants, parades and professional sporting events, the book presents an unsentimental look at a metropolis that once was called "the city of destiny." Detroit has become the nation's symbol of the industrial city in crisis, a synonym for failed public policy and a metaphor for the Rustbelt. Detroit Images depicts the symptoms of that crisis and reflects on its causes and consequences. Historian John Bukowczyk's essay outlines the historical development of industrial Detroit and probes the sources of its decline. The essay by photographer Douglas Aikenhead analyzes the themes and treatments employed by the book's fourteen contributors. In his afterword, poet and Detroit expatriate Philip Levine ponders photographs and personal history to provide a bittersweet commentary on the city. From Poletown to Downriver, Tiger Stadium to the Cass Corridor, Detroit Images mixes harshness, warmth and urban realism into a striking urban social portrait.

Detroit Images: Photographs of the Renaissance City

John J. Bukowczyk

An Afternoon in Waterloo Park evokes feelings, sights, and textures of experience of a bygone period. Prompted by the emotional strain of his mother's death in 1968, Gerald Dumas contemplates three generations of his family and lyrically records impressions of life on Dickerson Avenue in Detroit.This is a complex family story, recollected from the surface of childhood and pondered from the depths of mature experience. Dumas' poetic form allows for closely packed images not possible in prose. What Our Town did in its attempt to find a value for the smallest events of everyday life in early twentieth-century New England, An Afternoon in Waterloo Park achieves for midcentury mid-America-a real and honest evocation of going home.

An Afternoon in Waterloo Park (Great Lakes Books)

Gerald Dumas

Michigan in Literature is a guide to more than one thousand literary and dramatic works set in Michigan from its pre-territorial days to the present. Imaginative, narrative, dramatic, and lyrical creations that have Michigan settings, characters, subjects, and themes are organized into sixteen chapters on topics such as Indians in Michigan, settlers who came to Michigan, diversity in the state, the timber industry, the Great Lakes, crime in Michigan literature, Detroit, and Michigan poetry. 
In this most complete work to date, Clarence Andrews has assembled the literary reputation of a state. He illustrates, with a wide variety of literary works, that Michigan is more than just a builder of automobiles, a producer of apples and cherries, a supplier of copper and lumber, and the home of great athletes. It is also a state that has played-and continues to play-an important role in the production of American literature.
To qualify for inclusion, a work or a significant part of it has to be set in Michigan. Andrews shows how novelists, dramatists, poets, and short story writers have created their particular images of Michigan by using and interpreting the history of the state-its land and waters, people, events, ideas, philosophies, and policies-sometimes factually, sometimes modified or distorted, and sometimes fancied or imagined.
Biographical information is featured about authors, editors, and compilers, who range in fame from Ernest Hemingway and Elmore Leonard to persons long forgotten. The published opinions and judgments of reputable critics and scholars are also presented.

Michigan in Literature (Great Lakes Books)

Clarence A. Andrews

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