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Additional resources for this issue of History Now
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Detroit
Books:
If you need more background on the history of Detroit, you may want to start with
these readable books:
Poremba, David Lee. Detroit: A Motor City History.
Mt. Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2003.
Woodford, Arthur M. This Is Detroit, 1701-2001. Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, c2001.
For a resource guide for studying the American motor industry go to:
Berger, Michael L. The Automobile in American History
and Culture: A Reference Guide. Secondary Literature and
Sources in the Field. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
2001.
Henry Ford and the empire he founded are subjects of dozens of books. These may
be most useful for the topics discussed in this essay:
Batchelor, Ray. Henry Ford, Mass Production, Modernism, and Design. New
York: St. Martin's Press, c1994.
Brinkley, Douglas. Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century
of Progress, 1903-2003. New York: Penguin, 2004.
Hooker, Clarence. Life in the Shadows of the Crystal Palace, 1910-1927: Ford
Workers in the Model T Era. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University
Popular Press, c1997.
Lacey, Robert. Ford: The Men and the Machine.
Boston: Little, Brown, c1986.
These authors discuss the crisis in the Detroit auto industry in the last third
of the century:
Kannan, Narasimhan P., Kathy K. Rebibo, and Donna L. Ellis. Downsizing Detroit:
The Future of the U.S. Automobile Industry. New York: Praeger, 1982.
Maynard, Micheline. The End of Detroit: How the Big Three Lost Their Grip
on the American Car Market. New York: Currency/Doubleday, 2004.
Rubenstein, James M. Making and Selling Cars: Innovation and Change in the
U.S. Automotive Industry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Not every car manufactured in Michigan, or even the Detroit area, was a Ford.
Here are recent studies of other automakers:
Hyde, Charles K. Riding the Roller Coaster: A History of the Chrysler Corporation.
Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003.
Farber, David R. Sloan Rules: Alfred P. Sloan and the Triumph of General Motors.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, c2002.
The United Auto Workers and their first leader, Walter Reuther, have inspired
almost as much industry as the automakers themselves:
Barnard, John. Walter Reuther and The Rise of the Auto Workers. Boston:
Little, Brown, c1983.
Carew, Anthony. Walter Reuther. New York: St. Martin's Press, c1993.
Goode, Bill. Infighting in the UAW: The 1946 Election and the Ascendancy of
Walter Reuther. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.
Lichtenstein, Nelson. The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and
the Fate of American Labor. New York: Basic Books, 1995.
The African American experience in Detroit and the auto
industry is chronicled ably in these books. The first
is by Thomas Sugrue, the author of the article you've
just read in this issue of History Now:
Sugrue, Thomas J. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in
Postwar Detroit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, c1996.
Thomas, Richard Walter. Life for Us Is What We Make It: Building Black Community
In Detroit, 1915-1945. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
Detroit's troubling tradition of racial violence is discussed in:
Capeci, Dominic J., and Martha Wilkerson. Layered Violence: The Detroit Rioters
of 1943. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, c1991.
Farley, Reynolds, Sheldon Danziger, and Harry J. Holzer. Detroit Divided.
New York: Russell Sage Foundation, c2000.
Fine, Sidney. Violence in the Model City: The Cavanagh Administration, Race
Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, c1989.
Locke, Hubert G. The Detroit Riot of 1967. Detroit,
Wayne State University Press, 1970.
Sauter, Van Gordon, and Burleigh Hines. Nightmare in Detroit; A Rebellion
and its Victims. Chicago: Regnery, 1968.
Websites:
For general history of Detroit, you can begin with the very good entry for the
city in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit,_Michigan
The Detroit Historical Society has a helpful website as well:
http://www.detroithistorical.org/
And the Society's education section has a downloadable lesson plan on
Detroit history:
http://www.detroithistorical.org/learningcenter/resources.asp
Once you focus more closely on the history of the auto industry and its impact
on the city, you'll find even better materials on the Web. The Henry Ford
Museum's site is a good starting place for a biography of Ford with links
to specific online exhibitions at the Museum:
http://www.thehenryford.com/exhibits/hf/default.asp
Then you'll want to branch out to the absolutely wonderful "Automobile
in American Life and Society" site of the University of Michigan at Dearborn:
http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/
Here you'll find extensive units arranged under the
topics "Design" "Environment," "Gender", "Race," and
"Labor." Each one is focused on lengthy articles by
prominent scholars, linked to other areas of the site
and other Internet projects that provide more information
on key topics. Finally, there are student and teacher
resources for each area, ranging from suggestions for
exam questions to topics for classroom discussion. "Printable
views" are available for all.
Professor Sugrue contributes two essays for the "Race"
component of the "Automobile in American Life and Society"
site -- "From Motor City to Motor Metropolis: How the
Automobile Industry Reshaped Urban America" and "Driving
While Black: The Car and Race Relations in Modern America":
http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Race.htm
Still another Michigan-based website, the Walter Reuther Library at Wayne State,
provides online exhibitions on the 1937 Flint sit-down strike and "Battle
of the Overpass":
http://www.reuther.wayne.edu/exhibits/sitdown.html
http://www.reuther.wayne.edu/exhibits/battle.html
You'll find useful but more scattered materials in our
old friend "American Memory" at the Library of Congress.
In the site's general search field, try "River Rouge"
and "United Auto Workers" to bring up a selection photos
of the Ford plant, union leaders, and NLRB elections:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.php
In the segment called "Prosperity and Thrift: The Coolidge Era and the
Consumer Economy, 1921-1929" try searching for these subjects: "Ford,
Henry" and "Ford Motor Company":
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/coolhtml/coolhome.html
Public television hasn't ignored Detroit and the auto industry. I'll
list the documentaries and websites of most specific interest:
On the "They Made America" series website, look at the Henry Ford
section:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/theymadeamerica/whomade/ford_hi.html
The "People's Century" series website has an excellent
teacher's guide for "On the Line" which provides excellent
material on the evolution of the assembly line, focusing
on its status in 1926. It's geared to classes who've
actually watched the video, but it's still a good source
for ideas:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/peoplescentury/episodes/ontheline/
Not every good PBS documentary has a website. Sadly, an example of this is the
2004 film Sit Down and Fight: Walter Reuther and the Rise of the Auto Workers
Union. You'll just have to find a VHS or DVD of the hour-long program
to use in conjunction with other materials.
The good news about PBS documentaries is, of course, that Eyes on the Prize
has been re-launched with public access and educational materials on the Web.
Be sure to consult their segment on the July 1967 Detroit riots, which include
a four-minute film clip:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/story/13_detroit.html
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