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Wyandotte: Origins Through the 19th Century
By Natasha R. Garrison While the city of Detroit is the star of the show through most of the early years of Michigan’s history, the cities bordering it are equally as important to the formation of Michigan as we know it. Wyandotte, founded as an official city in 1867, is currently located just a few…
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Jim (James) Toy: Michigander and LGBTQ Activist
By Josh Sgroi Early Life and Family Jim Toy was born to a Scotch-Irish mother and a Chinese father in New York City in April of 1930.1 During his childhood, his father, James2, moved the family to Ohio after Jim’s mother’s, Ruth3, passing to live near her parents.4 Their names were Alice and Samuel Hamblen, and they…
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Michigan Shipping Industry
By Dylan Wacht The shipping industry had a big part in the growth of Michigan and the United States in its early years. The shipping industry started in the early 1800s. Some of the most popular things that were shipped was lumber, grains, coal and iron ore at this time period. During this era the…
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Background to the Michigan Copper Country Strike: The industry, Geography, and the Workers
PART ONE The traveler to the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan, the far most northern region in the state, may find it difficult to believe the area was a highly populated industrial center less then a century ago. Yet, in 1910, Houghton County, comprising the southern half of the Keweenaw Peninsula, was the fourth most populated…
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The Beginning of the Michigan Copper Country Strike – 23 July 1913
David Christopher Siwik is the creator and editor of Præteritum Michigan. He can be reached at david.siwik@gmail.com. On 23 July 1913 the great strike that would last into the Spring of 1914 began in Michigan’s Copper Country – the mines along the copper range of the Keweenaw Peninsula. While there were many collaborative and informative…
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Lumbering in the Great Lake State
Grace Gillengerten Præteritum Michigan contributor The beautiful Michigan we know today was once called a land worth nothing unless you wanted to raise frogs or mosquitoes. After land surveys were taken in the first half of the 1800s, the knowledge of Michigan’s dense and vast pine forests spread far and wide. Soon enough, Michigan became…
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Coming Soon!
From our latest contributor, Grace Gillengerten – stay tuned!
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2017 Student Articles
Good news! The 2017 Student Pages are now on Præteritum Michigan. Be sure and navigate the menu headings at the top of the page to check out all the great work the Lansing Community College Michigan History students did this year. You are guaranteed to learn something!
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The Black Legion and the Wolverine Republican League
Black Legion – Part II, The Wolverine Republican League By David Siwik – Præteritum Michigan Editor The previous post covered the rise of the Black Legion, a Ku Klux Klan-type, right-wing, white-supremacist group that rose to prominence in Michigan in the 1930s. The Legion were feared by many who had the unfortunate occasion of crossing their…
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The Black Legion in Michigan
by David Siwik, Præteritum Editor Taking the long view of American history, the decade of the 1930s looks different than those that preceded or followed. In a nation historically stubbornly resistant to change, in the 1930s, Americans experimented with new ideas and new possibilities of doing things in ways they had not done before. Some of…
