A MacArthur genius grant winner and professor at the University of Michigan, Miles investigates Detroit's metropolitan history as a center of the Northern slave trade.
In The Dawn of Detroit, the historian Tiya Miles transports the reader back to the 18th century and brings to life a multiracial community that began in slavery ... If many Americans imagine slavery essentially as a system in which black men toiled on cotton plantations, Miles upends that stereotype several times over ... She presents African-American and Native American histories as 'interrelated rather than separate streams of experience,' and explores the connections as well as the conflicts between these groups ... Miles’s use of 'intuitive descriptions' can seem overly speculative in a few instances. But on the whole, her book powerfully reconstructs the experiences of Detroit’s slaves. The dearth of archival sources makes her achievement all the more impressive.
Miles’ account of the founding and rise of Detroit is an outstanding contribution that seeks to integrate the entirety of U.S. history, admirable and ugly, to offer a more holistic understanding of the country ... Miles sets a standard for thoroughness. With scant historical documentation available, she details personal accounts of the lives of the 'unfree' and the political ideologies and actions that affected them.
...groundbreaking history... Miles calls her book 'an alternative origin story' — and with good reason. Hers is a history that 'privileges people in bondage, many of whom launched gripping pursuits of dignity, autonomy, and liberty.' Piecing together voices from primary source material...Miles chronicles 'the rise, fall and dawn of Detroit while centering on the experiences of those who were held in bondage from the mid-1700s to the early 1800s' ... Miles demonstrates a unique insight on native and African American culture. Very few scholars move so seamlessly from the intricacies of the Africans to those of the Ottawa, Potawatomi and Objiwe cultures. Miles’s voice is consistently authoritative ... As episodes unfold in fragments, there are redundancies, seemingly for the purpose of reacquainting the reader with a particular incident and the characters involved ... In her eloquent account, Miles conjures up a city of stark disparity and lives quashed.
