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.
Drawing on archival records and a thin scholarly literature, Miles pieces together a story in which African-Americans were used 'like railroad cars in a pre-industrial transit system that connected sellers, buyers, and goods.' At times, the narrative takes turns that push it away from general readers into the hands of postmodern-inclined academics... But for the most part, the author’s account is accessible to anyone with an interest in local history as well as the larger history of world systems in the time of the Seven Years War and beyond ... A book likely to stand at the head of further research into the problem of Native and African-American slavery in the north country.
Miles, professor of history at the University of Michigan, illuminates an 'alternative origin story' of this much-studied city, which was 'born of the forced captivity of indigenous and African people' ... Miles places Detroit’s history in a more expansive frame than its 20th-century boom and decline, emphasizing racial inequalities far in advance of the Great Migration.
