Ways of Knowing a City’s Past: Using Made in Detroit in the Classroom

Abstract

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO TEACH a history of Detroit without discussing the role of race in the city’s development, decline, and attempted redevelopment. Despite the centrality of race in the story of Detroit, mine is not a course in race specifically. Instead, it is a beginner’s look at how scholars study the city using Detroit as a case study. In addition to a textbook and some journal articles, students in my class read Paul Clemens’s memoir, Made in Detroit (2005). I use the book as an example of how historians must handle potential sources; the author’s ambivalent, often controversial discussions of race make the book particularly challenging for that exercise. Despite the discomfort that this text brings to the classroom, the intensive learning, peer engagement, and discussion that come from its examination of race continue to make use of this text central to the class. Here I make a case for not abandoning a difficult supplemental text in favor of soothing, placating, or reaffirming texts that make the teaching and learning experience easier. Inasmuch as historians must often work with difficult sources, here is an opportunity to illustrate the challenge of the historian’s craft. I started teaching a Detroit history class to freshman art and design students during fall 2008. Called “Detroit: The Modern City in Historical Context,” the course is part of a number of freshman seminar offerings meant to teach the important academic skills that students need to succeed in all their liberal arts courses using subjects they would find interesting and relevant. In creating this class, I was responding to requests from a number of students who were interested in their urban surroundings both