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At the age of eleven, shoemaker apprentice Hyacinthe Reaume dreamed of working in the vibrant fur trade like his father and uncles. He longed to join his voyageur father on one of his trips, despite its grueling labour and the dangers of traveling across frigid waters for long periods of time. An opportune pair of blue shoes led to his courtship and marriage to Agatha LaCelle. Years later, in 1733, Hyacinthe and Agatha, along with their two children, made the long, arduous trip from Montreal to Fort Pontchartrain in sparsely populated Detroit, where he would combine his two passions of shoemaking and fur trading. Their life would be forever changed. They experienced daily hardships and tragic losses, having survived the French and Indian War, the British takeover of the fort, and Chief Pontiac’s Uprising. Living through the most tense and critical days in Detroit’s history, theirs is a story of courage, perseverance, acceptance, and enduring love.
Detroit’s industrial health has long been crucial to the American economy. Today’s troubles notwithstanding, Detroit has experienced multiple periods of prosperity, particularly in the second half of the eighteenth century, when the city was the center of the thriving fur trade. Its proximity to the West as well as its access to the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River positioned this new metropolis at the intersection of the fur-rich frontier and the Atlantic trade routes. In Frontier Seaport, Catherine Cangany details this seldom-discussed chapter of Detroit’s history. She argues that by the time of the American Revolution, Detroit functioned much like a coastal town as a result of the prosperous fur trade, serving as a critical link in a commercial chain that stretched all the way to Russia and China—thus opening Detroit’s shores for eastern merchants and other transplants. This influx of newcomers brought its own transatlantic networks and fed residents’ desires for popular culture and manufactured merchandise. Detroit began to be both a frontier town and seaport city—a mixed identity, Cangany argues, that hindered it from becoming a thoroughly “American” metropolis.
Babson recounts Detroit's odyssey from a bulwark of the "open shop" to the nation's foremost "union town." Through words and pictures, Working Detroit documents the events in the city's ongoing struggle to build an industrial society that is both prosperous and humane. Babson begins his account in 1848 when Detroit has just entered the industrial era. He weaves the broader historical realties, such as Red Scare, World War, and economic depression into his account, tracing the ebb and flow of the working class activity and organization in Detroit -- from the rise of the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor in the 19th century, through the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the sitdown strike of the 1930s, to the civil rights and women's movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The book concludes with an examination of the present day crisis facing the labor movement.