The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits By Tiya Miles

Abstract

Tiya Miles, in The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits, offers a fresh and unique perspective on early Detroit. While she maintains the borderlands narrative, instead of focusing on the political machinations of explorers, traders, and soldiers, Miles centers the experience of enslaved Native Americans and Africans living in Detroit. In a wonderful narrative history of the founding of Detroit from below, Miles challenges many assumptions about the region and forces readers to confront how areas far removed from southern plan[1]tations were complicit in the scourge of slavery.