Introduction

Introduction The Fall 2012 issue of The Michigan Historical Review features three research articles, two research notes, and 17 book reviews. The issue begins with Michelle Cassidy’s “‘The More Noise They Make’: Odawa and Ojibwe Encounters with American Missionaries in Northern Michigan, 1837-1871,” the winning entry in our 2011 Graduate Student Essay Prize. According to Cassidy, the actions of Peter Greensky and Daniel Mwakewenah—two Anishinaabe men in northwest Michigan who became Methodist preachers—demonstrate how Anishinaabe cultural logic, political power, and perceptions of spiritual power shaped Native life in the mid-nineteenth century. Both men acted as cultural intermediaries between their communities and outside political and religious forces, shaping a critical period of change and complicating U.S. claims to power over the region. Ojibwe and Odawa men used Christianity to acquire leadership roles, maintain autonomy, and preserve land rights. Greensky and Mwakewenah claimed authority through the tools Christianity provided, and Mwakewenah reinforced his leadership position by enlisting in the Union army as a member of Company K. Community dynamics and religious divisions leading up to the Civil War illuminate a world influenced by Anishinaabe kinship practices, seasonal rounds, alliance systems, and claims to leadership and autonomy that influenced and hindered Presbyterian missionaries’ goals of assimilation. In “Old Friends and New Foes: French Settlers and Indians in the Detroit River Border Region,” Guillaume Teasdale stresses the importance of examining French land-ownership near the Detroit River under a succession of French, British, and American regimes during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While historians have long identified eighteenth-century Detroit as an important furtrading post in the colonial Great Lakes region—and a settlement inhabited by Frenchmen who married Indian women and had métis children—Teasdale notes that thousands of French settlers also lived in agricultural settlements located near Fort Detroit. Studying the area’s French-Indian relations only through the fur trade cannot explain why the vast majority of French settlers who lived on the American side of the border in the early nineteenth century were loyal to the United States (or neutral) during the War of 1812, while their Indian neighbors remained hostile toward the young American Republic. As the region developed into a border zone from 1796-1812, the U.S. government’s comparatively liberal and accommodating approach to viii The Michigan Historical Review land-ownership helped the new nation gain the loyalty of local French settlers. In a third research article—“A Mormon in Babylon: George Romney as Secretary of HUD, 1969-1973”—Roger Biles explores Romney’s time as secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). According to Biles, Romney found it difficult to implement the policies he favored to improve city life and address problems of racial inequality. As a three-term governor of Michigan and presidential candidate in 1968, Romney had become one of the leading Progressives in the Republican Party. Yet he clashed repeatedly with President Nixon and other top administration officials, leaving Washington, D.C., with little to show for his efforts. His unfortunate experiences at HUD are instructive for understanding the decline of urban America. Erica R. Hamilton’s research note—“Looking from the Outside In: Preparation for Democratic Citizenship in a 1925 Michigan HighSchool Yearbook”—analyzes Stepping Stone, Zeeland High School’s 1925 school yearbook, as a historical artifact. Upon first glance, and befitting of the time, the book contains school and community information as well as students’ pictures, narratives, and local business advertisements. It also includes references to Zeeland’s Dutch heritage and history. However, Hamilton writes that the yearbook also functions as a metaphorical window into an educational era in which schools, teachers, and surrounding communities focused on developing secondary students’ democratic citizenship, creating wellrounded members of society who were taught to work toward, and contribute to, the nation’s greater good. Finally, a second research note—Robert P. Davidow’s “The 1939 Trial of Raymond Tessmer: Exemplar of UAW Factionalism”—explores the story of a fascinating legal case. As the UAW was breaking apart into AFL and CIO factions, Raymond Tessmer, an automobile worker (AFL), was charged in Detroit with criminal libel based on his distribution of...