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134 The Michigan Historical Review therefore that Steckley, who has devoted his life’s work to understanding and unraveling the cultures and kinship of Great Lakes native cultures, was adopted by the Wyandot people of Kansas—a compliment of brotherhood that is unquestionably the greatest accolade of his professional life; more importantly, Steckley, as a human being, is helping to counter the terrible effects of cultural genocide and ethnocide that occurred throughout the Great Lakes, and all of the Americas, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Eighteenth-Century Wyandot makes major contributions to the academic fields of Great Lakes and Native American history, anthropology (and archaeology), sociology, and anthropological linguistics. Indeed, Steckley’s book is the best kinship/clan based historical study I have ever read. Most importantly, keeping a culture’s language alive keeps the culture alive for generations to come. As both a historian and anthropologist, I cannot thank Steckley enough for all of his contributions regarding Indigenous peoples; this book represents another major gift of research of the highest magnitude. Without a doubt, Steckley’s book is a must read for anyone interested in eighteenth-century Native studies of the Great Lakes region or applied anthropological linguistics. I give Steckley’s book my highest recommendation as a must read corpus of research that is unparalleled in today’s Great Lakes history. Kenneth C. Carstens Institute of Frontier History and Archaeology Murray, Kentucky Ronald J. Stephens. Idlewild: The Rise, Decline, and Rebirth of a Unique African American Resort Town. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Pp. 420. Illustrations. Index. Paper, $35.00 Black leisure throughout the twentieth century was never solely about idle time. Vacationing for blacks was simultaneously a political act. With the institutionalization of Jim Crow legislation and white supremacist social practice after 1900, the ways middle-class and elite black men and women spent their non-working hours raised difficult questions. Were they offering positive lessons to lower-class blacks on the rewards of individual ambition? Were they establishing an example of racial loyalty in forging a separate, distinct, and successful black community? Should their vacations be dedicated as much to Garveyite Book Reviews 135 social organization or NAACP political activism as they were to fishing, hiking, and social gathering? Ronald Stephens’s history of Idlewild, Michigan, a bucolic resort established in the 1910s, examines the tensions confronting the founders and inheritors of one of the most well-known black vacation retreats in the US. Hailed by W.E.B. Du Bois for both its “sheer physical beauty” and its warm society of “sweet, strong women and keen-witted men from Canada and Texas, California and New York, Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois—all sons and great-grandchildren of Ethiopia,” the resort attracted such leading lights of early twentiethcentury black society as author Charles Chesnutt, surgeon Daniel Hale Williams, entrepreneur Madame C.J. Walker, musician Louis Armstrong, and Du Bois himself (p. 51). Stephens wonderfully captures the ironies involved in the development of a black resort by white real estate agents—one of whom was a card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan. He carries his narrative through the mid-twentieth-century rise, later fall, and recent economic attempts at recovery of Idlewild. Stephens describes with deep feeling and keen analysis the ways the town’s identity was first heightened as a black enclave through the middle of the century but then fragmented due to the “unintended consequences” of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Stephens details how the eradication of formal segregation and the growing number of popular entertainments produced by impresario Arthur Briggs invited increasing numbers of working-class blacks and nonblacks to the resort. These changes undermined Idlewild’s earlier central purpose as a black middle-class enclave and led to a precipitous economic decline and cultural disintegration. Stephens closes the book with a historically informed plea to Idlewild’s stakeholders to formulate a clear plan for the town’s future, lest it devolve into nothing more than a “client community.” The work is notable for Stephens’s exhaustive research and for the seeming inattention of the book’s editors. Stephens has provided at times wonderfully detailed analyses of...

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