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Introduction The Fall 2016 issue of The Michigan Historical Review features three research articles, two research notes, twenty-one book reviews, and notes on books received. The issue’s first article is “Assistant US Attorney Ella Mae Backus: ‘A most important figure in the legal profession in the Western District of Michigan,’” by Ruth Stevens. Stevens explains how Backus, an attorney admitted to practice in Michigan in 1895, became the first female Assistant U.S. Attorney in Michigan. Backus established herself as a leading figure in the legal profession during her 35-year career as an employee of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Grand Rapids. Although she challenged social norms by entering a field that was dominated by men, she was not active in political movements, such as suffrage, and she advocated distinct roles for male and female attorneys. Backus enjoyed wide-spread respect for her dedication and expertise, and she ultimately worked for six different US Attorneys, Republicans and Democrats, opening a path for later women attorneys. The next article, Camden Burd’s “Imagining a Pure Michigan Landscape: Advertisers, Tourists, and the Making of Michigan’s Northern Vacationlands,” explores how a wave of urban tourists remade Michigan’s northern landscapes in the second half of the nineteenth century. According to Burd, visitors imagined northern Michigan as a healthful remedy or haven to avoid the pressures of urbanity, rather than a region of economic extraction. Supported by railroad and steamship companies, tourists shaped the landscapes to answer their cultural concerns. Through conservation efforts and new environmental appreciation, vacationers redefined this part of the state—often at the expense of local inhabitants. Burd argues that the history of Michigan’s tourist landscapes helps us understand how cultural motivations imprint themselves onto the environment. Today, residents of Michigan come to expect certain pristine or “pure” locales. Yet the history of Michigan’s vacationlands reveals that those places are constructed to reflect the imaginative desires of tourists and advertisers. The issue’s final research article is an essay by Matthew R. Thick titled “‘The Exploded Humbug’: Antebellum Michigan, Personal Liberty Laws, and States’ Rights.” Like most other free states in antebellum America, Michigan enacted personal liberty bills, ostensibly to protect free blacks from wrongful kidnapping by slave catchers, who then might sell freepersons into slavery. Thick analyzes how Northern Democrats and Southerners vehemently opposed these bills, claiming that the personal viii The Michigan Historical Review liberty laws were attempts to subvert the Constitution and federal fugitive slave laws, especially the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. They further strengthened their position by citing federal court cases, thus clearly in support of federal supremacy. In response, Michigan’s advocates of its personal liberty laws rallied around the idea of states’ rights, claiming that Michigan was independent and sovereign, and that the laws it had passed regarding its own citizens were of no concern to the South. In exploring the surprising course of these political debates, Thick highlights Michigan’s advocacy of states’ rights on the eve of the Civil War, while also revealing the broader flaws, fluidity, and perhaps fallacy, of states’ rights arguments in the nineteenth century. The issue’s first research note, James LaForest’s “A Métis Family in the Detroit River Region and Pays d’en Haut,” examines the development of one family in the interior of “New France” from the seventeenth through the twentieth century, analyzing its cultural legacy in the region and importance to future generations. LaForest argues that subjective views on race and ethnicity, and genealogical errors, have clouded scholarly understanding of the region and how its people forged identity. As a result, historical narratives continue to disregard the agency and historical significance of mixed Indigenous/French Canadian marriages and their Métis offspring, particularly in the area of the Great Lakes. LaForest shows how one family exemplified cultural continuity in the face of pressure to conform to societies that did not value French Canadian and Métis history and culture. The issue concludes with Douglas P. Gleason’s “Money Men, Misdemeanors, and Motorcar Makers: The Uncompromising Vision of Henry Ford and Those He Left Behind.” In 1919, the world marveled at the wealth accrued by the...

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