Once America's "arsenal of democracy," Detroit is now the symbol of the American urban crisis. In this reappraisal of America's racial and economic inequalities, Thomas Sugrue asks why Detroit and other industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty. He challenges the conventional wisdom that urban decline is the product of the social programs and racial fissures of the 1960s. Weaving together the history of workplaces, unions, civil rights groups, political organizations, and real estate agencies, Sugrue finds the roots of today's urban poverty in a hidden history of racial violence, discrimination, and deindustrialization that reshaped the American urban landscape after World War II. This Princeton Classics edition includes a new preface by Sugrue, discussing the lasting impact of the postwar transformation on urban America and the chronic issues leading to Detroit's bankruptcy.

Heaven Was Detroit: From Jazz to Hip Hop and Beyond is the first of its kind to capture the full spectrum of Detroit popular music from the early 1900s to the twenty-first century. Readers will find in this unique and stimulating anthology new essays, and a few classics, by widely known and respected music writers, critics, and recording artists who weigh in on their careers and experiences in the Detroit music scene, from rock to jazz and everything in between. With a foreword by the acclaimed rock writer Dave Marsh and iconic photos by Leni Sinclair, the book features such well-known writers as Greil Marcus, Jaan Uhelszki, Al Young, Susan Whitall, Gary Graff, John Sinclair, and many others. Divided into nine sections, the book moves chronologically through the early days of jazz in Detroit, to the rock 'n' roll of the 1960s, and up to today's electronica scene, with so many groundbreaking moments in between. This collection of cohesive essays includes Motown's connection to the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement through its side label, Black Forum Records; Lester Bangs's exemplary piece on Alice Cooper; the story behind the emergence of rap legend Eminem; and Craig Maki's enlightening history on "hillbilly rock" -- just to name a few. With a rich musical tradition to rival Nashville, Detroit serves as the inspiration, backdrop, and playground for some of the most influential music artists of the past century. Heaven Was Detroit captures the essence of the Detroit music scene: the grit, the spark, the desire to tell a story set to the rhythm of the city. Fans of any music genre will find something that speaks to them in the pages of this collection.

Intense attention has been paid to Detroit as a site of urban crisis. This crisis, however, has not only yielded the massive devaluation of real estate that has so often been noted; it has also yielded an explosive production of seemingly valueless urban property that has facilitated the imagination and practice of alternative urbanisms. The first sustained study of Detroit's alternative urban cultures, The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit initiates a new focus on Detroit as a site not only of urban crisis but also of urban possibility. The Guide documents art and curatorial practices, community and guerilla gardens, urban farming and forestry, cultural platforms, living archives, evangelical missions, temporary public spaces, intentional communities, furtive monuments, outsider architecture, and other work made possible by the ready availability of urban space in Detroit. The Guide poses these spaces as "unreal estate": urban territory that has slipped through the free- market economy and entered other regimes of value, other contexts of meaning, and other systems of use. The appropriation of this territory in Detroit, the Guide suggests, offers new perspectives on what a city is and can be, especially in a time of urban crisis.

Local author Michael Zadoorian follows characters coming to terms with the past and the present in a broken city. Rusty, ornery, and down at the heels, Zadoorian's characters have made the wrong choices, been worn down by bad news, or survived traumatic events, but like the city they live in, they are determined not to let tragedy and rotten luck define them. Their close connection to Detroit also infuses Zadoorian's stories with themes significant to the city, including issues of racial tension, political unease, and economic hardship. Zadoorian's writing throughout this collection is clear and vivid, never getting in the way of his characters or their stories.

In Line for the Exterminator is the final collection in Jim Daniels's trilogy of books explaining the urban working-class landscape. Daniels, a graduate of Warren's Fitzgerald High School, grew up near the Eight Mile Road boundary between Detroit and the suburbs, and walks the razor's edge of the borderline in this collection, examining complex issues of race and class that are a part of daily life there. Daniels presents blue-collar culture both in and out of the workplace, showing its profound influence on the lives of workers and their families. As in Places/Everyone and M-80, Daniels uses his character Digger to show the effects of work on outside life, following Digger into retirement from his factory job and into his struggle to find a new future. Local heroes, from professional wrestler the Sheik to the contemporary rapper Eminem, also appear as touchstones for the community's complex view of itself.

Bobweaving Detroit is Murray Jackson's final collection of poems. Dr. Jackson, a highly respected educator, political figure and philanthropist, as well as an internationally known poet, offers work rich in the history and hope of Detroit's Black urban--and urbane--tradition. Jackson was a Classicist as well as an athlete, an inspiring teacher and an inspired humanist whose poems engage the blues vernacular, a wide palate of visual arts, and a broad spectrum of musical sources. Murray Jackson was always a poet, though he first published with Broadside Press, Detroit's and the nation's longest continuously publishing Black poetry press, after a long career of public service during which he opened Detroit's first community college and many other educational and artistic venues to his fellow citizens and scholars. Readers of poetry and lovers of the arts, humanities, and athletics can recognize and join Jackson's conversations--his "bobweaving"-- with Langston Hughes, Julius Caesar, Mozart, Duke Ellington, Archie Moore and Marianne Moore, William Shakespeare and Willie the Pimp, Coleman Hawkins and Coleman Young, Malcolm X and Malcolm Boyd.