Sin City North: Sex, Drugs, and Citizenship in the Detroit-Windsor Borderland
The early decades of the twentieth century sparked the Detroit-Windsor region's ascendancy as the busiest crossing point between Canada and the United States, setting the stage for socioeconomic developments that would link the border cities for years to come. As Holly M. Karibo shows, this border fostered the emergence of illegal industries alongside legal trade, rapid industrial development, and tourism. Tracing the growth of the two cities' cross-border prostitution and heroin markets in the late 1940s and the 1950s, Sin City North explores the social, legal, and national boundaries that emerged there and their ramifications.

In bars, brothels, and dance halls, Canadians and Americans were united in their desire to cross racial, sexual, and legal lines in the border cities. Yet the increasing visibility of illicit economies on city streets—and the growing number of African American and French Canadian women working in illegal trades—provoked the ire of moral reformers who mobilized to eliminate them from their communities. This valuable study demonstrates that struggles over the meaning of vice evolved beyond definitions of legality; they were also crucial avenues for residents attempting to define productive citizenship and community in this postwar urban borderland.

1121707206
Sin City North: Sex, Drugs, and Citizenship in the Detroit-Windsor Borderland
The early decades of the twentieth century sparked the Detroit-Windsor region's ascendancy as the busiest crossing point between Canada and the United States, setting the stage for socioeconomic developments that would link the border cities for years to come. As Holly M. Karibo shows, this border fostered the emergence of illegal industries alongside legal trade, rapid industrial development, and tourism. Tracing the growth of the two cities' cross-border prostitution and heroin markets in the late 1940s and the 1950s, Sin City North explores the social, legal, and national boundaries that emerged there and their ramifications.

In bars, brothels, and dance halls, Canadians and Americans were united in their desire to cross racial, sexual, and legal lines in the border cities. Yet the increasing visibility of illicit economies on city streets—and the growing number of African American and French Canadian women working in illegal trades—provoked the ire of moral reformers who mobilized to eliminate them from their communities. This valuable study demonstrates that struggles over the meaning of vice evolved beyond definitions of legality; they were also crucial avenues for residents attempting to define productive citizenship and community in this postwar urban borderland.

17.49 In Stock
Sin City North: Sex, Drugs, and Citizenship in the Detroit-Windsor Borderland

Sin City North: Sex, Drugs, and Citizenship in the Detroit-Windsor Borderland

by Holly M. Karibo
Sin City North: Sex, Drugs, and Citizenship in the Detroit-Windsor Borderland

Sin City North: Sex, Drugs, and Citizenship in the Detroit-Windsor Borderland

by Holly M. Karibo

eBook

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Overview

The early decades of the twentieth century sparked the Detroit-Windsor region's ascendancy as the busiest crossing point between Canada and the United States, setting the stage for socioeconomic developments that would link the border cities for years to come. As Holly M. Karibo shows, this border fostered the emergence of illegal industries alongside legal trade, rapid industrial development, and tourism. Tracing the growth of the two cities' cross-border prostitution and heroin markets in the late 1940s and the 1950s, Sin City North explores the social, legal, and national boundaries that emerged there and their ramifications.

In bars, brothels, and dance halls, Canadians and Americans were united in their desire to cross racial, sexual, and legal lines in the border cities. Yet the increasing visibility of illicit economies on city streets—and the growing number of African American and French Canadian women working in illegal trades—provoked the ire of moral reformers who mobilized to eliminate them from their communities. This valuable study demonstrates that struggles over the meaning of vice evolved beyond definitions of legality; they were also crucial avenues for residents attempting to define productive citizenship and community in this postwar urban borderland.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781469625218
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date: 08/31/2015
Series: David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 226
File size: 7 MB

About the Author

Holly M. Karibo is assistant professor of history at Oklahoma State University.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Holly Karibo's lively and engaging Sin City North makes a strong contribution to scholarship on urban history and U.S.-Canadian relations. Its investigation of the informal economy of vice in the Motor City and its Canadian sister shows us the underside of the consumer culture of the postwar decades.—Elizabeth Faue, Wayne State University

In this original and compelling book, Holly Karibo reorients borderland studies northward. Following smugglers and sex tourists and workers and reformers from Detroit to Windsor and back again, she offers an exciting reappraisal of citizenship, marginality, gender, and race in the twentieth century.—Thomas Sugrue, New York University

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