How America's Most Powerful Industrial State Collapsed Overnight: Michigan

Michigan's story is not the familiar American arc of rise and decline. It is the story of a state that kept finding something valuable beneath its feet — copper, iron, white pine, and eventually the mechanical skill to build automobiles — and each time built an industry so dominant that the state's identity fused to whatever it was producing. This documentary traces that pattern from the French fur trade at Fort Pontchartrain in 1701 through the Toledo War that accidentally gave Michigan the Upper Peninsula, the copper rush on the Keweenaw Peninsula, the lumber boom that stripped the northern forests bare, the construction of the Soo Locks, Henry Ford's five-dollar day, the Flint sit-down strike, the Arsenal of Democracy at Willow Run, the long postwar prosperity, and the wrenching decades of deindustrialization, white flight, and Detroit's 2013 bankruptcy. It is a history of grand hotels and ghost towns, of ore boats and assembly lines, of deals made and deals regretted — told through the specific places, people, and dollar figures that made Michigan the manufacturing capital of the world and then left it searching for what comes next. Sources Sidney Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937 (University of Michigan Press, 1969) Willis Dunbar and George May, Michigan: A History of the Wolverine State (Eerdmans, revised edition) "The Mighty Soo: Construction of the Locks at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan," National Archives, Unwritten Record blog (2017) "Copper Mining in Michigan," Wikipedia, drawing on USGS production data and Keweenaw National Historical Park records "Ford's Five Dollar Day," The Henry Ford museum archives (2014) Michigan Legislature, Michigan Manual historical chronology and constitutional records