Lecture: the making of Detroit with Jonathan Quint, 2 pm, Sunday, Jan.14, Alger House on The War Memorial campus.
Looking at colonial Detroit with Jonathan Quint, 2 pm, Sunday, January 14
Some of the influential people Quint will introduce include:
- Indigenous people including the Huron (Wendat), Ottawa, Potawatomi, Lenape (Delaware) and the Ojibwe
- French explorer Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, founder of Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit
- Anthony Wayne
- Moravian missionaries from Germany
He will also share stories about daily life, describing for example how German-born, protestant missionaries interacted with the indigenous people, local settlers and British military.
He will also explore how Detroit and its residents became involved in the American Revolution. For the British, Detroit was a staging point for organizing raids against Americans in the backcountry settlements in Kentucky and Virginia. For American Revolutionaries, it became a place of confinement. For instance, Daniel Boone and other soldiers were captured and imprisoned in the British fort here.
Exploration of these varied experiences will shed light on this relatively unknown period of Detroit’s history.
