logo for University of Michigan Press
Under the Campus, the Land
Anishinaabe Futuring, Colonial Non-Memory, and the Origin of the University of Michigan
Andrew Herscher
University of Michigan Press, 2025
In the 1817 Treaty of Fort Meigs, Anishinaabe leaders granted land to a college where their children could be educated. At the time, the colonial settlement of Anishinaabe homelands hardly extended beyond Detroit in what settlers called the “Michigan Territory.” The University of Michigania claimed the Anishinaabe land just after it was granted. By the time that the university’s successor moved to Ann Arbor twenty years later, Anishinaabe people had been forced to cede almost all their land in what had become the state of Michigan, now inhabited by almost 200,000 settlers.

Under the Campus, the Land narrates the University of Michigan’s place in both Anishinaabe and settler history, tracing the university’s participation in the colonization of Anishinaabe homelands, Anishinaabe efforts to claim their right to an education, and the university’s history of disavowing, marginalizing, and minimizing its responsibilities and obligations to Anishinaabe people. Continuing the public conversations of the same name on U-M’s campus in 2023, Under the Campus, the Land provides a new perspective on the relationship between universities and settler colonialism in the US. Members of the U-M community, scholars of Midwest history, and those interested in Indigenous studies will find this book compelling.
[more]

front cover of A Union Soldier in the Land of the Vanquished
A Union Soldier in the Land of the Vanquished
TheDiary of Sergeant Mathew Woodruff, June-December, 1865
Mathew Woodruff
University of Alabama Press, 1969
"Mathew Woodruff was a frontiersman by adoption, [and] as a sergeant in the 21st Missouri Infantry, he participated in all the major campaigns of the western theater.  In June 1865, following a furlough home, this veteran of twenty-two rejoined his regiment for occupational duty along the Gulf coast of  Mississippi and Alabama. The journal spans the remaining period of 1865 only, yet it is a unique and revealing chronicle of life in the victorious federal forces."  Civil War History 

"The brief daily entries, with all the misspellings and grammatical mistakes, present an insight into the frustrations and pleasures of a peacetime soldier.  There are a wide range of topics covered:  Woodruff's duties as first sergeant, discipline problems, hunting and fishing trips and social activities.  Beyond the soldier's immediate experience, the reader gets an outsider's view of a southern city during reconstruction."  Alabama Historical Quarterly
[more]

front cover of The Use of Land and Water Resources in the Past and Present Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico
The Use of Land and Water Resources in the Past and Present Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico
Anne V. T. Kirkby
University of Michigan Press, 1973
In the first volume of a series on Prehistory and Human Ecology of the Valley of Oaxaca, Anne V. T. Kirkby investigated the agricultural production in the valley. With land-use data gathered at the time of her study (the 1960s), she created population and distribution models to help archaeologists interpret prehistoric settlement patterns in the region.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter