Located 600 miles inland from Philadelphia and over 700 miles from Québec City, early Detroit could have been a backwater, a frontier post that Europeans established to protect colonial settlements from Native American attacks.

Yet Detroit emerged as a cosmopolitan entrepôt filled with many different people and all of the goods you would expect to find in early Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, or Charleston.

Today, we explore the early history of Detroit with Catherine Cangany, an associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and author of Frontier Seaport: Detroit’s Transformation into an Atlantic Entrepôt. 

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/051

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Complementary Episodes

• Episode 028: Janice Fontanella, Building the Erie Canal
• Episode 029: Colin Calloway, The Victory with No Name
• Episode 162: Dunmore’s New World: The British Empire and the American Revolution
• Episode 113: Brian Murphey, Building the Empire State
• Episode 186: Max Edelson, The New Map of the British Empire
• Episode 223: Susan Sleeper-Smith, A Native American History of the Ohio River Valley & Great Lakes Region

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