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.

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9781469625201

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Expertly demonstrates the ways in which images of prostitutes and drug dealers were used in political discourse in Canada and the United States. . . . Complicates a transnational story that is often oversimplified and overlooked. --<i>Michigan Historical Review</i>

Expertly demonstrates the ways in which images of prostitutes and drug dealers were used in political discourse in Canada and the United States. . . . Complicates a transnational story that is often oversimplified and overlooked. --Michigan Historical Review Karibo's writing is engaging, her reasoning is solid, and her conclusions make an important contribution to the histories of drugs and alcohol, the sex industry, cross-border trade, tourism, and early twentieth century changes to national identity, racial politics, and transborder economies.--Canadian Journal of History Makes a unique contribution to the expanding field of northern borderland studies through the perspective of the vice economies of the mid-twentieth century. . . . a valuable read for students, scholars, and a general public interested in local history and in the borderland history of vice and its meaning in the postwar urban border.--Journal of the History of Sexuality

Expertly demonstrates the ways in which images of prostitutes and drug dealers were used in political discourse in Canada and the United States. . . . Complicates a transnational story that is often oversimplified and overlooked. --Michigan Historical Review

"Expertly demonstrates the ways in which images of prostitutes and drug dealers were used in political discourse in Canada and the United States. . . . Complicates a transnational story that is often oversimplified and overlooked."" --Michigan Historical Review Karibo's writing is engaging, her reasoning is solid, and her conclusions make an important contribution to the histories of drugs and alcohol, the sex industry, cross-border trade, tourism, and early twentieth century changes to national identity, racial politics, and transborder economies.--Canadian Journal of History Makes a unique contribution to the expanding field of northern borderland studies through the perspective of the vice economies of the mid-twentieth century. . . . a valuable read for students, scholars, and a general public interested in local history and in the borderland history of vice and its meaning in the postwar urban border.--Journal of the History of Sexuality"

Karibo's writing is engaging, her reasoning is solid, and her conclusions make an important contribution to the histories of drugs and alcohol, the sex industry, cross-border trade, tourism, and early twentieth century changes to national identity, racial politics, and transborder economies.--Canadian Journal of History Expertly demonstrates the ways in which images of prostitutes and drug dealers were used in political discourse in Canada and the United States. . . . Complicates a transnational story that is often oversimplified and overlooked. --Michigan Historical Review

Author Information

Holly M. Karibo is assistant professor of history at Tarleton State University, USA.

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