Ketamine has found wide uses since the 1960s: as a painkiller, an anesthetic, a street drug consumed at raves, and — now — considered by many to be an exciting new treatment for depression. We explore how ketamine was developed here in Detroit, at the Parke-Davis pharmaceutical company, with help from a Wayne State University…

Newscaster Fran Harris’s life was a lifetime of firsts. She was the first woman newscaster in Detroit radio during World War II, persuading her bosses at WWJ to abandon its “guys only” tradition. And when television came along in Detroit on Channel 4 in 1946, she was on the air for that, too. When she…

A longstanding community called Mexicantown on Detroit’s southwest side has persevered for around a century. The area of restaurants, shops, and bakeries anchors a key ethnic community in Detroit. For many, the journey here was prompted by a search for jobs. We explore the rise of the community, and the decline when Depression-era policies due…

Thousands of phonograph records were destroyed, as were thousands of needles used on the old-style record players. Teenage sleuths were conducting their own investigations in the great conspiracy theory of the fall of 1969: Beatle Paul McCartney had died, but that his death was covered up. However, as the theory went, clues could be found…

Sometime in the mid-1940s, an Italian immigrant bar owner by the name of Gus Guerra started making pizzas in his joint to bring in a few extra dollars. Decades later, Gus’s creation is big business, and world-renowned. Detroit Style Pizza is being served up in uber hip places in Brooklyn. The big chains are in…

It was horrific, even by the low standards of the urban drug trade. Three dead bodies found in a van on Detroit’s east side one night in 1979. All three had been decapitated. We explore the street politics that led to the massacre. And we tell the story of Frank “Nitti” Usher, a crime lord…

The beginnings of Detroit are inaccurately pinned to the arrival of Cadillac on these shores in 1701, but there were various Native American tribes in the area for centuries before that. Thousands of years ago, people came over on a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska. The earliest indigenous people around Detroit were suspected to…

Smack in the middle of the Civil War, Detroit experienced a riot that was characterized as “the most brutal and bloody riot that ever disgraced any community.” A local bar owner, Thomas Faulkner, who was thought to be African-American (he wasn’t) went to trial in March, 1863 on sexual assault charges. The accuser was a…

On a cold winter day in 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, some 3,000 or more people met at a park on Detroit’s southwest side. They hoped to march to Ford Motor Company’s Rouge Plant to present a list of demands to Henry Ford. By modern day standards, those demands weren’t all that…

Joe Louis may have been the most famous person to come out of Detroit. He arrived here in the mid-1920s as part of the Great Migration, that influx of African-Americans who came north to escape the Jim Crow South. When he took up boxing as a teenager, there was no stopping him. He became heavyweight…