Last year brought news of upheavals in the world, around the country and in our backyard. News of hurricanes and the California fires made me more grateful than ever to claim southeastern Michigan as home. It also makes me concerned that not everyone in southeast Michigan benefits from our region's riches. Worse, I fear that we are being reckless with our treasures. Thus, I offer this resolution for southeastern Michigan: Let's think like a region in 2018.    

Saeed Khan, senior lecturer in Near East and Asia studies at Wayne State University, explains why there is so much tension behind the decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Howard Lupovitch, associate professor of history and the director of the Cohn Haddow Center for Judaic Studies at Wayne State University, explains that President Trump’s announcement was part of promises he made during the presidential campaign.   

As an anthropologist who specializes in reconstructing past diets, I can say that even though we don’t have a definitive account of the menu at the first Thanksgiving, letters and recorded oral histories give us a pretty good idea of what they probably ate. And we know for a fact that it didn’t include mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie.

A book by a Detroit historian is inspiring a movie about the early activism of Rosa Parks and her quest for justice for a rape survivor. The upcoming film will focus on a real-life event that occurred long before Parks made history in 1955 by refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a bus. Parks helped spark the landmark Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama and became an icon of the civil rights movement. But a decade before that, she was one of many African-American women fighting for the right to live and travel without fear of racial and sexual violence. The early activism of Parks is detailed in "At the Dark End of the Street," an award-winning 2010 book written by Wayne State University adjunct associate history professor Danielle McGuire.