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 peoples 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: http://www.benfranklinsworld.com/051

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051 Frontier Seaport: A History of Early Detroit