Author: Laura Bien

To write this month’s local history column Laura Bien took the risk of reading a dangerous old book – one laced with arsenic. The volume, called “Shadows from the Walls of Death” consists mostly of pages of wallpaper samples with no words. It was “authored” by Civil War surgeon and University of Michigan alum Robert Kedzie. [Full Story]

In this month’s “In the Archives” column, Laura Bien traces the history of Holstein cows in Michigan. Her column includes the contrast between the milk production achievable today with bovine growth hormone (72,120 pounds of milk in a year) and the amounts that dairy farmers achieved in years gone by (4,379 pounds of milk in a year). Featured in the column is a cow named Pontiac De Nijlander. [Full Story]

In this month’s edition of Laura Bien’s local history column, she looks at the history of the Lake Sturgeon, an ancient fish that was threatened with extinction a century ago. That was an era when some of the world’s finest caviar was produced in the Great Lakes region, from the roe of the Lake Sturgeon. [Full Story]

The first installment of Laura Bien’s local history column after a three-month hiatus takes a look at the history of the Ypsilanti Home Association. It was a charitable organization that provided assistance partly based on their members’ assessment of the people they were asked to help. Those deemed unworthy were denied assistance. [Full Story]

This week, local history writer Laura Bien takes a look back to the 1920s at the expulsion of a group of girls from the Michigan State Normal College. The young women did not meet the college’s moral standards – what with their smoking and carousing about with strange men. [Full Story]

In this installment of Laura Bien’s local history column she traces the career of a school teacher who eventually became postmaster of Ypsilanti. He refused to allow the U.S. to deliver one edition of the local newspaper because it described a fundraiser he felt was tantamount to gambling. It led to outcry, but not his demise. [Full Story]

This week local history columnist Laura Bien describes the origins of “rushing” in the sense of the confrontations between freshmen and sophomores at the University of Michigan. Some of the posters announced various events dating back to the early 1900s are preserved at the university’s Bentley Historical Library. [Full Story]

In this week’s local history column, Laura Bien takes a look back over 100 years to a time when the term “U. of M.” was offensive to some people. They wrote editorials about it. No, seriously. Bien even unearths a quote from a student newspaper of that era, called The Chronicle. [Full Story]

Local history writer Laura Bien takes a look back to the early 1900s, when dogs were under quarantine in Ypsilanti – the fear was rabies. She also traces the activity of the University of Michigan’s Pasteur Institute, specifically for the diagnosis and treatment of rabies. [Full Story]

In this week’s column, local history writer Laura Bien takes the occasion of the first day of August 2011 to describe a holiday that was celebrated locally on Aug. 1 in days gone by, but no longer is: Emancipation Day. And as always, she includes a mystery artifact. [Full Story]