Author: Laura Bien

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]

As discussion of major investments in commuter rail service continues in the Ann Arbor region, Laura Bien’s local history column this week takes a look back to efforts in the last century to establish rail connections in the region. It features a rail connection nicknamed The Huckleberry Line. [Full Story]

This week, local history columnist Laura Bien sketches out Ypsilanti teacher Frederick Boyd’s turn-of-the-century journey to the Klondike. He did not mine prodigious amounts of gold. But he also did not perish in the Alaskan wilderness and wound up moving his family to the west coast. [Full Story]

After a brief hiatus, local history writer Laura Bien returns with the tale of an orphan girl whose public transit options were robust enough that she could flee her Ypsilanti foster home, head for Ann Arbor, then reverse direction and head to Detroit for a shopping spree … before she was apprehended. [Full Story]