Thomas Klug’s Extensive Bibliography on Detroit — Now Available through a Link on the Reuther Library’s Website

Of the many online resources the Reuther Library makes available to its patrons, we now provide a link to another one: Historian Thomas Klug’s Bibliography of Detroit History, Politics, and Culture: Late-19th Century to the Present. While the Reuther Library neither owns this bibliography nor the website that hosts it, it is nonetheless an invaluable resource for many, including those patrons of the Reuther Library seeking secondary sources to review before delving into research at the Reuther Library or elsewhere. For the more seasoned scholar, the bibliography will simultaneously, albeit indirectly, allow them to determine areas of original research that scholars have yet to explore. You can find the bibliography at:

https://detroitartsculture.wixsite.com/detroitstudies/detroit-bibliography

This Bibliography of Detroit evolved from research that Klug conducted in connection with his 1993 dissertation, The Roots of the Open Shop: Employers, Trade Unions, and Craft Labor Markets in Detroit, 1859-1907. He updated the bibliography by drawing from Richard Hathaway’s 1974 Dissertations and Theses in Michigan History. Klug made further additions to the bibliography periodically through the 1990s during his tenure as a professor of history at Marygrove College.

Marygrove College’s Institute for Detroit Studies, where Klug served as Director, secured a grant in 2002 to place the bibliography online. Updated versions of this resource included topical bibliographies, which grew, as Klug conceived meaningful areas he thought would benefit his students and other researchers. The use of Google Scholar and then Zotero, a free open-source citation management system, allowed Klug to expand the bibliography with added citations. Sponsored by the Marygrove Conservancy and the Institute for Detroit Studies, the fourth and current edition of the Detroit Bibliography is 217 pages, holds 3,078 citations covering 2,365 publications,713 unpublished works and 27 topical categories. The works are mostly scholarly but they also include memoirs as well as select online blog postings and exhibits.