City of Champions: A History of Triumph and Defeat in Detroit by Stefan Szymanski and Silke-Maria Weineck
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: City of Champions: A History of Triumph and Defeat in Detroit by Stefan Szymanski and Silke-Maria Weineck Patrick J. Harrigan Stefan Szymanski and Silke-Maria Weineck. City of Champions: A History of Triumph and Defeat in Detroit. New York: The New Press, 2020. Pp. 416. Index. Notes. Hardcover: $29.99. The Detroit Tigers won their first World Series in 1935, defeating the Chicago Cubs four games to two. The Detroit Lions won their first National Football League championship 26-7 over the New York Giants, and the Detroit Red Wings gathered the Stanley Cup three games to one versus the Toronto Maple Leafs in April 1936, ending the 1935-36 season. No other city has held three major sport championships in the same year. Gar Wood was then dominating powerboat racing, held on the Detroit River for half a century. In a ceremony held in the Masonic Temple in downtown Detroit, Michigan Governor Frank Fitzgerald designated April 18, 1936, as "The Day of Champions" honoring victors in minor sports as well. Detroiter Joe Louis's heavyweight boxing championship the next year cemented Detroit's reputation as "City of Champions." All was not well in Detroit, however, for 80,000 auto workers' jobs had been lost in the Depression and union organization had been met with violence at the auto plants. Eighty-five years later, two Ann Arborites—Stefan Szymanski and Silke-Maria Weineck—have honored that memory with City of Champions: A History of Triumph and Defeat in Detroit. The selection of that title gives a clue [End Page 161] that there is a nostalgic feel to the book. The writers clearly love Detroit, warts and all. The format of the book is unusual. It consists of thirty vignettes in reverse chronological order, "selecting iconic moments in Detroit sports [that] fan out … into the life of the city and its people." (ix) The first chapter focuses on 2017 and District Detroit. The link to sport is that it was the brainchild of Mike Ilitch, the owner of both the Tigers and the Red Wings until his death in February of that year. Despite high hopes, the District has floundered. Unhappily, it is one of many failed attempts to reverse Detroit's decline going back to the Ren Cen debacle fifty years before. (Chapter 11) The Tigers World Series victory of 1968 was supposed to bring Detroiters together after the 1967 riots. (Chapter 12 is titled "Can a world series heal a grievously wounded city?") Newspaper writers then claimed a restored unity through baseball, but it was not to be. Walter O. Briggs's racism guaranteed Black antipathy toward the Tigers. Happily, the authors do not claim anything more than a moment of communal joy. Two hundred thousand White Detroiters had fled to the suburbs by 1970. A distinctive relation between sport and general history occurs in the earliest episode (1763), a game of baggataway (lacrosse) between Ojibwas and soldiers was a subterfuge to attack the British and restore the land to Native Americans. Ultimately, Detroit fell to the settlers, but the suburb of Pontiac honors the Indian chief. City of Champions will not add to the scholarly canon, but it is an enjoyable trip down memory lane. The authors link sport and community temporally but not syncretically. Readers should sample the chapters that most interest them. Patrick J. Harrigan University of Waterloo Copyright © 2021 Historical Society of Michigan
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".