History UsefulNotes / Michigan

** Another notable tourist town in northern Michigan is Oscoda, where the first known PaulBunyan stories were published. It had a massive Air Force base until 1993. Alpena still has the area's largest commercial airport.

* GeraldFord, of course.

* ''EscanabaInDaMoonlight''--Set in the UP, but beloved of all Michiganders for Jeff Daniels' role.

* Bob Seger: Born in Dearborn, grew up in Ann Arbor. Still lives in a northwest suburb of Detroit.
* TheStooges: Formed in Ann Arbor. Iggy Pop was born in West Michigan.

* MarvinGaye was raised in [[UsefulNotes/WashingtonDC the District]], but moved with his family to join Motown.
* ArethaFranklin was raised in Detroit.
* As was {{Eminem}} (albeit born in Missouri). Hence those "Imported from Detroit" commercials that Chrysler's been running.

* [[LawAndOrder S. Epatha Merkerson]], again from Detroit.
* [[MythBusters Jamie Hyneman]], from Marshall.
* [[TheXFiles Gillian Anderson]], from Grand Rapids, was voted "most likely to get arrested" by her high school classmates in the city's high-school

* Alice Cooper is from Allen Park.

* ''Madonna'', born in Bay City, raised in Rochester Hills.

*** Kalamazoo plays host to two educational institutions--Western Michigan University and Kalamazoo College. WMU is notable for being a party school (nicknamed "Wastern") rather like Indiana's Purdue University, but of a substantially lower caliber in most areas except for Medieval Studies, while Kalamazoo is a liberal arts college notable for sending all its undergrads abroad for a year and being ridiculously expensive.

* BruceCampbell is from Royal Oak.

*** Oakland University: Situated in the comfortable suburb of Rochester. Formerly Michigan State University at Rochester, it won its independence--to the relief of the MSU administration in East Lansing--in the 1960s, it currently acts as a commuter college, but it also has a strong nursing program.

** Another notable tourist town in northern Michigan is Oscoda, where the first known PaulBunyan stories were published. It had a massive Air Force base until 1993. Alpena still has the area's largest airport.

*** University of Detroit-Mercy: A private Catholic college, noted for its surprising prowess at basketball. (Still, it hasn't gotten past the second round of March Madness. Curses.

* The Thumb: A flat region corresponding to the "thumb" of the "mitten". Mostly agricultural. ThomasEdison grew up in its largest city, Port Huron, which is a major crossing to Canada (the Blue Water Bridge connects Port Huron to Sarnia, Ontario, and is probably the most direct route for most Michiganders to {{Toronto}}).[[note]] Where the Thumb ends and Southeast and Mid-Michigan end is a local point of contention. It's universally agreed that all of Tuscola, Huron, and Sanilac Counties are in the Thumb, but depending on who you ask, the thumb also includes and St. Clair Counties, as well as portions of northern Macomb and Oakland Counties. This is deadly Serious Business to some. It all depends on whether you believe The Thumb is a geographic region, a political region, an economic region, or just where the thumb would be if Michigan were a hand.[[/note]]

* The Thumb: A flat region corresponding to the "thumb" of the "mitten". Mostly agricultural. ThomasEdison grew up in its largest city, Port Huron, which is a major crossing to Canada (the Blue Water Bridge connects Port Huron to Sarnia, Ontario, and is probably the most direct route for most Michiganders to {{Toronto}}).

An oft-forgotten fact about Michigan is that it is ''huge''--the largest state east of the Mississippi by total area, and the second-largest east of the Mississippi by land area (Georgia is a little bigger). The shape of the state--two peninsulas roughly perpendicular to each other--makes getting from the UP border with Wisconsin to Detroit quite a long trip.

* Henry Ford is from Greenfield Township.
* Terry O'Quinn grew up in Newberry in the Upper Peninsula and went to Central Michigan University

* Potter Stewart, [[AmericanCourts Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court]], was born in Jackson. [[SmallReferencePools He's most famous for writing]] the "[[MemeticMutation I know it when I see it]]" definition of "hard-core pornography" (as opposed to "[[ItsNotPornItsArt erotic art]]") in ''Jacobellis v. Ohio'' (1967). [[NeverLiveItDown It is really quite a shame]], as he's highly respected for jurisprudence on court access, civil rights, free speech, and the Fourth Amendment.

* The two largest Universities in the state are the UsefulNotes/UniversityOfMichigan in Ann Arbor and Michigan State University (in East Lansing, which is immediately [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin east of Lansing]]). The two Universities are leading National Research Institutions and they share an intense, in-state rivalry with each other in sports...and everything else.[[note]]Academically, consensus holds that MSU's best programs are better than their equivalents at Michigan, but that Michigan is better on average--if only because Michigan is often the "safety school" for East Coasters who ''just'' missed the IvyLeague. MSU, on the other hand--and in particular its best programs--is a highly-desired target school for less well-off kids from Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Additionally, people in the know note the remarkable number of University of Chicago grads who go on to become MSU profs and and the number of MSU grads who go on to study at [[=UChicago=]]; they tend think of MSU as a sort of public-university outpost of Chicago.[[/note]] How [[FriendlyEnemy friendly]] this rivalry gets depends on who you ask; since many Michiganders have relatives who went to both, there's often a desire to keep the peace, but others regard the other school as The Enemy (or at U of M, The Second Enemy, The First Enemy being Ohio State), with whom there is no reconciliation. If Michigan State is playing against Ohio State, U of M will be angry no matter the result. U of M feels they're the only school allowed to defeat Michigan State, but they also don't want MSU to rob them of the opportunity to conquer the Buckeyes. The rivalry against Ohio State stems all the way back to Michigan's birth as a state, during which the then-Michigan Territory declared war on Ohio over who the city of [[UsefulNotes/ToledoOhio Toledo]] belonged to. This border dispute awarded the Toledo Strip to Ohio and gave Michigan the Upper Peninsula as a "consolation". Some Michiganders remain bitter to this day about the whole debacle even though Wisconsin arguably was the state hurt the most by the "Toledo War"

* JamesEarlJones was raised in Jackson, after moving away from his family in Mississippi at age five. He's still the narrator for the "Please come here" video for the University of Michigan (from which he graduated in 1955).

* Southeast Michigan: Centered on [[MotorCity Detroit]]--the state's largest city--and home to just under half of Michigan's 9.8 million people. Often called Metro Detroit, but this isn't strictly true; Ann Arbor is unquestionably in Southeast Michigan, but whether it's part of Metro Detroit is something of a hot topic. Either way, the Southeast is the home of the American automotive industry (GM's headquarters are in the iconic Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit, Ford's are in Dearborn--which is entirely surrounded by Detroit--and Chrysler's are in the northern suburb of Auburn Hills). As a result, the region is highly dependent on the industry: when the Big Three are doing well, the area (although not Detroit itself) does well, too. When it isn't, the area generally suffers.

* See all works on the page for MotorCity for works set in Detroit and Metro Detroit.

** People also have a good if rather immature laugh at the expense of [[HaveAGayOldTime Gaylord]], which has precisely two claims to fame: being exactly halfway between the North Pole and Equator (at 45 degrees north) and being the smallest city in the US with a Roman Catholic cathedral.

** The more rural areas are noted for their fruit production, including viticulture (i.e. wine); Lake Michigan increases rainfall and moderates the climate, making the whole coast heaven for fruit farmers. Also heavily dependent on tourism: there are lots of nice beaches on the lake shoreline, which attract people from elsewhere in the state in the summertime.

* Mid-Michigan: Centered on the state capital, Lansing. Moderately populated, its economy is dependent on agriculture, some industry, government (around Lansing), and education (around Lansing and Mt. Pleasant). The Lansing area plays host to one major university (Michigan State University, in East Lansing), one significant third-tier law school (Cooley, in Downtown Lansing) a vocational college (Davenport University, again in downtown), besides the obligatory community college. Mount Pleasant is home to Central Michigan University, which is respectable enough for a "directional" college. Jackson, in the south-central part of the state, is roughly the midway point between between Ann Arbor and Lansing (traveling northwest) and between Ann Arbor and Kalamazoo (traveling roughly due west); it is notable in Michigan for playing host to Michigan's most important maximum-security prison and being the birthplace of the [[AmericanPoliticalSystem Republican Party]].[[note]]This last is somewhat ironic, as Jackson is named after AndrewJackson, the founder of the Democratic Party in its current institutional form.[[/note]] Flint--essentially Detroit-like, but smaller--can be considered part of Mid-Michigan (with the Tri-Cities of Saginaw, Bay City, and Midland), Southeast Michigan, or...

* Southeast Michigan: Centered on [[MotorCity Detroit]]--the state's largest city--and home to just under half of Michigan's 9.8 million people. Often called Metro Detroit, but this isn't strictly true; Ann Arbor is unquestionably in Southeast Michigan, but whether it's part of Metro Detroit is something of a hot topic. Either way, the Southeast is the home of the American automotive industry (GM's headquarters are in the iconic Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit, Ford's are in Dearborn--which is entirely surrounded by Detroit--and Chrysler's are in the northern suburb of Auburn Hills). As a result, the region is highly dependent on the industry: when the Big Three are doing well, the area (although not Detroit itself) do well, too. When it isn't, the area generally suffers.

** Worthy of note are Southeast Michigan's major institutions of higher education other than [[UsefulNotes/UniversityofMichigan the University of Michigan]]:

* The two largest Universities in the state are the UniversityOfMichigan in Ann Arbor and Michigan State University (in East Lansing, which is immediately [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin east of Lansing]]). The two Universities are leading National Research Institutions and they share an intense, in-state rivalry with each other in sports...and everything else.[[note]]Academically, consensus holds that MSU's best programs are better than their equivalents at Michigan, but that Michigan is better on average--if only because Michigan is often the "safety school" for East Coasters who ''just'' missed the IvyLeague. MSU, on the other hand--and in particular its best programs--is a highly-desired target school for less well-off kids from Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Additionally, people in the know note the remarkable number of University of Chicago grads who go on to become MSU profs and and the number of MSU grads who go on to study at [[=UChicago=]]; they tend think of MSU as a sort of public-university outpost of Chicago.[[/note]] How [[FriendlyEnemy friendly]] this rivalry gets depends on who you ask; since many Michiganders have relatives who went to both, there's often a desire to keep the peace, but others regard the other school as The Enemy (or at U of M, The Second Enemy, The First Enemy being Ohio State), with whom there is no reconciliation. If Michigan State is playing against Ohio State, U of M will be angry no matter the result. U of M feels they're the only school allowed to defeat Michigan State, but they also don't want MSU to rob them of the opportunity to conquer the Buckeyes. The rivalry against Ohio State stems all the way back to Michigan's birth as a state, during which the then-Michigan Territory declared war on Ohio over who the city of [[UsefulNotes/ToledoOhio Toledo]] belonged to. This border dispute awarded the Toledo Strip to Ohio and gave Michigan the Upper Peninsula as a "consolation". Some Michiganders remain bitter to this day about the whole debacle even though Wisconsin arguably was the state hurt the most by the "Toledo War"