When Julien arrives in Michigan to meet his wife's American family, he gets to know the American Midwest, as well as some unusual cousins. But above all, he meets Odette, his French great aunt with what one might call a resilient personality. Originally from Paris, she married an American soldier at the end of the Second World War. Like her, 200,000 other European "war brides" left behind their families and their countries to be with the G.I.s they loved.

November 1944, Paris, France. GI John arrives in France as a mechanic in the Military Railway Service. He meets and falls in love with a young French woman, Odette, working in a corner cafe. He is posted to Germany and returns a year later when his proposal of marriage is accepted and they decide to return to his home in the US - much to her family's chagrin. Odette is shipped to the Phillip Morris Camp in Le Havre for training in being 'American', before finally boarding the MS Vulcania. When we meet them at the beginning of the book, Odette's great niece Maud and her husband Julien are preparing to embark on a trip from Paris to Michigan, where many a culture shock awaits.

From the Gold Rush to rush hour, the history of the American West is fraught with diverse, subversive, and at times downright eccentric elements. This provocative volume challenges traditional readings of western history and literature, and redraws the boundaries of the American West with absorbing essays ranging widely on topics from tourism to immigration, from environmental battles to interethnic relations, and from law to film. Taken together, the essays reassess the contributions of a diverse and multicultural America to the West, as they link western issues to global frontiers. Featuring the latest work by some of the best new writers both inside and outside academia, the original essays in Over the Edge confront the traditional field of western American studies with a series of radical, speculative, and sometimes outrageous challenges. The collection reads the West through Ben-Hur and the films of Mae West; revises the western American literary canon to include the works of African American and Mexican American writers; examines the implications of miscegenation law and American Indian blood quantum requirements; and brings attention to the historical participation of Mexican and Japanese American women, Native American slaves, and Alaskan cannery workers in community life.

Michigan in the Novel records 1,735 novels published from 1816 through 1996 that are set wholly or partially in the state of Michigan. Consulting literally thousands of novels and visiting scores of libraries, Robert Beasecker spent more than twenty years researching this exhaustive bibliography. Works included are mainstream fiction, mystery and romance novels, juveniles, religious tracts, dime novels, and other marginal or popular genre literature. Omitted are short stories, poetry, drama, screenplays and pageants, and serially published novels with no subsequent separate publication. Through its six indexes, Michigan in the Novel provides literary and cultural access to Michigan novels, classifying novels by to title, series, setting, chronology, subject and genre, and Michigan imprints. Intended to serve as a guide for students, teachers, scholars, and readers to explore Michigan's vast, varied, and rich literary landscape, Michigan in the Novel is the most expansive compilation of its kind.