City history / Literature
Heather Ann Thompson
born 1963 · historian, author
Pulitzer-winning historian of the Attica uprising who grew up in Detroit's North Rosedale Park, graduated from Cass Tech and wrote Whose Detroit?
- Born
Lawrence, Kansas
age 63- Detroit years
- 1970s–1980s, 2015–present
- Field
- City history, Literature
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Thompson spent her early childhood in Indiana and England, but as a teenager her family moved to the North Rosedale Park neighborhood on Detroit's northwest side, and she graduated from Cass Technical High School. Her mother was a Detroit labor lawyer and her father an economist at the University of Michigan. After degrees at Michigan and a Princeton doctorate, she wrote Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (2001), a history of the city's struggles in the 1960s and 1970s that remains a standard work. Her Blood in the Water (2016), about the 1971 Attica prison uprising, won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Bancroft Prize. In 2015 she returned to the Detroit area as a professor at the University of Michigan, where she co-founded the Carceral State Project.
Highlights
- Pulitzer Prize for History (2017) for Blood in the Water
- Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (2001)
- Bancroft Prize (2016)
- Cass Technical High School graduate
02 / Their Detroit places
Their Detroit places 1
Where they lived, worked, performed and liked to hang out. Closed and demolished places stay here too, because they are part of the city's history.
Studied here · late 1970s–early 1980s
Cass Technical High School
Detroit's famous magnet high school, where she graduated; it moved into a new building in 2005.