The Nankin Township Historical Society

Detroit Free Press , March 11, 1864 On occasion there are mentions of both East and South Nankin in search results but I don't think I've ever seen a reference to an either North or West Nankin. Which might be because that's where the largest concentration of population was or I could just flatly be wrong. Regardless, Elizabeth Stewart of East Nankin was in the graduating class of 1864 at the Normal College (EMU) and read an essay entitled "Words for the Hour" bidding farewell to classmates and the faculty. I t's hard to imagine such a setting in pre-electricity days but I suppose that people were more quiet and courteous back then. I also can't imagine going to the archives there on horseback and publishing my findings in an newspaper called the "Southeastern Northwestern Nankin Township Historical Society of the Frontierlands of Michigania in Wolverina".

While national politics lead us away from our lives and towards war, local politics generally fortify us despite the divisions in philosophy, or so we'd like to think. Which is why I've long been enamored with local history over national and global histories. All are important but the local is severely undervalued and largely ignored. "Oh, Ypsi girls are very fine girls, With codfish balls they comb their curls." Gundella's connections to Marcello Truzzi, EMU professor and sc holar, have piqued my interest in Ypsilanti and the university in its many permutations.  While looking for information on the Michigan State Normal College News from the late 1800s I found this interesting spat between coeds from that institution and "Michigan Men" from 1940. An article in the Michigan Daily , a student newspaper, claiming that the girls of Normal College weren't as pretty as they used to be sent a throng of coeds to Angell Hall in a bus to protest the ...