Holly Karibo

author of "Sin City North: Sex, Drugs, and Citizenship in the Detroit-Windsor Borderland"

December 7, 2016

Holly M. Karibo received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 2012. Her research focuses on the history of vice, labor, and sexuality in transnational urban spaces. Her first book, Sin City North: Sex, Drugs, and Citizenship in the Detroit-Windsor Borderland (UNC Press, 2015), examines the history of illegal economies in the Great Lakes border region during the post-World War II period. She has also published several book reviews, book chapters, and peer-reviewed journal articles in Histoire Sociale/Social History, American Review of Canadian Studies, Social History of Drugs and Alcohol, 49th Parallel, and Neoamericanist.

The early decades of the twentieth century sparked the Detroit-Windsor region's ascendancy as the busiest crossing point between Canada and the United States, setting the stage for socioeconomic developments that would link the border cities for years to come. As Holly M. Karibo shows, this border fostered the emergence of illegal industries alongside legal trade, rapid industrial development, and tourism. Tracing the growth of the two cities' cross-border prostitution and heroin markets in the late 1940s and the 1950s, Sin City North explores the social, legal, and national boundaries that emerged there and their ramifications. In bars, brothels, and dance halls, Canadians and Americans were united in their desire to cross racial, sexual, and legal lines in the border cities. Yet the increasing visibility of illicit economies on city streets – and the growing number of African American and French Canadian women working in illegal trades – provoked the ire of moral reformers who mobilized to eliminate them from their communities. This valuable study demonstrates that struggles over the meaning of vice evolved beyond definitions of legality; they were also crucial avenues for residents attempting to define productive citizenship and community in this postwar urban borderland.

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2017-honorees-b/holly-karibo

Last Updated: 12 January 2022