conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled Hidden History of Detroit about Detroit, Bak, Hidden with the genre: Arts & Photography, Photography & Video.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Much like the talented Bak, who makes 20th century Detroit his wheelhouse, in Hidden History of Detroit, young author the author draws on Detroit's other two centuries to spin engaging tales of a city undisturbed by horseless carriages but often just as chaotic. From Antoine Cadillac's arrival on these pastoral shores, it would seem Detroit has always been facing calamities of one sort or another: conflagrations, invasions, epidemics, disorders and drunkenness. But the author renders this rocky history in graceful prose with a warm, first-person touch that lovingly lingers over some of its most unusual characters, those both immortalized in statuary and street names or simply forgotten over the ages. Mason, Friend Palmer, Joseph Campau, Jean-Francois Hamtramck and a whole host of characters the author raises from the dead for a brief moment if only so we can miss them properly.  --Detroit Metro-Times
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about You'll, Clarence, Burton.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Much like the talented Bak, who makes 20th century Detroit his wheelhouse, in Hidden History of Detroit, young author the author draws on Detroit's other two centuries to spin engaging tales of a city undisturbed by horseless carriages but often just as chaotic. From Antoine Cadillac's arrival on these pastoral shores, it would seem Detroit has always been facing calamities of one sort or another: conflagrations, invasions, epidemics, disorders and drunkenness. But the author renders this rocky history in graceful prose with a warm, first-person touch that lovingly lingers over some of its most unusual characters, those both immortalized in statuary and street names or simply forgotten over the ages. You'll meet Clarence Burton, Jim Scott, Lewis Cass, Stevens T. Mason, Friend Palmer, Joseph Campau, Jean-Francois Hamtramck and a whole host of characters the author raises from the dead for a brief moment if only so we can miss them properly.  --Detroit Metro-Times
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Hidden History of Detroit
  It's 2011, and I think I missed the latest "where we've been/where we're going" check-in by ten years. When we celebrated the tricentennial in 2001, I was a junior in high school and not at all aware that Detroit was celebrating a tricentennial.
  But now is a good time (is there ever a bad time?) to take up the voyage again. When Detroiters talk about history today, it's often to make sense of Detroit's "big mess": a dwindling population, high unemployment, a hollowed-out economy, acres of empty property and an infrastructure desperately in need of repair. How did this happen after we spent half of the twentieth century on top of the world?
  Detroit's history can do so much more than that, though. There's a lot of joy in these old halls (I giggle a lot when I work on this stuff) and plenty to celebrate. There are role models and stories of mortal hubris—like the hot spur and boy wonder Stevens T. Mason, who went toe to toe with the State of Ohio and President Andrew Jackson to deliver Michigan to statehood and whose ambition created a statewide network of roads, railways and canals, effecting a gaping hole in the new state's economy. And there's a reason Re-Elect Pingree posters pop up all over town during election years.
  Two of them created—through sweat, drudgery, obsession, near-pathological attention to detail and humorless dispositions—the definitive canon of Detroit history before 1900.
  The third, my wild card pick, brings a needed dose of personality to any picture of the early city. And I like him. I kind of want to hug him.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Thus, the paper recommended: "The improvements on the street should obviously be made during the cool season of the year and the remains interred in another locality."
  This particular obstacle to progress—the unearthed soldier—presented itself a lot in this neighborhood, roughly bound by modern-day Cass, Fort, Griswold and Lafayette Streets. That's because there used to be a fort there, hence the name Fort Street. And guess what? Sometimes the fort was used as a graveyard, too. But the military cemetery was not the only burial ground of old Detroit that had been left to erode into oblivion.
  Personally? As soon as those people become real to me, I experience a little grief. The peril of making friends in the halls of history is that all of your friends have died. And some of the things they created that were supposed to be eternal—like their cemeteries—have passed from this earth as well.
  Over a few hundred years, a shifting city needs to rearrange itself. To make room for the living, we may have to uproot the dead. Once in a while, we lose track of someone. Sometimes we just build right over the graves. For hundreds of years, Detroiters have written about their cemeteries as if they have been decrepit for hundreds of years.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last paragraph.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Taylor, George, Reverend. "First Visit to Michigan: Some Incidents Connected with Early Methodism in the State." Pioneer Society of the State of Michigan, vol. 6, 1884. Reprinted 1907. Accessed at the Internet Archive, archive.org.