Michigan

Michigan, the Wolverine State, entered the Union on January 26, 1837. It was the twenty-sixth state to join. Its total area measures 58,527 square miles (151,585 square kilometers), which makes it the twenty-third largest of the fifty states. Michigan is located in the eastern northcentral United States and is bordered by Ohio , Indiana , Illinois , Wisconsin , and Canada. Michigan is unique in that its boundaries are adjacent to four of the five Great Lakes: Superior, Huron, Michigan, and Erie. It also has two peninsulas, the Upper Peninsula and the Lower Peninsula; they are connected by the Mackinac Bridge, which crosses the Straits of Mackinac, the area where Lakes Michigan and Huron meet.

When European exploration began in the early 1600s, Michigan's Lower Peninsula was almost completely uninhabited. The Ojibwa and Menomini tribes lived in regions of the Upper Peninsula, and they were joined eventually by the Winnebago, Sioux, and Huron. These Native American tribes remained a vital force in the region's development for two centuries after Europeans first arrived. They enjoyed an active fur-trading business with the settlers until the end of the War of 1812 (1812–15). At that point, the tribes became less valuable to the settlers, and by 1842 most tribal lands in the state had been taken by the federal government.

Toward the end of the 1800s, Michigan became an industrial state with a focus on the automobile industry , especially in Detroit. Before this, the state depended upon mining and lumber for its livelihood. The Great Depression (1929–41) of the 1930s caused the unemployment of half of Michigan's industrial workers, and the automobile market collapsed.

Although the market resumed in later decades, the nationwide recession of the early 1980s hurt those automobile manufacturers that did not foresee the decline in popularity of large luxury cars. Increasingly, Japanese cars were dominating the market. Hundreds of thousands of auto workers lost their jobs, and tens of thousands of them left Michigan to find work elsewhere.

Because Michigan's economy has been focused on just one market, automobile manufacturing, whenever the national economy experiences downturns, Michigan is harder hit than most other states. Agriculture is important to the rural areas of southern Michigan, and forestry and mining continue in the northern region of the state, but on a smaller scale than in years past.

More than ten million people lived in Michigan in 2006; of these, 80 percent of them were white and 14 percent African American. The Republican Party dominated politics in the state until the Great Depression, when the Democratic Party gained ground. In the twenty-first century, Michigan is a strong two-party state with great support for and participation in labor unions.