Sin City North

“Dr. Karibo is to be congratulated on what can only be described as a compelling narrative of vice on the borders and the intricate relationships between various borderlands, both real and metaphorical, in the Detroit-Windsor area.” — Dan Malleck, Brock University

“Holly Karibo’s lively and engaging Sin City North makes a strong contribution to scholarship on urban history and U.S.-Canadian relations. Its investigation of the informal economy of vice in the Motor City and its Canadian sister shows us the underside of the consumer culture of the postwar decades.” — Elizabeth Faue, Wayne State University

“Original, ambitious, and clever, Sin City North transposes the story of postwar borderlands vice—Tijuana and all that—to the Detroit-Windsor region. Taking us beyond Prohibition-era bootleggers, Karibo shows how sex tourism and heroin trafficking flourished in the adjacent cities during the not-so-tranquil 1940s and 1950s, when vice became intertwined with Cold War anxieties and the simmering politics of class, gender, and race.” — David T. Courtwright, author of Dark Paradise and Forces of Habit

“In this original and compelling book, Holly Karibo reorients borderland studies northward. Following smugglers and sex tourists and workers and reformers from Detroit to Windsor and back again, she offers an exciting reappraisal of citizenship, marginality, gender, and race in the twentieth century.” — Thomas Sugrue, New York University

“Expertly demonstrates the ways in which images of prostitutes and drug dealers were used in political discourse in Canada and the United States. . . . Complicates a transnational story that is often oversimplified and overlooked.” — Michigan Historical Review

“Karibo’s writing is engaging, her reasoning is solid, and her conclusions make an important contribution to the histories of drugs and alcohol, the sex industry, cross-border trade, tourism, and early twentieth century changes to national identity, racial politics, and transborder economies.” — Canadian Journal of History

“Makes a unique contribution to the expanding field of northern borderland studies through the perspective of the vice economies of the mid-twentieth century. . . . a valuable read for students, scholars, and a general public interested in local history and in the borderland history of vice and its meaning in the postwar urban border.” — Journal of the History of Sexuality