Please join us on Tuesday, Nov.  13 (11:45 a.m. to 1:15 p.m., LA 241) as the Institute for Detroit Studies launches a new series that will focus on recent and ongoing scholarship about Detroit. 

Our second speaker of the series is Thomas B. Jankowski, Ph.D., Associate Director of the Institute of Gerontology and Merrill Palmer Skillman Institute, Wayne State University. 

Here's a brief discussion of his talk: 

Hard Times in the Great City of Plenty: The Detroit Department of Public Welfare and the Eloise Infirmary During the Great Depression 

The horror of the poorhouse “cast a wide shadow” in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. Almost everyone was afraid of ending his or her life in an institution that was ostensibly designed for public relief, but which occasioned fear since colonial times, never more so than in the beginning of the Great Depression. We build a case that the specter of the Wayne County, Michigan poorhouse, popularly known as “Eloise,” influenced Luella Hannan Memorial Home (LHMH) administrative decisions and the life courses of its aged applicants and clients, primarily women, in a number of crucial ways that relate to broader national issues concerning aging. 

Mary E. Byrnes, Ph.D., MUP 

Assistant Professor 
Department of Social Sciences 
Marygrove College