Ann Arbor
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Ann Arbor. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a thriving inland city of southern Michigan. Population, about 15,000. It is the shipping point of a large agricultural and fruit growing region, and has prosperous manufactures of implements, furniture, wagons, pumps, and engines. The city is noted chiefly, however, as the seat of the University of Michigan, the oldest of a large group of state universities in the North Central States. It was established in 1837, the year in which the state was admitted to the Union. The intelligence, liberality, and scholarship that have characterized the University of Michigan have resulted in the development of one of the great universities of the world. It possesses a spacious campus and capacious buildings. There are various colleges, large faculties, including many professors of acknowledged scholarship, leaders in their respective departments of thought. There are over five thousand students. Public confidence in institutions of higher education supported by the state has won by the success of this state university. As a consequence the state university idea has been intrenched in the West as a part of a public school system connecting at every step with the district school. See University ; Michigan
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
city and county-seat of Washtenaw co., Mich.; on the Huron river and the Michigan Central railroad; 38 miles W. of Detroit. It is in an agricultural region; has National banks, high school, manufactories of farming implements, woolen goods, furniture, carriages, and organs, daily, weekly, and monthly periodicals, and is the seat of the University of Michigan. Pop. (1910) 14,817; (1920) 19,516.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's counted 19,516 people in 1920 and listed factories making farm implements, woolen goods, carriages and organs; the 2020 census found about 123,000 residents, and those industries are long gone, replaced by an economy built almost wholly on the university, hospitals, research labs and software firms. The University of Michigan that Aiton's praised for its "over five thousand students" in 1910 now enrolls roughly 50,000 on the Ann Arbor campus and is among the largest research universities in the United States, while its Michigan Stadium, opened in 1927 and nicknamed the Big House, seats over 107,000 — the largest stadium in the country. The city also acquired a political reputation the old entries could not have foreseen: a center of 1960s student radicalism, it reduced the penalty for marijuana possession to a $5 civil fine in 1972. What has not changed is the basic fact both accounts lead with — Ann Arbor is still Washtenaw County's seat and still defined by the university at its center.
Written for this edition, 2026.