From the Collection

While today’s media landscape is dominated by comic book characters, it was actually an independent creator from Detroit who beat the Avengers and the Justice League to the punch on the silver screen.  In 1989, Detroit’s own James O’Barr debuted his character The Crow in a locally-published comic book.  From that initial seed would spring follow-up comic series, novels, a video game, a television series, four feature films, and perpetual rumors of a modern film remake. 

The Detroit Historical Society Collection is home to approximately 1,800 hats: Men’s, women’s, children’s, winter, summer, military, formal, casual, etc. These function as a critical part of the larger Costume and Textile collection which, at 20,000 artifacts strong, is the single largest grouping of objects in our holdings. A good chunk of the 1,800 hats were sold from Detroit department stores or were created by local designers, but the majority of them were collected to serve as representatives of certain periods and styles.