What Is Michigan’s Geography

State And Federal Representation

Lansing is currently split between three congressional districts. Most of the city lies within the boundaries of Michigan’s 8th congressional district, which is represented by Democratic congresswoman Elissa Slotkin, who was elected in the 2018 midterm election. The small portion of the city that extends into Eaton County is located in Michigan’s 7th congressional district, which has been represented by Republican congressman Tim Walberg since 2011. The small portion of the city that extends into Clinton County is located in Michigan’s 4th congressional district, which has been represented by Republican congressman John Moolenaar since 2015.

At the state level, most of Lansing is located in the 23rd district of the Michigan Senate, which has been represented by Democratic state senator Curtis Hertel Jr. since 2015. The small portions of the city that extend into Eaton County and Clinton County is located in the 24th district of the Michigan Senate, are currently represented by Republican state senator Tom Barrett. The city lies in the 67th, 68th, 71st, and 93rd districts of the Michigan State House of Representatives, represented by state representatives Kara Hope , Sarah Anthony , Angela Witwer , and Graham Filler .

Though Lansing is not the designated county seat, some Ingham County offices are located in downtown Lansing, including a branch office of the county clerk, the county personnel office, and some courtrooms.

Michigan Landscape And Landforms:

Boreal Hardwood Transition

As the name implies, this area is a transition zone between the mixed hardwood forest to the south and the boreal forest to the north. Northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan are in this physiographic area, as is much of southern Ontario and a small area of southeast Manitoba. The Great Lakes are a prominent ecological force in this area, affecting microclimates and forest community composition. These forest communities are a heterogeneous matrix with various oaks, maples, birch, and pines representing the southern element and spruces, tamarack, and balsam fir of boreal origin. Aspen is a common early successional species throughout.

Upper Great Lakes Plain

The Upper Great Lakes Plain covers the southern half of Michigan, northwest Ohio, northern Indiana, northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin, and small portions of southwest Minnesota and northwest Iowa. Glacial moraines and dissected plateaus are characteristic of the topography. Broadleaf forests, oak savannahs, and a variety of prairie communities are the natural vegetation types. A “Driftless Area” was not glaciated during the late Pleistocene and emerged as a unique area of great biological diversity.

The Lower Peninsula is fairly level but some low rolling hills can be found in the south. To the north this changes to a northern tableland of hilly belts. The lowest point in Michigan, along the shore of Lake Erie is found in the Lower Peninsula.

Geography

Us House Of Representatives

In 1996, Stabenow ran for a seat in the , challenging incumbent Republican U.S. Congressman for the opportunity to represent . She defeated Chrysler 54%44%. In 1998, she was reelected with 57% of the vote. In the House, Stabenow served on the and .

Before her current committee assignments, Stabenow also served on the and the .

Stabenow is only the second person from Michigan to have served in both houses of the and both houses of the , the other being . She is also the first person to have served as a Michigan state legislator to be popularly elected to the .

Stabenow became the third-ranking Democratic Party member in the U.S. Senate on November 16, 2004, when she was elected secretary of the Democratic caucus. As caucus secretary, she assisted in setting the Democratic agenda and priorities. Senator was elected , the second-ranking Democratic spot. In November 2006, Reid announced that Stabenow would leave the caucus secretary position to succeed as chair of the Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee, charged with “engag Democratic Senators and community leaders across the country in an active dialogue”.

After , President ‘s nominee for , withdrew his name, the urged the president to appoint Stabenow, citing her focus on and “her background as a social worker”.

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Geography And Landforms Of Michigan

Find an overview of Michigan geography, topography, geographic land regions, land areas, and major rivers.

Access Michigan almanac, furnishing more details on the state geography, geographical and land regions, climate and weather, elevation, land areas, bordering states, and other statistical data.

The state of Michigan consists of two peninsulas separated by the Straits of Mackinac. The Upper Peninsula lies between Lake Michigan and Lake Superior. The Lower Peninsula is bordered on the West by Lake Michigan and on the East by Lake Huron, Lake Erie, and two rivers, the Detroit and the St. Clair.

Michigan, one of the leading manufacturing states, is a leading tourist state as well. Touching on four of the five Great Lakes, the two land areas of Michigan give the state a shoreline of 3,288 miles, second in length only to Alaska. Michigan also supports over 11,000 lakes. Michigan’s two separate land areas are called the Upper Peninsula and the Lower Peninsula. They’re connected by the five mile long Mackinac Bridge.

Business And Academic Career

Peters worked for 22 years as a financial advisor, serving as an assistant vice president at from 1980 until 1989, when he joined as a vice president.

From 2007 to 2008, Peters served as the third Griffin Endowed Chair in American Government at . In that part-time position, he taught one class a semester, plus preparing additional student activities including two policy forums, and developing a journal of Michigan politics and policy, for $65,000 a year. Peters announced his candidacy to run for Congress two months after being hired. Some student and faculty members protested Peters’s hiring, saying he could not be objective in the classroom while running for office and that the university job was subsidizing his campaign.

Peters also has taught at Wayne State and and business courses at .

Peters was a senior policy and financial analyst for the Michigan Department of Treasury and served on arbitration panels for the and the .

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State Symbols And Nicknames

Michigan is traditionally known as “The Wolverine State”, and the University of Michigan takes the wolverine as its mascot. The association is well and long established: for example, many Detroiters volunteered to fight during the American Civil War and George Armstrong Custer, who led the Michigan Brigade, called them the “Wolverines”. The origins of this association are obscure it may derive from a busy trade in wolverine furs in Sault Ste. Marie in the 18th century or may recall a disparagement intended to compare early settlers in Michigan with the vicious mammal. Wolverines are, however, extremely rare in Michigan. A sighting in February 2004 near Ubly was the first confirmed sighting in Michigan in 200 years. The animal was found dead in 2010.

Geography Of Michigan Facts For Kids

Michigan consists of two peninsulas that lie between east longitude, and are separated by the Straits of Mackinac, and some nearby islands. With the exception of two small areas that are drained by the Mississippi River by way of the Wisconsin River in the Upper Peninsula and by way of the Kankakee–Illinois River in the Lower Peninsula, Michigan is drained by the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence watershed and is the only state with the majority of its land thus drained.

Michigan encompasses 58,110 square miles of land, 38,575 square miles of Great Lakes waters and 1,305 square miles of inland waters. Only Alaska has more territorial water. At a total of 97,990 square miles , Michigan is the largest state east of the Mississippi River . Michigan has a total area of 96,716.11 sq mi , making it the eleventh largest state. Michigan forestland covers nearly 52% of the land area of Michigan at 30,156 square miles .

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Urban Renewal And Downtown Redevelopment

Several urban renewal projects by private developers are adding higher end apartments and condominiums to the Lansing market. The Arbaugh, a former department store across from Cooley Law School, was converted into apartments in 2005. Motor Wheel Lofts, a former industrial site, was converted into loft-style living spaces in mid-2006. A combination retail and residential complex immediately south of Cooley Law School Stadium called “The Stadium District”, was completed in 2007. The Stadium District was redeveloped using a grant from the Michigan State Housing Development Authority through the Cool Cities Initiative.

The Thomas M. Cooley Law School is the largest law school in the nation and is located in downtown Lansing. Cooley is fully accredited by the American Bar Association. A majority of Cooley students are from out-of-state.

Lansing Community College offers more than 500 areas of study to over 18,000 students at its main facilities in Lansing, and another 5,000 students at twenty-nine extension centers and a site in Otsu, Japan. LCC’s new, state-of-the-art University Center enables students to take courses with the goal of eventually earning an undergraduate or graduate degree from other Michigan institutions. The University Center stands on the former site of “Old Central”, Lansing’s first public high school, which was established in 1875 as Lansing High School.

Abortion And Women’s Rights

Peters supports . In the late 1980s, his first wife had a wanted pregnancy that failed at four months, but her miscarriage did not proceed naturally, causing a health emergency. Their hospital did not perform abortions, but they were able to obtain an emergency abortion at another hospital in part because they were friends with the hospital’s administrator. He has supported the and in 2015 voted in favor of the .

Israel

In March 2017, Peters cosponsored the , which made it a federal crime for Americans to encourage or participate in boycotts against Israel and in the occupied if protesting actions by the Israeli government.

China

In November 2017, in response to efforts by to purchase tech companies based in the US, Peters was one of nine senators to cosponsor a bill that would broaden the federal government’s ability to prevent foreign purchases of U.S. firms through increasing the strength of the . The CFIUS’s scope would be expanded to allow it to review along with possibly decline smaller investments and add additional national security factors for CFIUS to consider, including whether information about Americans would be exposed as part of transactions or whether the deal would facilitate fraud.

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Inland Lakes And Rivers

The state has 11,037 inland lakes comprising 1,305 square miles of inland water. No point in Michigan is more than 6 miles from an inland lake or more than 85 miles from one of the Great Lakes.

The state’s numerous rivers are generally short and shallow, though several are navigable by recreational watercraft. The principal ones include the Au Sable, Thunder Bay, Cheboygan, and Saginaw, all of which flow into Lake Huron the Ontonagon, and Tahquamenon, which flow into Lake Superior and the St. Joseph, Kalamazoo, Grand, Muskegon, Manistee, and Escanaba, which flow into Lake Michigan.

Michigan has a humid continental climate, although there are two distinct regions. The southern and central parts of the Lower Peninsula have a warmer climate with hot summers and cold winters. The northern part of the Lower Peninsula and the entire Upper Peninsula has a more severe climate , with warm, but shorter summers and longer, cold to very cold winters. Some parts of the state average high temperatures below freezing from December through February, and into early March in the far northern parts. During the winter through the middle of February the state is frequently subjected to heavy lake-effect snow. The state averages from 30-40 inches of precipitation annually.

Th And 21st Centuries

Michigan’s economy underwent a transformation at the turn of the 20th century. Many individuals, including Ransom E. Olds, John and Horace Dodge, Henry Leland, David Dunbar Buick, Henry Joy, Charles King, and Henry Ford, provided the concentration of engineering know-how and technological enthusiasm to develop the automotive industry. Ford’s development of the moving assembly line in Highland Park marked a new era in transportation. Like the steamship and railroad, mass production of automobiles was a far-reaching development. More than the forms of public transportation, the affordable automobile transformed private life. Automobile production became the major industry of Detroit and Michigan, and permanently altered the socioeconomic life of the United States and much of the world.

Grand Rapids, the second-largest city in Michigan, is also an important center of manufacturing. Since 1838, the city has been noted for its furniture industry. In the 21st century, it is home to five of the world’s leading office furniture companies. Grand Rapids is home to a number of major companies including Steelcase, Amway, and Meijer. Grand Rapids is also an important center for GE Aviation Systems.

Michigan held its first United States presidential primary election in 1910. With its rapid growth in industry, it was an important center of industry-wide union organizing, such as the rise of the United Auto Workers.

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Immigration And Refugee Resettlement

The Brookings Institution has ranked Greater Lansing among the top 10 “medium-sized metropolitan areas” in the United States for refugee resettlement, with 5,369 refugees resettled from 1983 to 2004. St. Vincent Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services handle the adult and unaccompanied minor resettlement processes, respectively, while other organizations, such as the Refugee Development Center, focus on providing educational and social support services to refugees in the Lansing area. Nearby Michigan State University provides a source of volunteers for many of these programs.

As of 2005, the Lansing area has about 2,000 Arab Americans, mostly second-generation Christian Lebanese Americans as well as some Palestinian Americans.

The city is also home to a large number of temporary foreign residents enrolled as international students at Lansing Community College and nearby Michigan State University, with the city’s visitors bureau specifically promoting Mandarin-language video tours of Lansing, touting the “more than 6,000” Chinese students enrolled at MSU. The Lansing School District offers language immersion programs for its students in both Spanish and Chinese.

Since given the ability to do so by the state in 1964, the city has levied an income tax of 1 percent on residents. 0.5 percent on non-residents, and 1.0 percent on corporations.

Early Life Education And Early Career

Stabenow was born in , the daughter of Anna Merle and Robert Lee Greer. She grew up in . She graduated from Clare High School, where she was president of her junior class, the first female class president at the school. She received a Bachelor of Arts from in 1972 and a Master of Social Work from Michigan State University in 1975.

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Primary And Secondary Schools

As of 2016 many K-12 students in Detroit frequently change schools, with some children having been enrolled in seven schools before finishing their K-12 careers. There is a concentration of senior high schools and in the area, which had wealthier residents and more gentrification relative to other parts of Detroit: Downtown, northwest Detroit, and northeast Detroit have 1,894, 3,742, and 6,018 students of high school age each, respectively, while they have 11, three, and two high schools each, respectively.

As of 2016 because of the lack of public transportation and the lack of school bus services, many Detroit families have to rely on themselves to transport children to school.

Public schools and charter schools

With about 66,000 public school students , the district is the largest in Michigan. Detroit has an additional 56,000 students for a combined enrollment of about 122,000 students. As of 2009 there are about as many students in charter schools as there are in district schools. As of 2016 DPS continues to have the majority of the special education pupils. In addition, some Detroit students, as of 2016, attend public schools in other municipalities.

Detroit public schools students scored the lowest on tests of and of all major cities in the in 2015. Among eighth-graders, only 27% showed basic proficiency in math and 44% in reading. Nearly half of Detroit’s adults are .

Private schools

Detroit Free PressDetroit News

Entertainment And Performing Arts

Major theaters in Detroit include the , , the , , the , the , , , the , and , which hosts the renowned . The , the largest controller of Broadway productions in New York City, originated with the purchase of the in 1922 by the Nederlander family.

with 535,000 square feet produces movies in Detroit and the surrounding area based at the Pontiac Centerpoint Business Campus for a film industry expected to employ over 4,000 people in the metro area.

Because of its , , and , Detroit has enjoyed increased prominence as a tourist destination in recent years. listed Detroit as the 9th-best destination in its list of 52 Places to Go in 2017, while travel guide publisher named Detroit the second-best city in the world to visit in 2018.

Many of the area’s prominent museums are in the historic neighborhood around and the . These museums include the , the , , the , as well as the main branch of the . Other cultural highlights include , the museum, the studio and school, the Museum, , the Dossin Great Lakes Museum, the , the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit , and the Belle Isle Conservatory.

Artist Tyree Guyton created the controversial street art exhibit known as the in 1986, using found objects including cars, clothing and shoes found in the neighborhood near and on Heidelberg Street on the near East Side of Detroit.

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