Catton To Write State's History

American Association for State and Local History has commissioned Pulitzer prizewinning historian Bruce Catton to write a history of Michigan, his native state, as part of the nation's Bicentennial celebration in 1976. The book will be part of a project, supported by $300,000 in grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, to publish popular histories of each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. "Each volume in the series will be an interpretive essay, characterizing the people of a given state historically and showing the relationship of that particular state's history, experiences and values to the nation as a whole," the sponsors said. "A basic premise of the project is that the states, far from being mere political subdivisions, were dynamjc extensions of the American Revolution whose bicentennial observance belongs in that l sense to them all." The 73-year-old Catton, a l native of Petoskey, won the I Pulitzer in 1954 for his Civil Iwar trilogy, "Mr. Lincoln's lArmy," "Glory Road" and "A Istilness at Appomattox."