Ohio and the World, 1753-2053 - The Ohio State University Press

Geoffrey Parker

Richard Sisson

William Russell Coil

T H E O H I O S TAT E U N I V ER S I T Y P R E S S Columbus

OHIO& WORLDTHE

Essays toward a new history of Ohio

1 7 5 3 – 2 0 5 3

EDITED BY

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Copyright © 2005 by The Ohio State University.All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ohio and the world, 1753–2053 : essays toward a new history of Ohio / edited by Geoffrey Parker, Richard Sisson, and William Russell Coil.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-8142-0939-4 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-8142-5115-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) —ISBN 0-8142-9068-X (CD Rom)1. Ohio—History. I. Parker, Geoffrey, 1943– II. Sisson, Richard, 1936– III. Coil, William Russell. IV. Title.

F491.5.O38 2005977.1—dc22

2004018761

Jacket design by Laurence Nozik.Type set in Adobe Caslon.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the AmericanNational Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed LibraryMaterials. ANSI Z39.48-1992.

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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List of Illustrations viiForeword

Karen A. Holbrook ixPreface xiAcknowledgments xiii

INTRODUCTION

“While We Are in the World, We Must Converse with the World”: The Significance of Ohio in World HistoryAndrew R. L. Cayton 1

CHAPTER 1

A German Chocolate Cake, with White Coconut Icing:Ohio and the Native American WorldR. David Edmunds 23

CHAPTER 2

Race and Region: Ohio, America’s Middle GroundJames Oliver Horton 43

CHAPTER 3

Ohio and the World: The Civil War EraEric Foner 73

CHAPTER 4

Ohio 1903: Heartland of Progressive ReformKathryn Kish Sklar 95

CHAPTER 5

Ohio 1953: Problems and ProspectsJames T. Patterson 129

CONTENTS

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CHAPTER 6

Ohio 2003: Transitions and ChallengesHerbert B. Asher 149

CHAPTER 7

Ohio 2053: A Retrospective on Ohio’s Quality of Life and a Consideration of “Roads Taken and Not Taken” in the Twenty-First CenturyWilliam E. Kirwan 169

For Further Reading 185Notes on Contributors 187Index 193

Contents

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

“Progress?” From Joseph Brennan, Biographical Cyclopaedia and Portrait Gallery of Distinguished men, with an Historical Sketch of the State of Ohio (1880). xiv

“Miss Prohibition and Mr. World.” From American Issue ( Jan. 4, 1919). 11

“American Prejudice Abroad.” From The Gazette (1893). 18

“The Indians Delivering up the English Captives to Colonel Bouquet near his camp at the Forks of the Muskingum in North America inNovember 1764.” From William Smith, Historical Account of the Expeditionagainst the Ohio Indians (1766). 22

“One of Celoron’s Lead Plates” (1749). 29

“The Treaty of Greenville, 1795.” 36

“Pioneers Crossing the Ohio River” (1941). 42

“The Miami Canal.” From the Ladies’ Repository (December 1842). 56

“Mail—The Connecting Link” (1938). 72

“Ohio’s First African American Civil War Regiment” (1863). 81

“Karl Marx praises Ben Wade” (1867). 87

“The Exodus to the Cities” (1937). 94

“Buckeye Steel Safety Poster” (ca. 1912–1919). 97

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“Ohio women picket a saloon.” From L’Illustrazione popolare(May 3, 1874). 114

“New London Facets” (1940). 128

“Dayton Riot, September 1966.” 142

“Romance of Steel, Old” (1938). 148

“Union Protest at the Ohio Statehouse, 1978.” 152

“Blowing Up the Shuttered Ohio Works of US Steel, August 7, 1983.” 168

List of Illustrations

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FOREWORD

o commemorate the Ohio Bicentennial of Statehood in 2003, TheOhio State University sponsored in partnership with other public

institutions and agencies in the State a series of eight public lectures on“Ohio and the World.” This we did in the tradition of sharing knowledgewith the people of the state which is a long-standing and fundamental com-mitment of this and any other great public university. These lectures fea-tured distinguished scholar-teachers, both from around the nation and fromwithin Ohio, who presented lectures in the spring of 2003. All lectures weremade available to Ohio and the world on the web, and all but the first andlast lectures were presented in our capital city as well as in one other majorvenue in the State.

The lectures are here published in revised form and constitute impor-tant contributions to the understanding of our present and our past. We areindebted to Professors Geoffrey Parker and Richard Sisson and to doctoralstudent William Russell Coil for organizing this outstanding series of lec-tures and for bringing them to published form for the benefit of Ohioansand all others interested in this part of the world.

Karen A. HolbrookPresident, The Ohio State University

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PREFACE

he idea of a series of lectures in honor of Ohio’s bicentennial came toGeoffrey Parker, a history professor at The Ohio State University,

while driving from Ada to Columbus in April 2001. He had given a lectureat Ohio Northern University and, afterward, conversation turned to theBicentennial Barns going up in each county across the state. Had he seenone on the way up? No? His hosts provided meticulous directions for see-ing two on the way back.

He admired the barns while driving back on that brilliant spring day,and wondered how OSU could best celebrate Ohio’s last two hundred yearsin 2003. After all, a Bicentennial is all about history, and the OSU HistoryDepartment should have something interesting to say on the subject.Perhaps, he thought, a series of lectures could examine Ohio’s changingplace in the world, and the changing impact of the world on Ohio, overtime. His colleague Richard Sisson (Trustees Professor of Political Science,former Provost, and a native of Gallipolis, Ohio) showed great enthusiasmand they decided to devise a scheme together.

With the aid of an “advisory committee,” Parker and Sisson decided ona sequence of lectures presenting a snapshot of “Ohio and the World” at aparticular era: “Circa 1753,” because Ohio’s history did not start with thestate, still less with the beginning of White settlement; “Circa 1803,” withthe winning of statehood; “Circa 1853,” dealing with slavery, social conflict,and the Civil War; “Circa 1903,” with industrialization, invention, suffrage;“Circa 1953,” covering Ohio society through wars, protest movements, andeconomic transformations; and “Circa 2003,” the impact of the new worldeconomy, energy, globalization, and the environment. We also decided toadd a finale—”Circa 2053”—which would look back on our collective his-tory, consider the “roads not taken” in Ohio’s history, and assess futuretrends and needs for the state.

The series featured distinguished scholars from around the nation whodelivered their lectures once in Columbus, and again in another appropri-ate venue elsewhere in the state, in April and May 2003. They also metwith students from the Columbus public schools as well as with interested

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faculty and students. Interested readers may also view the lectures on whichthese essays are based by visiting www.osu.edu/bicentennial. Each lecturedelivered at The Ohio State University in spring 2003 is followed by a ques-tion-and-answer session, plus a slide show with images from Ohio’s past. Inaddition, there is an introductory address by New York Times AssociateEditor and native Ohioan R. W. “Johnny” Apple.

Now, assisted by William Russell Coil (also of the Ohio State HistoryDepartment), we present expanded versions of the lectures in print andhope that they will encourage a shared examination of our collective pastand purposeful reflection about our collective future. If so, those handsomebicentennial barns of Ohio will reach out to an even wider audience.

Geoffrey ParkerRichard SissonWilliam Russell Coil

Preface

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ounting a major lecture series is never cheap, and so we thank firstof all those who showed their confidence in “Ohio and the World”

by providing the necessary funds. Edward J. Ray, then Provost of The OhioState University, provided the vital “seed money” that enabled us to startplanning, and the Ohio Bicentennial Commission came through with amajor grant, closely followed by the Ohio Humanities Council. We thankStephen George and Gale Peterson, and their staffs, for their support.Wolfe Enterprises, Inc. also provided generous support for the InauguralLecture of the series, for which we thank Michael Curtin. The rest of thefunding required came from units of The Ohio State University: theMershon Center, the Humanities Institute, the College of Humanities, andthe departments of History and Political Science, and we are most gratefulto directors Richard K. Herrmann and Christian Zacher, Dean MichaelHogan, and chairs Kenneth Andrien (and before him Leila Rupp) and PaulAllen Beck.

Next we are indebted to those who kept the editorial team on the righttrack (and on its toes): to the “founder members” of our advisory commit-tee (Sandy Bolzenius, Andrew R. L. Cayton, Kenneth W. Goings, LucyMurphy and Gary Ness) and to those who provided further guidance as theproject developed (Dwight Groce and Doreen Uhas-Sauer of theColumbus Public Schools; John Tully of OSU’s Goldberg Center; and JohnWinkler); Eric Todd and his staff at the Audio-Visual unit who recordedeach lecture and the following discussion at OSU, and Jerry Dannemillerwho placed them on the web. Chris Burton of the History Departmenthandled the project’s budget; Libby Lantz of the Humanities Institute actedas its secretary and facilitator; Jessica Sherrick handled all publicity issues.We are most grateful to them all.

Finally, we thank our authors for accepting our invitation, enchantingtheir audiences, and then tolerating more editorial interference than wasreasonable. And we are deeply grateful to Drew Cayton whose keen insightsin the Introduction help us to think anew about Ohio’s place in the world.

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“Progress?” This drawing introduced Joseph Brennan’s Biographical Cyclopaedia and PortraitGallery of Distinguished Men, with an Historical Sketch of the State of Ohio (Cincinnati: JohnC. Yorsten and Company, 1880). By then, Ohioans had so completely identified their culturewith progress, here represented by the steamboat, that they revised their histories. Until the1790s, control of the Ohio country was in doubt, but in this scene the Native American standsimpotent and alone, unable to stop the inevitable advance of Western civilization. Courtesy,The Ohio History Society.

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was born in Ohio because my Kentucky-born parents happened to beliving temporarily in Cincinnati in 1954. As I grew up, even after my

immediate family moved back to Ohio in 1963, relatives regularly remind-ed me that the location of my birth was insignificant. More critical was thefact that my personal and cultural roots lay south of the Ohio River, in thesoil in which my ancestors were buried. “Wherever you go and whateveryou do, always remember that you are a native Kentuckian,” wrote a familyfriend when I graduated from high school. “It’s a fact to be proud of and oneto challenge a person to do his best.”1

I dutifully accepted this and other encomiums to Kentucky. But I iden-tified strongly with Ohio, and for reasons that went beyond the accident ofbirth. The state always intrigued me, in no small part because I was con-stantly being told it was different. No one seemed to know exactly how itwas different, but they were quite confident that it was different. Going“over the river” into Cincinnati was a major adventure when I was child. Mygrandmothers worked in department stores on Fourth Street, a canyon ofgiant buildings lined with businesses and restaurants. My grandfather tookme to baseball games in Crosley Field, which, illuminated at night andfilled with the likes of Frank Robinson, Willie Mays, and Stan Musial, wasa larger-than-life arena. Objective observers might conclude that life southof the Ohio River was substantially similar to life north of it. But I learnedto imagine the state of Ohio as a different kind of place from the one inwhich I lived.

Many Ohioans seemed to have a similar attitude about Kentucky. Theymocked the supposed stupidity, vulgarity, poverty, and lack of restraint dis-played by their neighbors across the river. A “virgin in Kentucky” was

1

INTRODUCTION

“WHILE WE ARE IN THE WORLD, WEMUST CONVERSE WITH THE WORLD”:

The Significance of Ohio in World History

Andrew R. L. Cayton

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either “the ugliest girl in the fifth grade” or “the sister who can outrun herbrothers.”2

The Ohioans who told these jokes were not unusually mean or intoler-ant; rather, they were defining themselves against “others,” deciding whothey were by deciding who they were not. Demeaning “hillbillies” allowedOhioans to affirm their own discipline, sophistication, and prosperity.These differences were largely imagined, of course. But that is precisely thepoint. Our identity originates and evolves in conversation; we create placeby telling stories that locate ourselves in relation to other peoples and envi-ronments.3

In this essay, I will try to exploit and expand on this insight in order tooffer an introduction to Ohio’s history as a global rather than a regionalconversation. I want to do more than argue that place is constructed. I alsowant to rethink the popular image of Ohio as a bastion of American nor-malcy, the comfortable heartland of the United States.

From the mid-eighteenth through the mid-twentieth century, Ohio wasat the forefront of most major developments in the Americas and Europe.Hundreds of thousands of people migrated to Ohio because they saw it asa land of possibility on the cutting edge of human history; others visited toobserve in microcosm the development of public culture, urbanization,industrialization, and civic reform. Ohio fascinated in ways hard to fathomtoday, when we generally see the state as an oasis of comfortable provincial-ity. Nineteenth-century Ohioans saw themselves as anything but provincial,however. Obsessed with questions about human nature and the ways inwhich we organize our lives, they were committed to the great cause ofhuman progress. It says a good deal about what has happened since that thetitle Ohio and the World, which would have made perfect sense in 1803 or1903, was an unlikely juxtaposition of words in 2003.

THE CHALLENGES OF OHIO’S HISTORY

Politics and water combined to establish the borders of the seventeenth stateadmitted to the Union. To the south, east, and much of the north, the exist-ing states of Kentucky, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, along with the OhioRiver and Lake Erie, made the choice of boundaries straightforward. Thewest and northwest were far more problematic. Why should a line drawnnorth from the mouth of the Great Miami River divide Ohio from theIndiana Territory? Or why should a line drawn west from the southernmostpoint of Lake Erie distinguish Ohio from what would eventually become theMichigan Territory? Imagine the difference if Congress had chosen to delay

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statehood by making the western border of Ohio start at the mouth of theLittle Miami River, thereby locating Cincinnati within the Indiana Territory.

Or can we imagine any difference? Do state borders really affect the cit-izens of the United States in any serious way? Fewer than ten miles frommy office on the campus of Miami University is the village of CollegeCorner, a crossroads notable for being in both Ohio and Indiana. The stateline runs through the center of College Corner. Is this an important fact?Does it affect the quality of life? People in College Corner, Ohio have dif-ferent license plates on their cars, pay different taxes, obey laws that areoccasionally unique or idiosyncratic, and vote in different elections thantheir Hoosier neighbors. Columbus looms larger in shaping their worldthan Indianapolis. Perhaps the most obvious difference is that CollegeCorner, Ohio shifts to Daylight Savings Time every spring while CollegeCorner, Indiana does not; from April to October it is always one hour ear-lier in the eastern part of the town.

The time differential reflects the nature of the division, which is largelypolitical and legal. People move freely between Ohio and Indiana with lit-tle consciousness of crossing a border. They shop in both states, althoughtaxes may shape their choices. They visit doctors and lawyers in both states,although, too, licensing may shape their choices. They read newspapersfrom both states, listen to radio stations in both states, and watch televisionstations in both states. Because American popular culture respects no polit-ical boundaries, they see the same movies, own the same videos, listen to thesame CDs, and follow the same sports teams. Their allegiance is likelygreater to the United States or to their city or county than to Ohio orIndiana.

Ohio’s somewhat arbitrary boundaries, in short, bring together land andpeople whose relationships with each other are hardly instinctive orinevitable. More than one observer has commented that the state consistsof four relatively distinct quadrants that meet at Columbus, a capital citythat sometimes seems to have little to do with any of them. Interstate 70,running parallel to the old National Road, bifurcates the state in more waysthan one. South of the expressway, the rolling terrain drains into theMuskingum, Hocking, Scioto, and Miami rivers, all of which empty intothe Ohio, the Mississippi, and eventually the Gulf of Mexico. To the north,the generally flatter landscape drains into the Maumee, the Sandusky, theCuyahoga and eventually Lake Erie. If drainage is destiny, then drainageliterally pulls Ohio apart.

Patterns of immigration and settlement have reinforced the centrifugaltendencies of geography. The prairie of northwestern Ohio, punctuatedwith swamps covering reserves of oil and gas, has more in common with

Introduction

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northern Indiana and Illinois than the rest of the state. The hilly river val-leys of the southeast are an extension of western Virginia and Kentucky;they support a rural agrarian culture dotted with small farms and villagesand founded on corn, tobacco, and cattle, abetted in the late nineteenth cen-tury by mining.

Cincinnati, the most important American city west of the Appalachiansin the first half of the nineteenth century, thrived as the commercial nexusof northern Kentucky and southeastern Indiana as well as the Miami Valley.In addition to southerners, thousands of Germans, Protestant, Catholic,and Jewish, driven out of Europe at mid-century by economic and politicalturmoil, flooded Cincinnati, making it one of the most ethnically diverseurban areas in the world, as well as one of the most contentious. Religiousand racial divisions rent the fabric of community; discrimination andrepression existed side by side with commercial and cultural achievements.

Canals and then railroads (in New York as well as Ohio) opened thenortheastern corner to development. In the second half of the nineteenthcentury, nearby reserves of oil, iron and minerals helped transform sleepyCleveland into a major industrial center. A region founded by YankeeProtestants and nurtured by Germans became the home of Italians, Czechs,Hungarians, Poles, and Slavs. Working in steel and other factories, theycongregated in Youngstown, Lorain, Canton, and Toledo, as well asCleveland. Northeastern Ohio had more in common with eastern NewYork and Pennsylvania than with southeastern Ohio, whose commercialand cultural links were to the mid-Atlantic and the Mississippi Valley.

Cincinnati, a commercial river city like Louisville, Memphis, and Nash-ville, peaked in the mid-nineteenth century. Cleveland, an industrial lakecity like Buffalo, Chicago, and Detroit, peaked in the early twentieth cen-tury. It is hardly coincidental that the politics of the two cities has come tosymbolize the bifurcation of Ohio. Almost from the beginning, the peopleof southern Ohio, perhaps because so many were southern and/or German,tended to be conservative. Except in times of economic crisis, they general-ly supported parties who promised minimal government, little reform, andlow taxes, meaning Democrats until well into the twentieth century andnow Republicans. Northeastern Ohio, on the other hand, has long been areliable stronghold of activist reform. Anti-slavery and temperance thrivedwith Republicans in the nineteenth century; labor unions, Progressive poli-cies, and the New Deal with Democrats in the twentieth century.

In the twentieth century, race reinforced and reconfigured social andcultural divisions. The Great Migration of Southern blacks and whiteAppalachians constituted the largest influx of peoples in the history ofOhio. Because they tended to settle in urban neighborhoods with low hous-

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ing costs, areas abandoned by the sons and daughters of nineteenth-century immigrants who had moved to suburbs, they competed for the samelimited resources. Major cities, with the exception of Columbus, embodiedthe decay of nineteenth-century life. Twentieth-century Ohioans sawthemselves as black and white, as the various permutations of EuropeanAmericans collapsed into one great mass of white people.

Since the citizens of Ohio seem to have little in common beyond theirgovernment, historians concentrate on politics and law and search for thesignificance of the state in the degree to which it represents developmentsin the United States as a whole. Ohio was shaped by conflicts with NativeAmericans and the implementation of a federal territorial policy. Ohio sentmore men per capita into the Union Army than any other state and morewomen into the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Immigration,urbanization, and industrialization have played major roles in Ohio’s histo-ry. The state has produced any number of celebrated Americans, fromThomas Edison and the Wright brothers to Annie Oakley and ClarkGable, to Toni Morrison and James Thurber. These factors are hardlyunique. What state does not embody larger developments in the UnitedStates? Which does not have a long list of famous sons and daughters? Still,historians emphasize the essential normalcy of Ohio. Other states representsimilar developments, but few represent them so well. Scholars use evidencefrom Ohio to illustrate points they wish to make about American politicalparties; American capitalism; American social reform; American industrial-ization; American labor; American ideas about race, gender, and class. Ohiois at once everywhere and nowhere, a bland place of no particular characterwhere quintessentially American things happened.

This interpretation is not so much wrong as incomplete. What was itabout this state between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River in the centerof the eastern half of North America? Why was it at the forefront of near-ly everything American in the nineteenth century, when America was at theforefront of nearly everything that was happening in the Atlantic world—immigration, the market revolution, industrialization, urbanization, religiousexperimentation, social reform, the triumph of a middle-class mentalité?Why was Ohio a peculiarly apt example of the confluence of global revolu-tions in a post-colonial setting: the formation of democratic states, capitalisteconomies, liberal politics, romantic notions of place and identity, culturalcontests to define space and memory, and bourgeois values?

If we want to understand how the world was different in 1903 from whatit was in 1803, we could do worse than study Ohio. For its history helps usto do much more than describe what happened in an American state.We must ask why and how certain kinds of change happened in certain

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kinds of ways in certain kinds of places. We must consider why and howparticular human beings produce particular configurations of power andculture in particular places at particular times. If Susan Morgan is correctthat “ideas, terms, concepts, critical theories, all emerge from and take theirilluminating power from particular locations,” then why did Ohio illumi-nate so much so well in the nineteenth century?4

OHIO HISTORY AS WORLD HISTORY

The Eighteenth Century

The Ohio Country was at the far margins of the Atlantic World in theeighteenth century, but its significance was obvious to anyone with access toa map. The expansion of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centurieshad initiated an unprecedented degree of contact among the diverse peopleswho lived around the Atlantic basin. More human beings were migrating tofaraway places than at any other point in the history of the world. They hadestablished a remarkable regular exchange of goods, diseases, artifacts, lan-guage, clothes, customs, and people. And they were confronting culturaldifferences on a grand scale.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, Native Americans, includingthe Iroquois, the Shawnee, and the Miami, were powerful players in tradeand diplomacy with the French from the St. Lawrence River Valley throughthe Great Lakes to the Mississippi River as well as the English-speakingcolonists who hugged the western shores of the Atlantic from the gulf ofMaine to the Sea Islands. All these peoples were engaged in a struggle forthe interior of North America. The Seven Years’ (or French and Indian)War began with the failure of a 1754 Virginia expedition to take control ofthe forks of the Ohio River (now Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), one of themajor portals into heart of the continent. From the 1750s through the1810s, Europeans, Americans, and Native Americans fought regularly forthe right to claim the Ohio Country—the well-watered, fertile landbetween the Ohio River and Lake Erie. Long before Ohio was Ohio, welearn from R. David Edmunds, the place was as hotly contested as any areain North America.

Pennsylvanian Benjamin Franklin explained in 1754 that the “naturaladvantages” of the Ohio Country ensured that it would become “a populousand powerful dominion; and a great accession of power, either to England orFrance.”5 He was still dreaming of that future two years later in a letter to hisfriend, the Anglican minister George Whitefield. Together, they should “set-

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tle a Colony on the Ohio. . . . What a glorious Thing it would be, to settlein that fine Country a large Strong Body of Religious and IndustriousPeople!” Britain would benefit, and so would Native Americans, who wouldmeet “a better Sample of Christians than they commonly see in our Traders,the most vicious and abandoned Wretches of our Nation[.]”6

Franklin never went to the Ohio Valley, but victory in the Seven Years’War, which secured Great Britain’s claim to Canada and the Great Lakes,allowed English-speaking peoples to transform the region. WesternEuropeans tended to believe that the major process of cultural encounterand conquest had come to an end and was now a fit subject for study. Thecontest for the Ohio Country took place in a period “of consolidation andcategorization, synthesis and incorporation.” Its major themes—the dis-placement of native peoples, the transformation of exotic landscapes, themobilization of labor, the formation of creole identities, the tension with theimperial center, and the evolution of a multi-cultural society—were famil-iar to Europeans and Americans. In fact, Ohio was a highly visible variationon colonialism at a time when discussion of the nature of conquest, settle-ments, and cultural diversity was becoming more formal and self-conscious.

Throughout the Atlantic World, the idea of a nation as a voluntary asso-ciation of citizens defined by residency and shared purpose was displacingempires constructed around hierarchical ranks of dependency. Americanshad to define the borders of citizenship as well as the borders of theirnation. Nowhere was this challenge more explicit than in the expansion oftheir republican empire. The ways in which the United States would con-quer, colonize, and deal with issues of difference were first and most fullyworked out in the federal territory north of the Ohio River and the firststate carved out of it, Ohio.

While for Native Americans the revolution that gave birth to the stateof Ohio in 1803 represented disaster and destruction, for some Europeansand many Americans it heralded the possibilities of a post-colonial order.Ohio was at once a refuge from the tumult of revolutionary change and apotential model of revolutionary change. “We hope soon to arrive at ournew territory, where we shall find things in their original state, as God madethem and not perverted by the ungrateful hand of man,” wrote a Frenchparticipant in the Scioto Company’s settlement at Gallipolis in the early1790s. “France shall find herself renovated in the western world, withoutbeing disgraced by the frippery of kings or seeing the best blood of thenation split to gratify the ambitions of knaves and sycophants.”7 The inven-tor of the guillotine imagined migration to “the Ohio region” as an escapefrom France, “this poisoned land where a man can only find trouble, dis-gust, worry, disappointment, and danger.”8

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Americans had similar visions. The founders of the Ohio Company ofAssociates settlement at Marietta projected it as the future capital of theUnited States. Ships would connect via the Ohio and Mississippi riverswith the Atlantic World, encouraging the “prospect of a prodigious tradeand commerce.”9 With regular commercial and intellectual engagementwith the rest of the world, Ohio would become “the garden of the universe,the center of wealth, a place destined to the heart of a great Empire.”10 APennsylvania Quaker contemplated “the future grandeur of this westernworld—when this Stream [the Ohio River] should be covered with vesselsspreading their canvass to the wind, to convey the produce of this fertilecountry to New Orleans and across the Atlantic Ocean.”11

The construction of Ohio as a place where the manifold problems ofhumanity might be wiped away persisted into the nineteenth century. Noone saw Ohio as “a promised land” of freedom more than did AfricanAmericans.12 Thanks to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the OhioConstitution, slavery was illegal in the state. For enslaved AfricanAmericans, the Ohio River became a North American Jordan and the regionnorth of the river a Canaan. Thousands of enslaved blacks crossed the OhioRiver in the early nineteenth century, although not necessarily with theintrepid ingenuity of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Eliza, who made her way byleaping onto ice floes. “[O]nce they were infected with the spirit of freedom,they would try again and again, until they succeeded or were sold south.”13

What better symbolized the progressive possibilities of Ohio than theabolition of slavery?

On the other hand, what better symbolized the failure of human beingsto deal with difference than the issue of race? Increasingly romantic notionsconjured up a competing image of Ohio—the face of North America in theearly nineteenth century—as a place where all the horrors of conquest andcolonization flourished. The violence that punctuated decades of intermit-tent warfare reminded even the most naïve of emigrants that the region wasanything but virgin land. The origins of the United States in a colonialrebellion against the British Empire obfuscated the character of Ohio as acolony of a new republican empire.14

Still, the insistence on silently erasing native peoples that characterizedso many visions of the Ohio Country could not erase the fact that the statewas founded in the aftermath of a brutal assault on Native Americans.Despite their defeats of American armies in 1790 and 1791, they wereforced to recognize after the Legion of the United States smashed them atFallen Timbers in August 1794 that the Ohio River was no longer a barri-er to white settlement.

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Tales of wilderness savagery as exaggerated as idyllic dreams of globalcommerce suggested that human beings were regressing rather than pro-gressing. Far from metropolitan London, Paris, or even Philadelphia, theOhio Country seemed rife with anarchy and confusion. It was a wildernesswithout order and replete with danger. For centuries, Europeans hadapproached these marchlands of their notion of civilization with a mixtureof anticipation and dread.15 Eighteenth-century philosophes such as theComte de Buffon and Abbé Cornelius de Pauw asserted that the settlementof the Americas would lead inevitably to disaster for mankind. De Pauwclaimed that the New World was “so ill-favored by nature that all it con-tains is either degenerate or monstrous.” According to de Pauw, “the con-quest of the New World” was “the greatest of all misfortunes to befallmankind.”16

The treatment of Native Americans and blacks in the Ohio Countryseemed to confirm such fears. The new state was a social laboratory, anexperiment in human behavior. Would the citizens of Ohio be able to nur-ture a new kind of society held together by ties of affection, empathy, andrespect? Would they prove the natural order of democracy and capitalism?Or would they degenerate into selfishness and vulgarity in a dissolute, dif-fuse environment characterized by violence and brutality? Could humanbeings living side by side overcome differences of race, religion, and tradi-tion and organize themselves into a stable, prosperous society?17

These were not rhetorical questions, nor were they peculiar to Ohio.They were projections of people eager to justify their conquest of others incultural as well as military terms. Describing Native Americans as savagesentailed a refusal, or an inability, to understand them on their own terms,let alone two centuries of complicated interaction of Native Americans andEuropeans in North America. But this concern went beyond the presenceof Native Americans. It also involved anxiety that life in a brutal borderlandwould reduce Europeans to a state of savagery marked by selfishness anddegeneracy. Settlers in Ohio were as eager as European colonists inBarbados to demonstrate their integration into the larger Atlantic worldand to dispel any impression of degeneracy.18

The Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Ohioans’ conquest of Native Americans and their hostility to blacks madeit difficult for them to persuade others that their cultural development mat-ched their material development. As Ohio blossomed in the early nineteenth

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century, it became both a beacon of abolitionism and a bastion of racism.The absence of slavery solidified the state’s reputation as a remarkable place.Alexis de Tocqueville, one of many Europeans who examined the UnitedStates in search of the secret of its success, marveled at the impact of freelabor on the development of Ohio. Invoking a favorite trope of travelers,Tocqueville cited the Ohio Valley as evidence that “slavery, so cruel to theslave, was fatal to the master.” He attributed the “sparse” population andunderdevelopment of Kentucky to slavery. In Ohio, “a confused hum pro-claims from afar that men are busily at work; fine crops cover the fields; ele-gant dwellings testify to the taste and industry of the workers; on all sidesthere is evidence of comfort; man appears rich and contented; he works.”The “differences between ancient and modern civilizations” that separatedKentucky and Ohio were rooted in the fact that labor was “degrading” inthe former and “honorable” in the latter.19

As James O. Horton reminds us, however, blacks were restricted by legalcodes, segregated into separate schools and churches, and regularly attackedin the streets of Cincinnati. Living in a “borderland between slavery andfreedom,” Ohio’s white citizens “could not accept the permanent presenceof slavery, neither were they anxious to welcome free African Americansinto the state.”20 Blacks who migrated to Ohio full of hope “found everydoor closed against the colored man in a free State, excepting the jails andpenitentiaries, the doors of which were thrown wide open to receive him.”21

The fact that whites treated blacks badly is in some ways less interest-ing, and certainly less surprising, than the fact that growing numbers ofwhites in Ohio and other parts of the Atlantic World were becoming com-mitted opponents of slavery. The emergence of immediate abolitionism wasa product to some extent of a new emphasis on human freedom, of refinedhuman sensibility, and of an evangelical commitment to social justice.Slavery was antithetical to the workings of a liberal society, a vestige of thetriumph of dependency in an ancient world. What about Ohio made it aplace where some people confronted the evil of racial slavery even as theyrefused to confront the idea of black men and women as equal citizens?Where did Ohio fit into the movement in Western Europe toward an ame-lioration of the legal status of Africans and other peoples subjugated in theprocess of conquest and colonization?22

The tensions inherent in the abolitionist crusade led people throughoutthe Atlantic World, black as well as white, women as well as men, to for-mulate questions that went to the heart of the workings of a liberal society.Eric Foner identifies those questions in his essay. “What should be the bal-ance of power between local authority and the national government, who isentitled to American citizenship, what are the concrete meanings of free-

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dom and equality in the United States?” (see page 73 below). Foner revealsthe “central role” played by “Ohio and Ohioans” in the development of theanti-slavery Republican Party, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction of theUnion with a new legal commitment to equality before the law as well asthe retreat from that commitment. The contradiction between the drive to

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“Miss Prohibition and Mr. World.” From American Issue, January 4, 1919, p. 1, the magazine ofthe Anti-Saloon League, based in Westerville, Ohio. The League was a male-led organizationand here the editors seem to criticize the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, a female-ledgroup which tried to organize around the world. The sinister “Mr. World,” according to theAmerican Issue, would easily exploit the vulnerable “Miss Prohibition.” Courtesy, Westerville(Ohio) Public Library, Temperance Collection.


end slavery and the reluctance to accept blacks as full citizens played itselfout fully in Ohio.

Foner argues that “the war era also witnessed sweeping changes in Ohioitself,” that Ohio “was a far different state when the Civil War era endedthan it began” (see page 74 below). Not all those changes were wrought bythe war or the debate over slavery and race. Ethnicity, religion, and classwere just as important. Of the millions of people who migrated long dis-tances to new homes, hundreds of thousands of Germans, Italians, Irish,Poles, Slavs, and Russians ended up in Ohio. Like Birmingham, Glasgow,Liège, and Frankfurt, Cleveland and Toledo exploded on the backs of theindustrial revolution. Ohio was full of inventors: the residents of Daytonfiled the most patents per capita in the United States in 1900. The stateproduced the Wright brothers, Thomas Edison, and Charles Kettering.John Patterson revolutionized corporate organization with the NationalCash Register Company. Ohio’s factories were state-of-the-art, as were itsunions: both the United Mine Workers and the American Federation ofLabor were founded in Ohio.

Meanwhile, in the midst of remarkable diversity and change, the middle-class citizens of the state’s towns and cities engaged in an orgy of pietisticreform designed to inculcate character and ensure continuous moralimprovement. Ohio was among the leaders in the Atlantic World in theproliferation of voluntary reform societies (especially temperance) as well asin the establishment of private denominational colleges and public univer-sities. Kathryn Sklar’s essay stresses the strength of a “civil society” in whichcitizens voluntarily choose to try to “synthesize public and private good.”Ohio at the turn of the twentieth century had a “pattern of valuing com-monality over difference.” Sklar examines the use of federal troops inNewark to suppress the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 as well as the careersof Columbus Congregational minister Washington Gladden, Clevelandmayor Tom Johnson, president of the Ohio Federation of Colored Women’sClubs Hallie Q. Brown, and secretary-treasurer of the National AmericanWoman Suffrage Association Harriet Upton Taylor. If the western worldwas “antidemocratic” in 1900 because it excluded women from power andsegregated people by race, it had more than a few citizens, female as well asmale, black as well as white, “who used public space to build a more inclu-sive society. And Ohioans did more than their share of that importantwork” (see page 121 below).

Indeed, Ohioans were everywhere. We know they were in the WhiteHouse and Congress. But they were also traveling the world, learning aboutother places. The novelist William Dean Howells was among the first in a

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long list of creative Buckeyes who sojourned in Italy, France, and Germany,soaking up the newest developments in European culture and returning tothe United States full of new ideas. Artists such as John Henry Twachtmanwere captivated by Impressionism. Businessmen and politicians traveled toEuropean cities or read about them. Former President Ulysses S. Grantwent on a round-the-world trip between May 1877 and December 1879,visiting sites and talking to leaders of other countries.

Trans-Atlantic conversation was commonplace by the turn of thetwentieth century. Cleveland’s Progressive mayor, Tom Johnson, visitedGlasgow, as did Brand Whitlock, who succeeded Samuel M. “GoldenRule” Jones as mayor of Toledo. Devoting their careers to building com-munity in Ohio’s crowded cities, they marveled at what Whitlock called“the most wonderfully governed city, that is, from the standpoint ofdemocracy, in the English speaking world.” They recognized that Ohio’sproblems and Scotland’s problems, especially municipal ownership oftransportation and utilities, were similar, and that they might be suscepti-ble to similar solutions. Whitlock’s fear that “we are so cocky over here thatwe won’t learn anything from the experience” was at that time somewhatmisplaced.23 Cleveland lawyer and councilman Frederick C. Howe wrote aseries of books and articles urging Americans to imitate British andGerman urban models.

Mayor Johnson commissioned Chicago architect Daniel Burnham todesign “a vast court of neoclassical public buildings,” including governmentoffices, a railroad station, a library, and an auditorium.24 Although Burnham’splan was only partly implemented, it was inspired by Baron Georges-EugèneHaussmann’s famous reorganization of Paris into a city of broad boulevardsand public spaces. As in art and literature, prominent Ohioans were engagedin a serious conversation with Europeans about how to deal with problemscreated by urbanization and industrialization.

Europeans continued to flock to Ohio to check in on the grand experi-ment in democracy and capitalism, although they frequently complainedthat a culture of equality produced little more than banality and material-ism. Frances Trollope set the tone in her account of her sojourn inCincinnati in the early 1830s. She came away convinced that every man was“employed in search of that hone of Hybla, vulgarly called money; neitherart, science, learning, nor pleasure can seduce them from its pursuit.” Thefact that “[a]ll animal wants are supplied profusely in Cincinnati, and at avery easy rate” barely compensated for the “total and universal want of man-ners.” Trollope had never seen “any people who appeared to live so muchwithout amusement as the Cincinnatians.”25

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Novelist Charles Dickens was slightly more charitable during his 1842visit. Traveling by coach from Cincinnati to Columbus, he had a field daymocking the monosyllabic language of the coachmen, the earnest temper-ance houses, the predictable villages, and the boring conversation. WhileCincinnati was “a beautiful city; cheerful, thriving, and animated” with“intelligent, courteous, and agreeable” society, Ohio as a whole was a verydull place. Like Trollope, Dickens suggested that the state’s rapid rise toeminence was a product of single-minded ambition focused largely onmaterial accumulation and creature comforts.26

Most Europeans spent too little time in Ohio to have anything morethan superficial impressions. Still, the idea that Ohio embodied theAmerican predilection to sacrifice its soul on the altars of money and equal-ity was too popular to be ignored. Even in the midst of World War I, Britishnewspaper publisher Lord Northcliffe found Ohioans’ “prosperity” “irritat-ing. Was there ever a land so overflowing with milk and honey? . . . Wasthere ever so many gloomy, but effective looking plants?”27

A generation earlier, Lord James Bryce was more measured. “Equalityimproves manners, for it strengthens the basis of all good manners, respectfor other men and women simply as men and women, irrespective of theirstation in life,” he wrote in the 1880s.28 The major downside of equality was,of course, “uniformity.” “Travel where you will,” Bryce wrote, “you feel thatwhat you have found in one place you will find in another.”29 What madeOhio important was its critical political role. Its voters decided nationalelections. Because it was a “great and often doubtful State,” divided ratherevenly between the major parties, its politics were highly competitive and“presageful.” And it was for this reason that so many Ohioans were presi-dential candidates between 1868 and 1920.30

The most overwhelming evidence for the global character of Ohio in thenineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, lies not in the words ofintellectuals but in the decisions of hundreds of thousands of people to mi-grate to the state. Can we imagine any greater testimony to the significanceof Ohio? People talked about Cincinnati in Hamburg and about Toledo inBeirut. Blacks in Alabama imagined life in Cleveland and rural Appalachi-ans discussed Akron. And when they moved, they sent letters and newspa-pers home, full of information. Migrants from within the United States trav-eled back to Mississippi and eastern Kentucky by train, bus, and car.

The Mid- and Later Twentieth Century

Until the 1950s, Ohio was at the center of global networks of human migra-

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tion and information distribution. It was a destination of choice, a placeworth talking about, worth considering, worth imagining. Reality disap-pointed, of course. People left, moved on, returned home. But whatever theydecided, they were examples of a huge number of people who were interest-ed in the possibilities of Ohio.

Among the most significant changes in twentieth-century Ohio wasthe precipitous decline in that attitude. By the middle part of the centu-ry, travelers were ignoring the state—and to some extent the Midwestaltogether. Immigrants from the South continued to pour across the OhioRiver, but their conversations were more regional than global. Interest inregionalism as a counterpoint to the homogenization of the United Statesunder the pressure of commerce and mass consumer culture largelyfocused on the South, Appalachia, New England, and the RockyMountain West. Even in explicit studies of regionalism, the Midwest wassimply invisible.31

Ohio—like the Midwest as a whole—had lost the cachet it enjoyed inthe nineteenth century. A symbol of mainstream America, it conjured upimages of complacency and security, of domestic refuge from the tribula-tions and possibilities of the world beyond it.

English journalist Graham Hutton, surviving World War II in Chicago,observed in Midwest at Noon (1946) that the region of which Ohio was partwas changing under the pressure of “national uniformity,” becoming morelike the “East,” losing whatever peculiar characteristics it may once havehad. Not necessarily in decline, the region was nonetheless no longer on therise. It had a sense of stability in its “cult of the average” and its “belief in,and even satisfaction with, popular ignorance.” “What pays business mustbe right. It is ‘what the people want.’ They do not want ideas or culture.They want washing-machines, movies, soap operas.” Hutton thoughtCleveland and Cincinnati particularly solid midwestern cities, thanks toevents that had happened years before. The “greater sense of civic responsi-bility” among Cleveland’s leaders reflected the legacy of the New England“cultural revolution in early Ohio.” Cincinnati was more cosmopolitan andefficient than Mrs. Trollope had thought.32

More common was the reaction of the French feminist and writerSimone de Beauvoir during her February 1947 visit to Oberlin. Once syn-onymous with radical causes such as abolitionism and woman’s rights,Oberlin struck Beauvoir as staid and stagnant. Students she met in “adreary cafeteria” after her lecture did not discuss “social problems” or“intellectual matters”; rather, they talked about “nothing,” or, rather, “sportsor college organizations.” What most discouraged Beauvoir was that thestudents were

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so apathetic while being neither blind nor unconscious. They know anddeplore the oppression of thirteen million blacks, the terrible poverty ofthe South, the almost equally desperate poverty that pollutes the big cities.They witness the rise, more ominous every day, of racism and reactionaryattitudes—the birth of a new kind of fascism. They know that their coun-try is responsible for the world’s future. But they themselves don’t feelresponsible for anything, because they don’t think they can do anything inthis world. At the age of twenty, they are convinced that their thought isfutile, their good intentions ineffective.33

Although she was in Ohio for only a few hours, hardly long enough tobecome an expert on the place, Beauvoir was as condescending as Dickensor Trollope. Nonetheless, her words suggested that Ohio was no longerinteresting, not even worth criticizing. One Hungarian-born student atOberlin spoke to her of returning to Europe—“the only place where it stillmeans something to think.”34 This melodramatic statement embodied thefeelings of many young Ohioans who left the state to seek fame, fortune,and stimulation elsewhere.

In popular culture, Ohio was becoming a code word for complacency,comfort, and an idealized past of small towns. A 1950s Broadway musicalplayed on that image in its title. The Wonderful Town was New York City, aplace of energy and excitement. Two sisters from Columbus migrate toManhattan in search of possibilities. When they miss their home (“Why-o,why-o, why-o/did I ever leave Ohio?” they lament), they are missing safetyand security. It’s a fleeting sense of longing. To engage the world, they haveto go elsewhere. And they know it. Indeed, Ohio had become a place peoplecame from rather than a place people went to. When a Syracuse Universityprofessor remarked in 2000 that “There are no trends being set in Ohio,” hewas also remarking on a seismic shift in the reputation of the state.35

James T. Patterson stresses “that many trends in Ohio during the erasurrounding its sesquicentennial year of 1953 resembled those of its nearneighbors, and of trends nationwide.” He quotes historian Carl Wittke’sremark that “what we are doing in Ohio today has also, happily, been goingon elsewhere. It is part of the American way, and the average Ohioan is alsothe average American” (see page 130 below). But it became abundantly clearover the next quarter of a century that that was no longer the case. The statewas “less at the center of things after 1970 than it had been,” whether themeasure was personal income or personal satisfaction. The optimism of the1950s became the contentiousness of the 1960s and the relative bleaknessof the 1970s, particularly because of “the rise of more open, sometimes vio-lent racial tensions” and “the spread of serious economic problems.” Racial

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unrest in cities, the rapid demise of the steel and other heavy industry, andthe shooting of four Kent State University students in May 1970—“Fourdead in Ohio” chanted Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young—confirmed thatOhio was in the midst of hard times.

LOOKING AHEAD

The progressive story of nineteenth-century Ohio thus turns into one ofdecline and stagnation. Observing that the state in 1903 “was a destinationof choice, a place where Americans went to enhance their economic stand-ing,” Herbert Asher concludes that Ohio is “no longer the heart of it all.”Beyond the shift from a manufacturing to a service economy, Asher identi-fies a “major obstacle” in the inability of Ohioans to respond to challengescollectively. “Ohio as a state has an incredibly difficult time coming togeth-er to achieve common purposes.” Somehow, diverse peoples and regionsmust end “the drift and consciously” choose “to build [a] future in particu-lar directions.” Only then will Ohio “be a destination of choice once againjust as it was a century ago.”

It is important to stress that Ohioans have to a large extent chosentheir fate. From the middle of the twentieth century, they have generallyreciprocated others’ lack of interest. In part, this disengagement reflects therise during the Cold War of an aggressive patriotism that scorns most ofwhat the rest of the world has to offer, from automobiles to ideas. Neverhas the utilitarian emphasis in Ohio’s public culture been stronger: foreignideas and products are often seen as dangerous threats to the well-being ofOhioans. Many citizens of the state, quite happy with the status quo, pre-fer to live away from cutting-edge change. They enjoy the image of Ohioas an oasis of comfortable provinciality, a symbol of traditional values andheartland normalcy. They spend more time celebrating the past than imag-ining the future. Where in the early nineteenth century many people cameto Ohio because they wanted to experiment, most Ohioans in the earlytwenty-first century are content with enjoying—and defending—theachievements of their predecessors. Having developed a good society, theyhave no interest in risking any parts of it on something untried and unfa-miliar. They have lost the edge, in all its many meanings, that they onceenjoyed.

In his concluding essay, William E. Kirwan laments that loss. He advo-cates state investment in technology programs, especially in areas ofbiotechnology that could eradicate poverty, disease, and hunger from theworld. Assuming the attitude taken by Ohioans in the nineteenth and early


“American Prejudice Abroad.” In his article, published inthe African American newspaper The Gazette inCleveland, Ohio, on July 1, 1893, editor Harry C. Smithwrote about racism in Hawaii (then an American protec-torate). He called for African Americans to opposeracism wherever it occurred in the world and “to have acare, also, for the interests of all ‘colored’ people, eventhose of Hawaii.” Courtesy, The Ohio Historical Society.


twentieth centuries, Kirwan argues for the value of experimentation, devel-opment, and public debate. Whether or not we agree with his prescriptions,we should not ignore his challenge to reconsider definitions of the qualityof life, the nature of education and its value to society, and the character ofcitizenship in the Information Age.

In short, Kirwan wants Ohioans to reinvigorate their conversation withthe world, a conversation in which Ohioans presently use language moreappropriate for 1903 than 2053, and we should start that process with themuch discussed and little understood concept of globalization. All too fre-quently Ohioans, like most Americans, believe that globalization is some-thing new under the sun. They concede that we must learn about the rest ofthe world, but consent to do so only reluctantly and mainly for economicreasons.

As the following essays try to demonstrate, those assumptions are mis-placed. Our current preoccupations echo long-standing themes in the histo-ry of the state. “While we are in the world, we must converse with theworld,” wrote a 1790 contributor to the Louisville Kentucky Gazette in astatement of the sentiment that informed Ohio’s creation. “All mankind . . .are our brethren, and we are interested, in their pleasures and pains, theirsufferings, or their deliverances, throughout the world. Accounts of theseshould produce in us suitable emotions[,] which would tend to the exerciseof different virtues, and the improvement of our tempers. We should accus-tom ourselves hereby to rejoice with those who rejoice, and mourn withthose who mourn.”36

To mourn and rejoice with others is to do much more than practicebenevolence or cultivate virtue. It is, in fact, an act of self-interest. For, asoften as not, human beings have thrived as citizens of Ohio to the extentthey have also seen themselves as citizens of the world.

NOTES

1. Pearl Buchanan to Andrew Cayton, 28 May 1972, in author’s possession.2. Quoted in Andrew R. L. Cayton, Ohio: The History of a People (Columbus: The

Ohio State University Press, 2002), 292.3. William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal

of American History 78 (1992): 1347–76; Katherine G. Morrissey, Mental Territories:Mapping the Inland Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); and Andrew R. L.Cayton and Susan E. Gray, eds., The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

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4. Susan Morgan, Place Matters: Gendered Geography in Victorian Women’s TravelBooks about Southeast Asia (Rutgers: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 23.

5. Benjamin Franklin, “A Plan for Settling Two Western Countries,” in LeonardW. Labaree, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 36 vols. (New Haven:Yale UniversityPress, 1959–1998), 5: 457.

6. Benjamin Franklin to George Whitefield, 2 July 1756, in Labaree, ed., ThePapers of Benjamin Franklin, 6: 468, 469.

7. Quoted in T. T. Belote, The Scioto Speculation and the French Settlement atGallipolis (Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati Press, 1907), 73.

8. Quoted in Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Imageof American Society to 1815 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 172.

9. James Varnum, “An Oration Delivered at Marietta, July 4, 1788 (Newport,R.I., 1788), in Samuel Prescott Hildreth, Pioneer History (Cincinnati: H. W. Derby,1848), 505.

10. Thomas Wallcut to George Minot, 31 Oct.–3 Nov. 1789, in George Dexter,ed., “Journal of Thomas Wallcut,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society(Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1879–80), 17: 175.

11. Joseph E. Walker, ed., “The Travel Notes of Joseph Gibbons, 1804,” OhioHistory 92 (1983): 124.

12. Stephen A. Vincent, Southern Seed, Northern Soil: African-American FarmCommunities in the Midwest, 1765–1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1999); Juliet E. K. Walker, Free Frank: A Black Pioneer on the Antebellum Frontier(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983).

13. Stuart Seely Sprague, ed., This Promised Land: The Autobiography of John P.Parker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 72.

14. Edward Watts, An American Colony: Regionalism and the Roots of MidwesternCulture (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2002).

15. Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America (New York: Knopf,1985).

16. Quoted in C. Vann Woodward, The Old World’s New World (New York: NewYork Public Library, 1991), 6.

17. Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance toRomanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 117–88.

18. John H. Elliott, “Introduction: Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World,” inNicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, eds., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World,1500–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 3–14.

19. J. P. Mayer, ed., Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Garden City,N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), 345, 346.

20. See page 45 below. See also, Stephen Middleton, The Black Laws in the OldNorthwest: A Documentary History (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993).

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21. Allan Peskin, ed., North into Freedom: The Autobiography of John Malvin, FreeNegro, 1795–1800 (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1988), 40.

22. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975); Thomas Bender, ed., The Antislavery Debate:Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1992).

23. Quoted in Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a ProgressiveAge (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 139.

24. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 170.25. Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (Barre, Mass.: Imprint

Society, 1969), 35, 37, and 57.26. Charles Dickens, American Notes (New York: Modern Library, 1996), 213,

216.27. Quoted in J. Lee Thompson, “‘To Tell the People of America the Truth’: Lord

Northcliffe in the USA, Unofficial British Propaganda, June–November 1917,”Journal of Contemporary History 34, no. 2 (April 1999): 258.

28. James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (New York: Macmillan and Co.,1888), 2: 662.

29. Quoted in Woodward, Old World’s New World, 60.30. Bryce, America Commonwealth, 2: 583–84.31. See, for example, Edward L. Ayers, et al., All Over the Map: Rethinking

American Regions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).32. Graham Hutton, Midwest at Noon (DeKalb: Northern Illlinois University

Press, 1990 [1946]), 342, 343, 246, 193, 152, 153.33. Simone de Beauvoir, America Day by Day (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1999), 93, 94.34. Ibid., 94.35. Quoted in Cayton, Ohio, 399.36. Quoted in David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of

American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1997), 110.

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“The Indians Delivering up the English Captives to Colonel Bouquet near his camp at the Forksof the Muskingum in North America in November 1764.” Peter Canot engraving after aBenjamin West drawing, in William Smith, Historical Account of the Expedition against theOhio Indians (Philadelphia and London, 1766). The English painter West drew the Ohio Indianswith a measure of humanity and dignity, caring for their white “captives” and incorporatingthem into Native American community life. Smith noted in his text the reluctance of some ofthese “captives” to return to European civilization. Courtesy, The State Library of Ohio.

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This collection of essays invites Ohioans to rethink their place, and theirstate’s place, in the world. To that end, it offers a different way of studyingOhio’s history and the traditional topics of Ohio history are joined by oth-ers less familiar. Thus, beside mention of the Enabling Act of 1803, whichcreated the state, we read of William Hand and his attempts to sell his cropson the world market in the 1810s; and as well as John Hunt Morgan andhis raids during the Civil War, we learn about Ohio’s women temperanceadvocates whose efforts gained widespread publicity in Europe in the1870s.

Our authors provide detailed reading suggestions in the notes to eachchapter. For a general overview, readers may consult with confidence:

• Andrew R. L. Cayton, Ohio: A History of a People (Columbus: TheOhio State University Press, 2002), which discusses how Ohioanshave created and recreated their communities and identities fromstatehood to the present.

• Warren Van Tine and Michael Pierce, eds., Builders of Ohio: ABiographical History (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press,2003), which presents essays on important people who shapedOhio from the era of George Croghan and British colonization inthe Ohio country to David Thomas and the creation of his fast foodempire.

Comprehensive overviews that synthesize a wide range of scholarshipinclude Eugene H. Roseboom and Francis P. Weisenburger A History ofOhio, 2d ed. (Columbus: Ohio Historical Society, 1976), and GeorgeKnepper, Ohio and Its People, 3d ed. (Kent, OH: Kent State UniversityPress, 2003). An older but still valuable collection is Carl Wittke, ed.,History of the State of Ohio, 6 vols. (Columbus: Ohio State Archaeologicaland Historical Society, 1941–44), which covers the frontier period throughindustrialization.

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For a discussion of Benjamin West and the importance of his “Ohiocountry” drawings, see Jules D. Prown, “The Expedition against the OhioIndians in 1764 under Colonel Bouquet: Two early Drawings by BenjaminWest,” in Guilland Sutherland, ed., British Art 1740–1820: Essays in Honorof Robert R. Wark (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1992), 205–33.On Ohio’s “post office art,” funded by the federal government during theNew Deal, several examples of which feature in this volume, see GeraldMarkowitz and Marlene Park, “Not by Bread Alone: Post Office Art of theNew Deal,” Timeline 6, no. 3 ( June–July 1989): 2–19.

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Herbert B. Asher

Professor emeritus of political science and counselor to the university pres-ident, Herbert Asher joined the faculty of The Ohio State University in1970 after receiving his BA with Honors in mathematics from BucknellUniversity, and his MA and Ph.D. degrees in political science from theUniversity of Michigan. He is a member of several academic honor soci-eties, including Phi Beta Kappa. A prolific scholar and highly regardedteacher and mentor, Professor Asher is author of Polling and the Public:What Every Citizen Should Know, now in its 5th edition, and of PresidentialElections and American Politics: Voters, Candidates, and Campaigns since 1952.He is also the co-author of American Labor Unions in the Electoral Arena(2001). A special area of research and teaching interest over the past threedecades has been Ohio politics in the national arena. Professor Asher hasserved as co-editor of the American Journal of Political Science and was thefounding and interim director of the John Glenn Institute for Public Ser-vice and Public Policy at The Ohio State University. As an emeritus mem-ber of the faculty, Professor Asher continues to teach and has receivedrecognition for his excellence in teaching. Actively engaged in public as wellas professional affairs, he serves as a member of the Ohio Ethics Commis-sion, the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission, and the ColumbusMetropolitan Club. He is president of the board of trustees of CommunityResearch Partners, a partnership between United Way, the City of Colum-bus, and The Ohio State University. Professor Asher is currently engaged inresearch that will result in a book entitled Ohio Politics and Government.

Andrew R. L. Cayton

Distinguished Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford,Ohio, Andrew R. L. Cayton has published widely in the history of trans-Appalachian North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Born in Cincinnati, he graduated from Marietta (Ohio) High School in

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1972 and the University of Virginia in 1976. He received his Ph.D. fromBrown University in 1981. His publications include Ohio: The History of aPeople (2002); Frontier Indiana; The Midwest and the Nation: Rethinking theHistory of an American Region (1990), co-authored with Peter S. Onuf; andThe Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780–1825(1986). He co-edited The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History(2001) with Susan E. Gray, and Contact Points: American Frontiers from theMohawk Valley to the Mississippi (1998), with Fredrika J. Teute. ProfessorCayton has been the John Adams Visiting Professor of American Studiesat Leiden University in the Netherlands. His forthcoming books are TheDominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North American History, 1500–2000,co-authored with Fred Anderson; and The Encyclopedia of the Midwest, co-edited with Richard Sisson and Christian Zacher.

R. David Edmunds

The Watson Professor of American History at the University of Texas atDallas, R. David Edmunds grew up in Illinois and received his BA fromMillikin University and his MA from Illinois State University, both in hishome state, and his Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma. His researchand teaching focus on Native American people, particularly in Illinois,Indiana, and Ohio. He is the author of more than one hundred essays andarticles and is author or editor of eight books, among which are ThePotawatomis: Keepers of Fire (1978), awarded the 1978 Francis ParkmanPrize; The Shawnee Prophet (1983), awarded the 1983 Ohioana Prize forBiography; Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership (1998); with JosephL. Peyser, The Fox Wars: The Mesquakie Struggle for New France (1993),awarded the 1994 Heggoy Prize; and The New Warriors: Native AmericanLeaders since 1900 (2001). Professor Edmunds has received awards from theFord Foundation, the Newberry Library, the National Endowment for theHumanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation for support of his work andthe Award of Merit from the American Indian Historians Association inrecognition of it. Formerly acting director of the D’Arcy McNickle Centerfor the History of the American Indian at the Newberry Library inChicago, he currently serves as president of the American Society forEthnohistory.

Eric Foner

The DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, wherehe received both his BA and Ph.D. degrees, Eric Foner specializes in the

Notes on Contributors

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Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery, and nineteenth-century America.His many books in these areas include Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: TheIdeology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (1970); Tom Paine andRevolutionary America (1971); Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War(1980); Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (1983);Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988), whichwon the Bancroft Prize, the Parkman Prize, the Owsley Prize, the LionelTrilling Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for History, andwas a finalist for the National Book Award; Reader’s Companion to AmericanHistory (edited with John A. Garraty, 1991); Freedom’s Lawmakers: ADirectory of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction (1993); The Story ofAmerican Freedom (1998); and Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in aChanging World (2002). He has also served as curator of the award-winningexhibitions A House Divided (Chicago Historical Society) and America’sReconstruction (Virginia Historical Society). He has served as Pitt Professorof American History and Institutions at Cambridge; Fulbright Professor ofAmerican History at Moscow State University; Harmsworth Professor ofAmerican History at Oxford; and has been president of the Organizationof American Historians as well as of the American Historical Association.He has been elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciencesand Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Committed to teaching,Professor Foner is a recipient of the Great Teacher Award, given by theSociety of Columbia Graduates.

James Oliver Horton

The Benjamin Banneker Professor of American Studies and History atGeorge Washington University and director of the Afro-AmericanCommunities Project of the National Museum of American History at theSmithsonian Institution, James Oliver Horton received his Ph.D. degreefrom Brandeis University in 1973. He has lectured internationally, andserved as Senior Fulbright Professor of American Studies at the Universityof Munich as well as assistant to the German government in developingAmerican studies programs in the former East Germany. He is the authorof numerous books, among which are Black Bostonians: Family Life andCommunity Struggle in the Antebellum North (with Lois E. Horton, 1979);Free People of Color: Inside the African American Community (1993); In Hopeof Liberty: Culture, Protest, and Community among Northern Free Blacks,1700–1860 (with Lois E. Horton, 1997), nominated for the Pulitzer Prizein History; and Hard Road to Freedom: The African America Story (2001). Heserves as editor of the projected twelve-volume series entitled The


189


Landmarks of American History being published by Oxford University Press.A strong advocate of public history, Professor Horton has served as a mem-ber and chair of the National Park System Advisory Board and as senioradviser on Historical Interpretation and Public Education for the Directorof the National Park Service. He has served as historical adviser to severalmuseums, including the Underground Railroad Freedom Center inCincinnati, the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, ColonialWilliamsburg, and the Tenement House Museum in New York City. Hehas served as a consultant for numerous video presentations on theDiscovery and History channels and was himself a subject of the HistoryChannel series “Great Minds in American History” hosted by RogerMudd. Devoted to teaching, Professor Horton has been recognized forteaching excellence by the Carnegie Foundation and is a recipient of theTrachtenberg Distinguished Teaching Award conferred by GeorgeWashington University.

William E. Kirwan

A widely respected academic leader and public intellectual, William E.Kirwan is chancellor of the University System of Maryland. He has servedas president of The Ohio State University and the University of Maryland,College Park, where prior to his presidency he was a member of the facul-ty for thirty-four years. Dr. Kirwan received his BA in mathematics fromthe University of Kentucky and his MA and Ph.D. degrees in mathematicsfrom Rutgers University. He is a member of several honorary and profes-sional societies, including Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi, the AmericanMathematical Society, and the Mathematical Association of America.Prolific as a scholar, he is co-editor of the book Advances in Complex Analysisand has published many articles on mathematical research and majorreports on issues in higher education. A distinguished leader in Americanhigher education, Dr. Kirwan has held consequential positions in nationalorganizations and commissions dealing with the relationship between high-er education and social and economic change. He serves on the boards ofdirectors of the American Council on Education (ACE), the NationalAssociation of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC),the Business-Higher Education Forum, and was appointed by PresidentGeorge H. W. Bush to the Board of Advisers on Historically BlackColleges and Universities. His leadership roles include being chair ofNASULGC’s Commission on International Affairs, chair of its Council ofPresidents, and chair of the Commission on Human Resources and Social


190


Change. Appointed by President Clinton to serve as a member of theNational Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21stCentury, Dr. Kirwan also chaired the National Research Council’sCommission on Mathematical Sciences, which produced the report Movingbeyond Myths: Revitalizing Undergraduate Mathematics. He served as chair ofthe committee of the national Kellogg Commission on the Future of HigherEducation, which produced the report entitled Renewing the Covenant:Learning, Discovery, and Engagement in a New Age and Different World.During his tenure as president of The Ohio State University, Dr. Kirwan waselected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

James T. Patterson

Ford Foundation Professor of History at Brown University, James T.Patterson received his BA from Williams College after which he served inthe U.S. Army and as a reporter for the Hartford (Conn.) Courant, wherehe learned the skill and virtue of writing under the pressure of deadlinesand in aiming his prose at a wide audience of readers, experience he con-siders to have been valuable for his later work as a writer about history.Before entering Harvard, from which he received his MA and Ph.D.degrees, he was a high school teacher of history in Milwaukee. He hasserved on the history faculties of Indiana University, Bloomington, wherehe was extended the University Teaching Award, as well as Brown, and hasheld the Harmsworth Chair of American History at Oxford, the JohnAdams Chair of American Civilization at the University of Amsterdam,and the Pitt Chair of American History and Institutions at Cambridge.With broad interests in the social, economic, and political history of theUnited States from the nineteenth century to the present, ProfessorPatterson is the author of numerous books, including America’s Struggleagainst Poverty in the Twentieth Century (1981); Grand Expectations: TheUnited States, 1945–1974 (1996); Brown v. Board of Education: A CivilRights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (2001); and Mr. Republican: ABiography of Robert A. Taft (1972). His work has been awarded theFrederick Jackson Turner Book Prize; the Bancroft Prize in AmericanHistory; and, for his biography of Senator Robert A. Taft, the OhioanaAward for Biography. Professor Patterson’s research has received supportfrom the National Endowment for the Humanities and the GuggenheimFoundation. His research has been recognized by his election as a memberof the Society of American Historians and as a Fellow of the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Sciences.


191


Kathryn Kish Sklar

Distinguished Professor of History and co-director of the Center for theHistorical Study of Women and Gender at the State University of NewYork at Binghamton, Kathryn Sklar was born and raised in Columbus,Ohio. She received her BA degree from Radcliffe College in 1965 and herPh.D. from the University of Michigan in 1969. While her research andteaching interests encompass a wide scope, they center on women in socialmovements in the United States, comparatively considered with British andGerman women. Her work focuses on both the Antebellum and theProgressive eras. A leading scholar and teacher in her field, her numerouspublications include Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity(1973); a collection of Harriet Beecher Stowe novels: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, orLife among the Lowly; The Minister’s Wooing; Oldtown Folks (1982); FlorenceKelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830–1900(1995); and U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays (withLinda Kerber and Alice Kessler-Harris, 1995). Professor Sklar’s work hastwice received the Berkshire Prize, awarded by the Berkshire Conference onWomen Historians for the best book written by a woman scholar in anyfield. Her research has received support from the National Endowment forthe Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Association ofUniversity Women, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and theGuggenheim Foundation as well as from the Center for Advanced Study inthe Behavioral and Social Sciences at Stanford University. She has served aspresident of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and ProgressiveEra and has been elected a member of the Society of American Historians.Devoted to teaching, Professor Sklar serves as the co-director of the Centerfor the Teaching of American History at the State University of New Yorkat Binghamton.


192


Adair law, 115Adams County, 24Adena People, 24–25The Affluent Society (Galbraith), 133African Americans, 4–5, 8, 46, 49–50,

53–64, 66, 74–75, 81–86, 88–90, 107,116, 119–21, 129, 131, 141–42, 150.See also slavery

Akron Beacon Journal, 164Akron, Ohio, 98, 171American Antislavery Society, 65American Colonization Society, 60–61American Federation of Labor, 12American Female Moral Reform Society,

113American Missionary Association, 107American Revolution, 30–32Ames, Adelbert, 90Amesville, Ohio, 47Anthony, Susan B., 118–19Appalachians, 4–5, 129, 144, 150Argonne Laboratory, 132–33Armstrong, Neil, 140Asher, Herbert, 17, 170, 176Ashley, James M., 84Ashtabula County Female Anti-Slavery

Society, 64Atlanta, Ga., 180Atlanta University, 107Atwater, Caleb, 139Austin, Tex., 177, 179, 180automotive industry, 140, 153. See also

HondaAvondale area, 141

Baltimore, 100Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, 100–101Beauvoir, Simone de, 15–16Becker, Gary, 175

193

Bezos, Jeff, 175Bimeler, Joseph, 47Bingham, John, 73, 85Bionaz, Robert, 111biotechnology, 174, 177, 178Bird, Henry, 31Birney, James G., 64, 65, 78Bismarck, Otto Von, 160Black Laws, 46, 54–55, 66, 67Board of Lady Managers, 120Bombeck, Erma, 140Boone, Daniel, 31Boston, 172, 177Bowman, John, 31Bradlee, Ben, 130Bricker, John, 135, 136, 137British Women’s Temperance Association,

116The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engi-

neers, 105Brough, John, 83Browder, Earl, 137Brown County, 50, 58Brown, Hallie Quinn, 12, 118–20Brown, John, 73Brown v. Board of Education, 131, 141Bryce, Lord James, 14buckeye symbol, 65Buffon, Comte de, 9Bureau of Labor Statistics, 172Burnham, Daniel, 13Burton, Harold, 141

Cahokia, 24–25California, 171, 178Camden, 143Canada, 55Canton, Ohio, 98carpetbaggers, 85

INDEX


Index

194

Cary, Samuel, 88Casto, Don, 134Catt, Carrie Chapman, 118Cayugas, 26Celeste, Richard, 149Celoron, Pierre Joseph, 28Central Friendly Inn, 116Champion City Guard, 101, 104, 105Chase, Philander, 76–77Chase, Salmon P., 67, 73, 77–78Chemical Abstract Services (CAS), 160Chicago, 100Chicago World’s Fair, 120“Chillicothe Junto,” 44Chillicothe, Ohio, 31, 43, 135The Christian Way (Gladden), 106Cincinnati Commercial, 89Cincinnati, Ohio, 4, 10, 13–15, 50–58,

60–61, 64, 66, 68–69, 74–76, 81–82,87–89, 99, 129, 136, 141, 155, 156

Cincinnati Trades and Labor Assembly,87–88

Circleville National Guard, 101, 104Civil Rights Act of 1866, 84Civil War, 12, 73, 79–83Clark, George Rogers, 31Cleaveland, Moses, 53Cleveland Browns, 141Cleveland, Ohio, 4, 15, 53–56, 74, 80, 82,

88, 98–99, 109–13, 116, 129, 134–36,141–43, 155, 157, 171, 177

The Cleveland Plain Dealer, 164Clyde, Ohio, 154Coit, Stanton, 117Colebrook, St. James, 55College Corner, Ohio, 3Colored Woman’s League of Washington,

D.C., 120Columbian Exposition, 120Columbus Board of Trade, 108The Columbus Dispatch, 164Columbus, Ohio, 3, 89, 98, 106–9, 113,

117, 140, 141, 143, 155, 157, 160–63,171

Committee on Southern Work, 116communism, 130–31, 137–39Compromise of 1850, 67–68Coney Island, 141Cooke, Henry, 80Cooke, Jay, 74, 80Coonskin Library, 47

Copperheads, 82“Cornstalk Brigade,” 137Cox, Samuel S., 83Croghan, George, 23, 27Cuyahoga County, 53Cuyahoga River, 136

Davies, Richard, 143Dayton Daily News, 164Dayton Engineering Laboratories, 99Dayton, Ohio, 66, 98–99, 142, 143, 159,

171Dayton-Wright Airplane Company, 99Delaware County, 161Delawares, 26, 27, 31, 33, 45, 46Dell computer company, 179Democratic Party, 67, 77, 82–83, 86,

89–90, 96, 137Detroit, 32Dickens, Charles, 14Donahue, Phil, 140Dorn, Jacob, 106, 108Douglass, Frederick, 80Downie, Leonard, 130Dragonfly, 27–29Du Bois, W. E. B., 107Dumas Hotel, 57–58, 66

economy, 132–34, 139–40, 142–45,151–55, 158–64, 170–81

Edmunds, R. David, 6–7, 170education, 76–77, 112, 143–44, 150, 156,

157, 162–64, 172–73, 178, 181–82. Seealso knowledge economy

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 130–32, 137,176–77

Elyria, Ohio, 61“Enola Gay,” 139Equal Rights League, 82Eries, 26, 27

Fallen Timbers, 8, 35Farnham, Marynia, 131–32FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation),

138–39Fiedler, Edgar, 169Finney, Charles, 63First Congregational Church (Colum-

bus), 106–8, 117Fleischman, John, 144Foner, Eric, 10–11


Forbes/Milken ranking, 171Ford, Seabury, 67Fort Ancient, 25Fort Finney, 33Fort Harmar, 33Fort McIntosh, 33Fort Miami, 35Fort Recovery, 35Franklin, Benjamin, 6–7Franklin County, 161The Freemen, 120Free Soil Party, 67, 77, 78Frémont, John C., 77Frey, William, 180

Galbraith, John Kenneth, 133Gallipolis, Ohio, 7Garfield, James A., 74, 85, 95, 118Garrison, William Lloyd, 65General Federation of Women’s Clubs,

117George, Henry, 111Georgia, 179–80German separatists, 47Germany, 97–98Giddings, Joshua R., 55–56, 75Gist, Samuel, 49–50, 58Gladden, Washington, 12, 106–9Glenn, John, 140Glenville area, 142globalization, 154–55GM plant, 157Gnaddenhutten, Ohio, 31Goodbye Columbus (Roth), 136Grant, Ulysses S., 13, 74, 89, 90, 95Great Lakes, 46, 53Great Railroad Strike of 1877, 12, 99–106Greeley, Horace, 89Green, Beriah, 61Grulke, Wolfgang, 174Gunther, John, 135–36Gustafson, Melanie, 120

Hamilton, Alexander, 33Hamilton County, 45Hand, William, 48–49Hanna Amendment, 137Hanna, Mark, 109–11Harding, Warren, 95Harmar, Josiah, 34Harrison, Benjamin, 74, 95

Index

195

Harrison, William Henry, 65Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, 13Hayes, Lucy Webb, 82Hayes, Rutherford B., 73, 74, 86, 89–90,

95, 100Hayes, Woody, 136Haygood, Will, 141Highland County, 50Hillman, Sidney, 137Hine, Thomas, 134Hinshaw, Cecil, 138His Promised Land (Parker), 59Hoagland, Moses, 68Honda, 144, 157–58Hopewell Culture, 24–25Horton, James O., 10, 170Hough area, 141Howe, Frederick C., 13Howells, William Dean, 12–13Hudson, Ohio, 60Hurons, 27. See also WyandotsHutton, Graham, 15

Illinois, 31, 138immigration, 12, 47–48, 68, 77–78, 98,

99, 112, 160–62, 173Indiana, 3, 138industry, 75–76, 86–88, 96–99, 112, 117,

139–40, 143, 144, 149–54, 157–58. Seealso automotive industry

International Woman Suffrage Alliance, 118Iroquois, 26, 33

Jay, John, 32–33Jay’s Treaty, 37Jews, 79Johnson, Andrew, 84, 86Johnson, Tom, 12, 13, 106, 109–13Jones, Samuel M. “Golden Rule,” 13

Das Kapital (Marx), 86Kennedy, Roger, 48Kent State University, 17, 144Kentucky, 1–2, 10, 30–31, 50, 58, 64, 75,

173Kenyon College, 76–77Kettering, Charles, 99Kirwan, William E., 17–19knowledge economy, 158–63, 170–81. See

also educationKnox, Henry, 51


Index

196

Korean War, 130, 139

labor, 96–97, 134, 137, 158, 173–76La Demoiselle, 27–29Lane Theological Seminary, 60, 61, 63, 64Langlade, Charles, 28–29Langston, John Mercer, 60–61, 75Lausche, Frank, 134, 136–38LeMay, Curtis, 139Lepper, Bradley, 24Lerner, Max, 134Lewis, Israel, 54–55Lexis-Nexis, 159–60Liberal Republicans, 89L’Illustrazione popolare, 113, 114Lincoln, Abraham, 77, 79, 82–83Linn, Brian, 101“Little Africa,” 55Lloyd, Henry Demarest, 88Logstown, 29The Lonely Crowd (Riesman), 132Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 51Lordstown, Ohio, 157Lundberg, Ferdinand, 131–32Lynch, John R., 90

MacArthur, Douglas, 130Mahan, Asa, 63, 64Main Street Blues, 143Malvin, Harriet, 55Malvin, John, 54–56Marble Collegiate Church, 135Marin, Paul, 29Marryat, Frederick, 52Martineau, Harriet, 52–53Marx, Karl, 86Maryland, 181Marysville, Ohio, 144, 157–58Massachusetts, 171, 178Mathematical Biosciences Institute, 178Maysville, Ky., 58McCarthy, Joe, 130–31, 139McClellan, George, 74McKinley, William, 74, 95, 110McLane, Louis, 51–52Mead Corporation, 159Meany, George, 134media, 157, 164Miami Canal, 51Miamis, 26–29, 33, 34Michillimackinac, fort at, 32

Microelectronics and Computer Technol-ogy Corp. (MCC), 179, 180

Midwest at Noon (Hutton), 15Milken Institute, 171, 178, 180Miller, John K., 68Mingos (“Ohio Iroquois”), 26, 27, 29minorities, 173–76. See also African

Americans; immigration; womenMississippi, 90Mississippian culture, 24–25Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (Farnham

and Lundberg), 131Mohicans, 27Monks Mound, 25Morgan, Albert T., 85Morgan, George, 33–34Morgan, John, 60, 63, 64Morgan, Susan, 6Morrison, Toni, 131Motley, Marion, 141

National American Woman SuffrageAssociation (NAWSA), 118–19

National Association of Colored Women,120

National Association of State Universitiesand Land Grant Colleges, 172

National Cash Register Company, 12, 99National Information Center for Higher

Education Policymaking and Analysis,173

National League of Republican ColoredWomen, 120

National Road, 75Native Americans, 5–9, 23–35, 45–46. See

also specific tribesNeighborhood Club, 120Nelsonville, Ohio, 154Neumann, John von, 133Newark, Ohio, 12, 100–106New Orleans, 57Nichols, C. M., 115Nicklaus, Jack, 140Nixon, Richard, 131, 137North Carolina, 178, 180Northcliffe, Lord, 14Northwest Ordinance of 1787, 8, 44–45Nullification Crisis, 51–52

Oberlin Collegiate Institute, 57, 61–64,75, 112


Oberlin, John Frederick, 61Oberlin, Ohio, 15–16Ohio Board of Regents, 170, 172Ohio Business Roundtable, 162, 180, 182Ohio Chamber of Commerce, 162Ohio College Library Center (OCLC),

159Ohio Company of Associates, 8, 28, 47Ohio Constitution, 8, 74, 137, 140Ohio Council of Republican Women, 120Ohio Country, 6–9, 23–37Ohio Federation of Colored Women’s

Clubs, 120Ohio General Assembly, 135Ohio Guide, 139Ohio Manufacturing Association, 162Ohio Mechanics’ Institute, 76, 77Ohio National Guard, 101–5, 141, 144Ohio River, 46, 49, 50, 52, 57Ohio Society of New York, 135, 182Ohio State University, 108, 136–38, 156,

159, 175Ohio University, 47, 156The Organization Man (Whyte), 132Osborn, 116T’Other Side of Ohio (Hand), 49

Parker, John, 59Patterson, James T., 16Patterson, John, 12, 99, 170Pauw, Abbé Cornelius de, 9Peale, Norman Vincent, 135Pennsylvania Assembly, 28The People of Plenty (Potter), 134Perry, George, 140The Philanthropist, 64Phillips, Wendell, 81Pickawillany, 27, 28–29Pickering, Timothy, 44Pittsburgh, 100Point Pleasant, 30Policy Matters Ohio, 154Pomeroy, Ohio, 113Pontiac, Chief, 30Populuxe (Hine), 134Potawatomis, 28–29, 34Potter, David, 134Proclamation of 1763, 30Proctor and Gamble, 87, 162Progress, 119Progress and Poverty (George), 111

Index

197

Progressive Policy Institute, 171Protection, or Free Trade (George), 111

Radical Reconstruction, 84, 85Radical Republicans, 78, 84railroads, 75–76, 99–106Raleigh-Durham, 177, 180Rankin, John, 58–59Recollections (Gladden), 108Reconstruction, 84–86, 88–90regionalism, 155–57, 159, 161Republican Party, 75, 77–78, 84, 86,

88–89, 96, 120Rhodes, Cornelius, 133Rhodes, James, 140, 143–44, 157Riesman, David, 132Ripley, Ohio, 58–59, 64Rockefeller, John D., 88, 177Roosevelt, Franklin, 137Roth, Philip, 136

Sandusky, 27, 45Sanitary Fairs, 82Sarnoff, David, 133Schlesinger, Arthur M., 108Scioto Company, 7SciTech, 178Scottish Christian Union, 116Seals, “England Dan,” 149Second Treaty of Ft. Stanwix, 33Senecas, 26, 46Serpent Mound, 24sesquicentennial year, 134–35Seven Years’ War, 6–7, 27–30Shannon, W. V., 132Shawnees, 23, 26, 27, 29–37, 43, 45, 46Sheridan, Philip H., 74Sherman, John, 73, 84Sherman, William T., 74, 83Shipherd, John Jay, 61, 63–64Shriver, Philip, 140Siegel, Frederick, 134Sklar, Kathryn Kish, 12, 170slavery, 10–12, 44–45, 49–50, 54, 56–62,

64–69, 73–75, 77–80. See also AfricanAmericans

Smith, Adam, 99Social Gospel movement, 106, 112, 113Social Security Act of 1935, 97Social Settlement Movement, 112, 117,

120


Index

198

Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois), 107Sparkman, John, 131Spiegel, Marcus M., 79–80Springfield National Guard, 101, 104,

105Springfield, Ohio, 98, 101, 104, 105,

113–16Standard Oil Company, 88, 177Stanton, Edwin M., 74Stassen, Harold, 133State Science & Technology Indicators,

171St. Clair, Arthur, 34, 44steel industry, 151–53Steffens, Lincoln, 109–10, 111Stevenson, Adlai, 131, 132Stevens, Thaddeus, 88Stewart, Eliza, 113, 115–16Stewart, Philo T., 61St. Louis, 100Stokes, Carl, 141–42Storrs, Charles Backus, 60, 61Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 8, 59streetcars, 109–11Susquehannas, 27

Taft, Governor Robert, 163–64Taft, Robert (son of William Howard),

129, 130, 135, 136Taft, William Howard, 95Taillon, Paul, 105Tambora Volcano, 48–49Tappan, Arthur and Lewis, 63taxes, 136–37, 173Taylor, Harriet Upton, 12Taylor, John L., 68Taylor, Zachary, 67technology, 174, 177–79Tecumseh, Chief, 35, 37temperance, 104–5, 112–20Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy at

Duke University, 103Texas, 179Third Frontier initiative, 163–64Thurber, James, 135Tibbets, Paul, 139Tiffin, Edward, 44Tocqueville, Alexis de, 10, 43, 50, 78–79Toledo, Ohio, 74, 98, 143, 155–57, 171Toynbee Hall, 117Treaty of Fort Industry, 53

Treaty of Greenville, 37Trent, William, 27Trollope, Frances, 13, 50–52Truman, Harry, 130, 136Tuscarawas County, 47Twachtman, John Henry, 13Tyler, John, 65

Ueda, Reed, 161un-American Activities Commission, 138Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 59Union Army, 5, 79, 81–82Union Leagues convention, 80Union Party, 83United Mine Workers, 12United States Census Bureau, 172United States Congress, 155United States Constitution, 83–85, 90United States Sanitary Commission, 82University of Akron, 156University of Cincinnati, 77, 179University of Texas, 179Upton, George, 118Upton, Harriet Taylor, 118–19U.S. Office of Technology Policy, 171

Vallandigham, Clement, 73, 83Vietnam War, 139Virginia, 28–31, 49, 75Virginia Military District, 49Voinovich, George, 158

Wade, Benjamin F., 73, 75, 79, 84, 86Warren, Earl, 131Warren, Ohio, 113, 118Washington, Booker T., 107Washington, George, 29Washington Post, 130Wayne, Anthony, 35Wealth against Commonwealth (Lloyd),

88Wealth of Nations (Smith), 99Webb, Sidney, 111Weld, Theodore Dwight, 60, 64, 75Wellsville, Ohio, 134–35Western Reserve, 45, 47–48, 53–58,

60–63, 67, 75, 86Western Reserve College, 60, 61, 64West Side Company, 110Whig Party, 65, 67, 77Whirlpool factory, 154


Whitefield, George, 6–7Whitlock, Brand, 13Whyte, William, 132Wilberforce, Canada, 55Wilberforce College, 119–20Wilberforce, Ohio, 113, 119, 120Wilkerson, J., 66Willard, Frances, 113Willis, Bill, 141Wittke, Carl, 16, 130, 134Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 5,

113, 116–20Woman’s Temperance League, 116women, 12, 61–62, 82, 112–21, 131–32“Women’s Temple,” 117Woman Suffrage Movement, 112, 113,

117–21Wonderful Town, 16

Index

199

Working People and Their Employers (Glad-den), 106

World War II, 139Worthington, Thomas, 44, 49Wright Center, 178Wright, Elizur, Jr., 61Wright Field, 99Wright, Orville, 99Wright, Wilbur, 99, 182Wunderlin, Clarence, 140Wyandots, 27, 29, 31–34, 45, 46

“Yankee Chill,” 48–49Yazoo, or On the Picket Line of Freedom in

the South (Morgan), 85Youngstown, Ohio, 98, 143, 157

Zoar, Ohio, 47


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Ohio and the World, 1753-2053 - The Ohio State University Press