BiblioVault - Books about Ohio Country

The Center of a Great Empire

The Ohio Country in the Early Republic

Andrew R. L. Cayton

Ohio University Press, 2005

“The people who lived in what became the seventeenth state in the American Union in 1803 were not only at the center of a great empire, they were at the center of the most important historical developments in the revolutionary Atlantic World.”
—From the introduction

Nowhere did the revolutions in politics, commerce, and society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries occur more quickly or more thoroughly than in the Ohio country. A forested borderland dominated by American Indians in 1780, Ohio was a landscape of farms and towns inhabited by people from all over the world by 1830. The Center of a Great Empire: The Ohio Country in the Early Republic chronicles this dramatic and all-encompassing change.

Andrew R. L. Cayton and Stuart D. Hobbs have assembled an impressive collection of articles by established and rising scholars. They address the conquest of Native Americans, the emergence of a democratic political culture, the origins of capitalism, the formation of public culture, the growth of evangelical Protestantism, the ambiguous status of African Americans, and social life in a place that most regarded as the cutting edge of human history.

For The Center of a Great Empire, distinguished historians of the American nation in its first decades question conventional wisdom. They emphasize contingency rather than inevitability and contention rather than progress. Downplaying the frontier character of Ohio, they offer new interpretations and open new paths of inquiry through investigations of race, education, politics, religion, family, commerce, colonialism, and conquest. As it underscores key themes in the history of the United States, The Center of a Great Empire pursues issues that have fascinated people for two centuries.

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Log Construction

In The Ohio Country, 1750-1850

Donald A. Hutslar

Ohio University Press, 1992

Log construction entered the Ohio territory with the seventeenth-century fur traders and mid-eighteenth-century squatters and then spread throughout most of the area after the opening of the territory in the 1780s. Scottish-Irish and German settlers, using techniques from the eastern states and European homelands, found the abundant timber resources of the Ohio country ideally suited to this simple, durable form of construction. Hutslar documents this early architecture with extensive descriptive materials from local histories, diaries, traveller’s accounts, building contracts and many recent site photographs. These descriptions will be interesting for modern craftsmen and other builders involved in historic restoration or log construction generally.

Hutslar’s extensive fieldwork is valuable to students of vernacular architecture and preservationists and this abridged paperback edition of his book is a boon to travelling or local history buffs who can refer to this wealth of information at their leisure.

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To Risk It All

General Forbes, the Capture of Fort Duquesne, and the Course of Empire in the Ohio Country

Michael McConnell

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023

General John Forbes’s campaign against Fort Duquesne was the largest over-land expedition during the Seven Years’ War in America. While most histories of the time period include the Forbes Campaign as an aside, McConnell documents how and why Forbes and his army succeeded, and what his success meant to the subsequent history of the mid-Atlantic colonies, native inhabitants of the Ohio Country, and the empire he represented.

A close look at the Forbes Campaign and its personnel reveals much about both British relations with native peoples and the nature of Britain’s American empire during a time of stress. Unlike other campaigns, this one was composed largely of colonial—not professional British—troops. In addition, individual colonies negotiated their role in the campaign and frequently placed their own local interests ahead of those of the empire as a whole. The campaign thus suggests the limits of imperial power and how Britain’s hold over its American frontiers was, at best, tenuous and helped lead to an eventual break-down of empire in the 1760s and 1770s.

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Transitions

Archaic and Early Woodland Research in the Ohio Country

Martha P. Otto

Ohio University Press, 2008

The late archaic and early woodland peoples lived in the Ohio region between 5,000 and 2,000 years ago. This was a time of transition, when hunters and gatherers began to grow native seed crops, establish more permanent settlements, and develop complex forms of ritual and ceremonialism, sometimes involving burial mound construction.

The focused archaeological studies described in Transitions: Archaic and Early Woodland Research in the Ohio Country shed light on this important episode in human cultural development. The authors describe important archaeological sites such as the rich Late Archaic settlements of southwestern Ohio and the early Adena Dominion Land Company enclosure in Franklin County. They present detailed accounts of Native American behavior, such as the use of smoking pipes by Adena societies and a reconstruction of mound use and ritual.

Transitions is the result of a comprehensive, long-term study focusing on particular areas of Ohio with the most up-to-date and detailed treatment of Ohio’s native cultures during this important time of change. This book will be of great value to students and other readers who wish to go beyond the general and often dated treatments of Ohio archaeology currently available.

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