BiblioVault - Books about Ohio

DANCE UNTO THE LORD

GEORGE DELL

The Ohio State University Press, 2001

George Dell’s Dance unto the Lord is a compelling fusion of history and fiction. Set in 1848 to 1852, when Ohio was considered to be the West, Dance unto the Lord transports the readers to Union Village, a Shaker community in southwestern Ohio. The novel traces the coming of age of Richard and Ruth, young people who wish to marry but are forbidden to do so by Richard’s parents. In desperation, Richard runs away to Cincinnati. Ruth, too, leaves her family. She settles in Union Village and eventually becomes a teacher at the Shaker school. Torn between her desire for freedom and the security of life with the Shakers, Ruth becomes increasingly more immersed in the Shaker society while dreaming of Richard and a life outside the community. Meanwhile, through his experiences with an ill-fated blacksmith’s shop and its owners, Richard learns that life in the city can be complicated and painful.

As he traces Richard’s and Ruth’s experiences, Dell vividly re-creates the texture of rural and city life in mid-nineteenth-century Ohio, providing a fascinating, well-researched account of a long-gone era. Dance unto the Lord provides wonderfully detailed descriptions of a Shaker community and life style. This book will be compelling reading for anyone interested in the time period, the Shakers, or simply a good story.

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The Dangerous Class

Crime and Poverty in Columbus, Ohio, 1860–1885

Eric H. Monkkonen

Harvard University Press, 1975

That the city and the factory cause crime and poverty has become an operative assumption for most Americans. This book is a study of an inarticulate group of people whose defining characteristic is the behavior that got them into criminal court or the poorhouse. Nineteenth-century observers tended to group criminals together with poor people into what Charles Loring Brace called “the dangerous class.” The question asked in this book is whether urbanization and industrialization, the two most central social processes in nineteenth-century American history, caused poverty and crime.

Using seldom consulted records of poorhouses and criminal courts, the author shows that the kinds of crime and the structure of crime changed, with very few paupers becoming criminals. Cities and industry affected the quality but not the quantity of crime and impoverishment. Overall no dramatic crime trends are discerned and major crimes were ubiquitous in rural and urban areas. Furthermore, the criminal class declined as Columbus grew and industrialized.

An important work in the new social history, Eric Monkkonen’s research modifies theories that the city drives its inhabitants into deviance and that status and stability inhered in the skilled occupations. He also lends clarity to the views about what kinds of criminal incidents represent pre-political rebellion.

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Dangerous Exits

Escaping Abusive Relationships in Rural America

DeKeseredy, Walter

Rutgers University Press, 2009

Decade after decade, violence against women has gained more attention from scholars, policy makers, and the general public. Social scientists in particular have contributed significant empirical and theoretical understandings to this issue.

Strikingly, scant attention has focused on the victimization of women who want to leave their hostile partners. This groundbreaking work challenges the perception that rural communities are safe havens from the brutality of urban living. Identifying hidden crimes of economic blackmail and psychological mistreatment, and the complex relationship between patriarchy and abuse, Walter S. DeKeseredy and Martin D. Schwartz propose concrete and effective solutions, giving voice to women who have often suffered in silence.

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Dayton

The Rise, Decline, and Transition of an Industrial City

Adam A. Millsap

The Ohio State University Press, 2019

The Rust Belt was once the crown of American manufacturing, a symbol of the country’s economic prowess. But now it is named for what it has become: a deteriorating stretch of industrial cities left behind by a post-industrial world. In Dayton: The Rise, Decline, and Transition of an Industrial City, Adam A. Millsap turns his focus to his hometown, an archetypal Rust Belt city, to examine its history and discuss its future.
Thoroughly researched and engagingly written, Millsap’s book explores the economic background of the region made famous by J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. From early twentieth-century optimism, through the Great Depression and post-WWII manufacturing decline, to Dayton now, with its labor-force problems and opioid crisis, Millsap tracks the underlying forces driving the city’s trajectory. Race relations, interstates, suburbanization, climate, crime, geography, and government policies all come into play as Millsap develops a picture of the city, past and present. By examining the past, Millsap proposes a plan for the future, claiming that there is hope for Dayton to thrive again. And if Dayton can rise from its industrial ashes, then perhaps the Rust Belt can shed its stigma and once again become the backbone of American innovation.

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Derelict Paradise

Homelessness and Urban Development in Cleveland, Ohio

Daniel R. Kerr

University of Massachusetts Press, 2011

Seeking answers to the question, "Who benefits from homelessness?" this book takes the reader on a sweeping tour of Cleveland's history from the late nineteenth-century through the early twenty-first. Daniel Kerr shows that homelessness has deep roots in the shifting ground of urban labor markets, social policy, downtown development, the criminal justice system, and corporate power. Rather than being attributable to the illnesses and inadequacies of the unhoused themselves, it is a product of both structural and political dynamics shaping the city. Kerr locates the origins of today's shelter system in the era that followed the massive railroad rebellions of 1877. From that period through the Great Depression, business and political leaders sought to transform downtown Cleveland to their own advantage. As they focused on bringing business travelers and tourists to the city and beckoned upper-income residents to return to its center, they demolished two downtown working-class neighborhoods and institutionalized a shelter system to contain and control the unhoused and unemployed. The precedents from this period informed the strategies of the post–World War II urban renewal era as the "new urbanism" of the late twentieth century. The efforts of the city's elites have not gone uncontested. Kerr documents a rich history of opposition by people at the margins of whose organized resistance and everyday survival strategies have undermined the grand plans crafted by the powerful and transformed the institutions designed to constrain the lives of the homeless.

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Do They Miss Me at Home?

The Civil War Letters of William McKnight, Seventh Ohio Volunteer Cavalry

Donald C. Maness

Ohio University Press, 2010

William McKnight was a member of the Seventh Ohio Volunteer Cavalry from September 1862 until his death in June of 1864. During his time of service, McKnight penned dozens of emotion-filled letters, primarily to his wife, Samaria, revealing the struggles of an entire family both before and during the war.

This collection of more than one hundred letters provides in-depth accounts of several battles in Kentucky and Tennessee, such as the Cumberland Gap and Knoxville campaigns that were pivotal events in the Western Theater. The letters also vividly respond to General John Hunt Morgan’s raid through Ohio and correct claims previously published that McKnight was part of the forces chasing Morgan. By all accounts Morgan did stay for a period of time at McKnight’s home in Langsville during his raid through Ohio, much to McKnight’s horror and humiliation, but McKnight was in Kentucky at the time. Tragically, McKnight was killed in action nearly a year later during an engagement with Morgan’s men near Cynthiana, Kentucky.

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The Documentary Heritage Of Ohio

Phillip R. Shriver

Ohio University Press, 2010

Key to the successful teaching and learning of history is its personalization. In presenting documents that help Ohio’s rich history come alive in the minds of its readers, this book has purposely sought to provide eyewitness, first-person narratives that will make the reader want to turn the page and keep on reading. At the same time, mindful of the significance of guideposts basic to our understanding of the development of the state, care has been taken to include those documents such as constitutions, laws, and ordinances that have truly made a difference in the shaping of our institutions and the lives of our people.

With informative and accessible introductions to each document, editors Shriver and Wunderlin have produced a book of record that reveals the sources of Ohio’s heritage. The Documentary Heritage of Ohio is the second volume in the Ohio Bicentennial Series and a must for all libraries, schools, and the bookshelves of any who wish to appreciate the state’s historic accomplishments and rich heritage not only for the bicentennial of statehood in 2003 but for many years to come.

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Driven toward Madness

The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio

Nikki M. Taylor

Ohio University Press, 2016

Margaret Garner was the runaway slave who, when confronted with capture just outside of Cincinnati, slit the throat of her toddler daughter rather than have her face a life in slavery. Her story has inspired Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a film based on the novel starring Oprah Winfrey, and an opera. Yet, her life has defied solid historical treatment. In Driven toward Madness, Nikki M. Taylor brilliantly captures her circumstances and her transformation from a murdering mother to an icon of tragedy and resistance. Taylor, the first African American woman to write a history of Garner, grounds her approach in black feminist theory. She melds history with trauma studies to account for shortcomings in the written record. In so doing, she rejects distortions and fictionalized images; probes slavery’s legacies of sexual and physical violence and psychic trauma in new ways; and finally fleshes out a figure who had been rendered an apparition.

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