Results by title

Walking the Steps of Cincinnati: A Guide to the Queen City’s Scenic and Historic Secrets is a revised and updated version of Mary Anna DuSablon’s original guidebook, first published in 1998. This new edition describes and maps thirty-four walks of varying lengths and levels of difficulty around the neighborhoods of Cincinnati, following scenic or historic routes and taking in many of the city’s more than four hundred sets of steps. Some of these walks follow the same routes laid out by DuSablon in the first edition of the guide; others have been revised to reflect changes in the city and its neighborhoods, the physical condition of the steps, and the scenic views of Cincinnati that they afford; and still others are altogether new.

In writing their descriptions of the walks, authors Connie J. Harrell and John Cicmanec have retraced each path and taken all new photographs of the steps as well as architectural and natural landmarks along the way. Cartographer Brian Balsley has drawn a fresh set of maps, and Roxanne Qualls, vice-mayor of Cincinnati, has graciously written a new foreword.

A unique collection of more than 150 letters written to an Ohio serviceman during the American Civil War that offers glimpses of women’s lives as they waited, worked, and wrote from the Ohio home front. The letters reveal fascinating details of the lives of mostly young, single women—friends, acquaintances, love interests, and strangers who responded to one Union soldier’s advertisement for correspondents. Almost all of the women who responded to Lieutenant Edwin Lewis Lybarger’s lonely-hearts newspaper advertisement lived in Ohio and supported the Union. Lybarger carried the collection of letters throughout three years of military service, preserved them through his life, and left them to be discovered in an attic trunk more than a century after Lee’s surrender.

Women’s letter writing functioned as a form of “war work” that bolstered the spirits of enlisted men and “kinship work” that helped forge romantic relationships and sustain community bonds across the miles. While men’s letters and diaries abound in Civil War history, less readily available are comprehensive collections of letters from middle-class and rural women that survived the weathering of marches, camp life, and battles to emerge unscathed from men’s knapsacks at war’s end.

The collection is accompanied by a detailed editorial introduction that highlights significant themes in the letters. Together, they contribute to the still-unfolding historical knowledge concerning Northern women’s lives and experiences during this significant period in American history.

This book traces the lives of the Snowdens, an African American family of musicians and farmers living in rural Knox County, Ohio. Howard L. Sacks and Judith Rose Sacks examine the Snowdens' musical and social exchanges with rural whites from the 1850s through the early 1920s and provide a detailed exploration of the claim that the Snowden family taught the song "Dixie" to Dan Emmett-–the white musician and blackface minstrel credited with writing the song. This edition features a new introduction in which the authors discuss the public response to this controversial claim, and present new information on the Snowdens' musical and social experiences.
 

The inspiring story of how two intrepid college professors revealed the lunar alignments and ancient engineering genius behind the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks.

How did people two millennia ago achieve the stunning architectural and scientific accomplishment that in 2023 became Ohio’s only UNESCO World Heritage Site? In Where the Moon Stands Still, James W. Graham recounts the inspiring true story of two small-town college professors who, without funds or training in archaeology, helped unlock secrets behind an ancient monumental work of land art—the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks—all but hidden in plain sight on a local golf course. Ever since the arrival of Europeans, thousands of Native earthworks east of the Mississippi were neglected, vandalized, bulldozed, and plundered. Their origins and purposes baffled scholars. How did ancient people build monuments of such grand scale and geometric sophistication? Why? Crucial answers emerged in the 1980s when philosopher Bob Horn and astronomer Ray Hively, driven by curiosity and a tireless devotion to truth-seeking, made a decades-long effort to conquer the skepticism of experts and unmask the ??astronomical genius behind the Indigenous earthworks. As he recounts Hively and Horn’s investigation, Graham refutes exploitative mythical interpretations and explains the history around these earthworks and of US treatment of its Indigenous people, including the long quest for tribes to regain authority over stories, ancestors, and places. Where the Moon Stands Still signals a global reawakening to the greatness of Indigenous achievement in America’s heartland.

There are two ways to leave the Amish—one is through life and the other through death. When Saloma Miller Furlong’s father dies during her first semester at Smith College, she returns to the Amish community she had left twenty four years earlier to attend his funeral. Her journey home prompts a flood of memories. Now a mother with grown children of her own, Furlong recalls her painful childhood in a family defined by her father’s mental illness, her brother’s brutality, her mother’s frustration, and the austere traditions of the Amish—traditions Furlong struggled to accept for years before making the difficult decision to leave the community. In this personal and moving memoir, Furlong traces the genesis of her desire for freedom and education and chronicles her conflicted quest for independence. Eloquently told, Why I Left the Amish is a revealing portrait of life within—and without—this frequently misunderstood community.

The prototypical rust belt city, Cleveland has long served as an emblem of late twentieth-century urban decay. But recent decades have brought a cultural and economic renaissance—a revival that has been reflected and aided by the growing number of films being shot on location there.
This new entry in the World Film Locations series offers the first-ever extended look at Cleveland on screen. Richly illustrated with images from dozens of productions, it reveals Cleveland to be usefully chameleonic, appealing to some filmmakers for its modern downtown’s ability to mimic more prominent (and more expensive) cities, to others for the way its shuttered factories and decaying docks signify contemporary urban distress. With entries on such classics as The Fortune Cookie, The Deer Hunter, A Christmas Story, and Marvel’s The Avengers, as well as lesser-known films, the volume reveals Cleveland to be a far more compelling, and far more varied, on-screen presence than even most film buffs would expect.
Like all the books in this series, World Film Locations: Cleveland is designed to appeal to cinephiles and scholars alike, while also serving as a silver screen souvenir for those who make the city their home as well as for those who visit it.