Ohio University Press
The Center of a Great Empire

The Ohio Country in the Early Republic

Edited by Andrew R. L. Cayton and Stuart D. Hobbs

—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.

Andrew R. L. Cayton,  distinguished professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, is the author of several books, including Ohio: The History of a People and, with Fred Anderson, The Dominion of War: Liberty and Empire in North America, 1500–2000.

Stuart D. Hobbs is the program director for History in the Heartland, a professional development program for middle and high school teachers of history. Hobbs is the author of The End of the American Avant Garde.

232 pages, 6 x 9
0-8214-1620-0
cloth $34.95
The History of Ohio Law

Michael Les Benedict and John F. Winkler

This publication was financially assisted by the Ohio State Bar Foundation. Other financial support was provided by The Ohio Humanities Council and the Ohio Bicentennial Commission.

History of Ohio Law is a complete sourcebook on the origin and development of Ohio law and its relationship to society. A model for work in this field, it is the starting point for any investigation of the subject.

In the two-volume The History of Ohio Law, distinguished legal historians, practicing Ohio attorneys, and judges present the history of Ohio law and the interaction between law and society in the state. The first history of Ohio law in nearly seventy years—and the most comprehensive compilation of essays on any state’s law—its twenty-two topics range from the history of Ohio’s constitutional conventions and legal institutions to the history of civil procedure, evidence, land use, civil liberties, and utility regulation.The essays describe Ohio’s legal institutions, legal procedures, and the substance of Ohio law as it has changed over time. Other essays describe how social, cultural, political, and economic institutions have affected Ohio law and how the law has affected them. The essays provide important information to practitioners and offer attorneys, legal scholars, historians, and the public a broad understanding of the relationship between law and society in Ohio.Going beyond the technical law, The History of Ohio Law deals with the intersections between law and race, gender, and labor. Insightful essays also discuss the development of Ohio’s legal literature, the impact of federal courts, and Ohio’s most important contributions to American constitutional development. Written by twenty-two leading lawyers and historians, The History of Ohio Law will be the indispensable reference and invaluable first source for learning about law and society in Ohio.

The publication of The History of Ohio Law was assisted financially by The Ohio State Bar Foundation.   The views expressed therein do not necessarily represent those of the Foundation

Michael Les Benedict is a professor of history at the Ohio State University. He is a noted scholar of American legal and constitutional history and the author of The Blessings of Liberty, a leading constitutional history textbook.

John F. Winkler is a Columbus lawyer with a civil litigation practice. A graduate of Yale College, he has graduate degrees from McGill and Harvard and a law degree from Ohio State.

952 pp., 2-volume boxed set, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
0-8214-1546-8
cloth $75.00s
Ohio’s First Peoples

James H. O’Donnell III

Depicts the Native Americans of the Buckeye State from the time of the well-known Hopewell peoples to the forced removal of the Wyandots in the 1840s.
Little Turtle

Although founders of the state like Rufus Putnam pointed to the remaining prehistoric earthworks at Marietta as evidence that the architects were a people of “ingenuity, industry, and elegance,” their words did not prevent a rivalry with the area’s Indian inhabitants that was settled only through decades of warfare and treaty-making.

Native American armies managed to win battles with Josiah Harmar and Arthur St. Clair, but not the war with Anthony Wayne. By the early nineteenth century only a few native peoples remained, still hoping to retain their homes. Pressures from federal and state governments as well as the settlers’ desire for land, however, left the earlier inhabitants no refuge. By the mid-1840s they were gone, leaving behind relatively few markers on the land.
Ohio’s First Peoples depicts the Native Americans of the Buckeye State from the time of the well-known Hopewell peoples to the forced removal of the Wyandots in the 1840s.

Professor James O’Donnell presents the stories of the early Ohioans based on the archaeological record. In an accessible narrative style, he provides a detailed overview of the movements of Fort Ancient peoples driven out by economic and political forces in the seventeenth century. Ohio’s plentiful game and fertile farmlands soon lured tribes such as the Wyandots, Shawnees, and Delawares, which are familiar to observers of the historic period.

In celebrating the bicentennial of Ohio, we need to remember its earliest residents. Ohio’s First Peoples recounts their story and documents their contribution to Ohio’s full heritage.

This book will be released in January, 2004

James O'Donnell
Andrew U. Thomas Professor of History and Director of the Master of Arts in Liberal Learning at Marietta College in Marietta, Ohio, James H. O’Donnell has a primary interest in Native American studies. His earlier works include Southern Indians in the American Revolution and Southeastern Frontiers: Europeans, Africans, and American Indians, 1513–1840.
Ohio History: 216 pp., 6 x 9, 23 illus. 0-8214-1524-7 cloth $36.95, 0-8214-1525-5 paper $17.95
Ouidah
The Social History of a West African Slaving Port, 1727–1892

Robin Law

Copublished with James Currey, Oxford OCBCEK

Ouidah, an African town in the Republic of Benin, was the principal precolonial commercial center of its region and the second-most-important town of the Dahomey kingdom. It served as a major outlet for the transatlantic slave trade. Between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, Ouidah was the most important embarkation point for slaves in the region of West Africa known to outsiders as the Slave Coast. This is the first detailed study of the town’s history and of its role in the Atlantic slave trade.

Ouidah is a well-documented case study of precolonial urbanism, of the evolution of a merchant community, and in particular of the growth of a group of private traders whose relations with the Dahomian monarchy grew increasingly problematic over time.

Robin Law
Robin Law is a professor of African history at the University of Stirling.

African Studies
320 pp., 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, illus.
0-8214-1571-9 cloth $49.95s • 0-8214-1572-7 paper $29.95s
An American Colony
Regionalism and the Roots of Midwestern Culture

Edward Watts

The Old Northwest—the region now known as the Midwest—has been largely overlooked in American cultural history, represented as a place smoothly assimilated into the expanding, Manifestly Destined nation. An American Colony: Regionalism and the Roots of Midwestern Culture studies the primary texts and principal conflicts of the settlement of the Old Northwest to reveal that its entry into the nation’s culture was not without problems. In fact, Edward Watts argues that it is best understood as a colony of the United States, just as the eastern states were colonies of the British Empire.

Reconsidered as a colony, the Old Northwest becomes a crucible revealing the complex entanglement of local, indigenous, and regional interests with the coercions of racism, nationalism, and imperialism. This conflicted setting, like those of all settlement colonies, was beset by competing views of local identity, especially as they came to contradict writers from the eastern seaboard.

Using postcolonial theories developed to describe other settlement colonies, An American Colony identifies the Old Northwest as a colony and its culture as less than fully participating in either the nation’s or its own writing and identity. This embedded sense of cultural inferiority, Watts argues, haunts Midwestern culture even today.

Edward Watts is an associate professor of American thought and language at Michigan State University. He is the co-editor of The First West: Writing from the American Frontier, 1776–1860 and author of Writing and Postcolonialism in the Early Republic.

328 pp., 6 x 9
0-8214-1432-1
cloth $55.00s
Ohio is My Dwelling Place
Schoolgirl Embroideries, 1800–1850

Sue Studebaker

Foreword by Kimberly Smith Ivey

“Sue Studebaker’s comprehensive book covering the development of female education and the role of needlework in a young lady’s life in Ohio significantly contributes to the study of regional styles in American needlework and samplers.” — Kimberly Smith Ivey, Associate Curator of Textiles, Colonial Williamsburg

One of the most intriguing cultural artifacts of our nation’s past was made by young girls—the embroidery sampler. In Ohio Is My Dwelling Place, American decorative arts expert Sue Studebaker documents the samplers created in Ohio prior to 1850, the girls who made them, their families, and the teachers who taught them to stitch.

In this lavishly illustrated book, these now highly prized works are coupled with the stories behind their creations and the circumstances under which they were sewn. Ohio Is My Dwelling Place also includes an extensive chart of known pioneer teachers and schools in Ohio, as well as maps depicting the counties where the samplers were made.
These samplers serve as a tangible and enduring legacy of Ohio’s history, and readers will be intrigued and fascinated by the stories presented in this extraordinary keepsake volume.

Sue Studebaker is the author of Ohio Samplers: Schoolgirl Embroideries, 1803–1850 and has published articles in the Antique Review and Early American Life. She lectures widely and teaches courses on American decorative arts.

320 pp., 81/2 x 11
216 photos, 120 in color
0-8214-1452-6
cloth $70.00t
0-8214-1453-4
paper $34.95t
August 8, 2005