Ohio: A History of the Buckeye State by Kevin F. Kern, Gregory S. Wilson (review)

Kevin F. Kern and Gregory S. Wilson, both of the University of Akron, have written the most comprehensive history of Ohio since George W. Knepper’s Ohio and Its People, which was first published in 1989. Well researched and solidly grounded in the most recent secondary literature, it is eminently readable and will serve ideally as the standard college-level text for years to come. Seventeen well-organized and informative chapters unfold the story of Ohio’s history from the geological and topographic heritage of the ancient past to the myriad social, political, and economic issues of the present day.

The book has excellent key topics of interest to scholars, teachers, and general readers. Chapter 2 on prehistoric peoples goes well beyond Knepper’s treatment and expertly summarizes recent work by archeologists in this area. The concept of the “middle ground,” developed by Richard White and others over the past quarter century, informs the story of eighteenth-century interactions between Native Americans and Europeans that culminated with the Treaty of Greenville in 1795. Well-chosen maps, diagrams, and illustrations accompany the narrative of Ohio’s early development as territory and state. Here the authors make effective use of the pathbreaking scholarship of R. Douglas Hurt, Andrew R. L. Cayton, and Donald J. Ratcliffe, to name but a few. While the level of detail provided for local events and people is impressive, the state’s experience is carefully set within national and international contexts. The regional origins of early settlers and immigration patterns preface insightful discussions of architecture, speech patterns, religion, education, and social reform movements. Economic growth and the development of canal and early rail transportation are viewed as particular expressions of the market revolution; an interesting account of the rapid rise and decline of Milan, Ohio, as commercial entrepôt makes for a dramatic example. In politics, Ohio’s role in the collapse of the Second Party System in the late 1840s and early 1850s receives close attention as a sign of the state’s movement toward a more central place in national politics.

Ohio’s history since the Civil War can in one sense be described as industrialism and its discontents, and here the authors thoroughly examine both. The new wealth and opportunities generated by industrial growth have been accompanied by forms of social distress and various struggles to ameliorate them, both publicly and privately. Kern and Wilson offer especially strong accounts of post–Civil War development in the cities and life there for African Americans and white ethnic groups; “Snapshot Cleveland” (296–99) is a superb example of the latter. On the other hand, changes in rural Ohio in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries do not receive the same level of attention. The authors integrate a number of topics that are sometimes treated separately. For example, the Great Migration of African Americans and their experiences upon arrival are set in the context of World War I’s home-front tensions and complications. A strong chapter on the interwar period (1920s to 1930s) includes portraits of well-known writers Sherwood Anderson and Louis Bromfield, although the overall coverage of Ohioans’ contributions to arts and culture is somewhat limited. Readers looking for a clear, insightful discussion of political and economic trends since 1945 will be rewarded; especially notable here are accounts of the social movements of the 1960s and the devastating impact of deindustrialization on Ohio communities in the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, the authors conclude that, despite an image of blandness, Ohio’s regional diversity actually suggests a history “profoundly more interesting, complex, and significant” (487). Such adjectives could well describe this book itself.