Zane L. Miller and the Cincinnati School of History

Zane L. Miller arrived at the University of Cincinnati in 1965, and over the next thirty-five years he became, in the words of his colleague Roger Daniels, "the rock upon whom the modern Cincinnati department was built." An energetic mentor, Zane attracted dozens of students to UC's nascent history doctoral program. Zane's attention to his students' work, his absolute faith in their ability to produce publishable history, and his lively, demanding teaching style helped ensure that many of the department's dissertations would take up urban topics, many of those focused on Cincinnati. Over the years, Zane created a Cincinnati school of history, one marked not just by attention to Queen City topics but also by a methodological approach dedicated to uncovering how conceptions of the city, citizenship, and democracy shaped American society.¹

Zane was remarkably generous to his students, reading draft upon draft and offering advice on research and publishing, sometimes even decades after their graduations. But Zane was not just generous with his time. Upon Zane's passing in 2016, Janet, his wife of more than fifty years, ensured that Zane's desire to endow a professorship in urban history would be fulfilled. In 2017, the University of Cincinnati created the Zane L. Miller Professorship in American Urban History, guaranteeing that the strength in urban history Zane established will continue in perpetuity.

Just as enduring, of course, will be the scholarship. Zane's remarkable scholarly productivity elevated the department's stature and inspired his colleagues and his students. For many years, Zane partnered with his colleague and friend Henry Shapiro, an intellectual historian. Among their collaborations was an edited volume, Physician to the West: Selected Writings of Daniel Drake on Science and Society, published in 1970 by the University Press of Kentucky. This in-depth volume on Cincinnati's polymath booster was indicative of the type of work Zane would take up over the course of his career—an understudied topic connected to the Queen City with an intriguing intellectual component. By writing far-reaching scholarship on topics near at hand, Zane became one of the nation's foremost urban historians.

Together with his students, Zane can be said to have given Cincinnati a historical literature. His first book, Boss Cox's Cincinnati: Urban Politics in the Progressive Era (Oxford University Press, 1968), was a much abridged version of his University of Chicago dissertation. Subsequent books delved into community formation and change, including Suburb: Neighborhood and Community in Forest Park, Ohio, 1935–1976 (University of Tennessee Press, 1981), still one of the finest case studies of suburban development. Changing Plans for America's Inner Cities: Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine and Twentieth-Century Urbanism, written with Bruce Tucker (Ohio State University Press, 1998) covered the long struggle to define—or redefine—the city's most troubled neighborhood. Fittingly, Zane's last book recounted the history of Clifton, the Cincinnati neighborhood in which he lived during his long career. In essence, Zane had conducted research for Visions of Place: The City, Neighborhoods, Suburbs, and Cincinnati's Clifton, 1850–2000 (Ohio State University Press, 2001) for thirty-five years, since he moved into a modern home in the historic neighborhood.

In addition to his monographic work, Zane published numerous articles, including many in journals that preceded Ohio Valley History. Among these were "Corruption Ain't What It Used To Be: City Politics, Ethics, and the Public Welfare," which appeared in Queen City Heritage (Summer 1991) and "Thinking, Politics, City Government: Charter Reform in Cincinnati, 1890s–1990s," in the same journal (Winter 1997). Both of these works, and many others, took up issues that were alive in Cincinnati and encouraged readers to consider how the city could better pursue the public interest.

The growing historiography of Cincinnati did not come from Zane's pen alone, of course. Many of his students also produced important works, including Robert Fairbanks, whose dissertation became Making Better Citizens: Housing Reform and the Community Development Strategy in Cincinnati, 1890–1960 (University of Illinois Press, 1988), and Alan I. Marcus, whose dissertation became Plague of Strangers: Social Groups...