Just one year after a settlement was established on the Ohio River in 1788 and one year before its name was changed from Losantiville to Cincinnati, an Irish immigrant brought his family to the cabins located there. Shortly thereafter, Francis Kennedy established a ferry service to support his wife and children, and more Irishmen followed over the next few decades. It was a diverse group that included Methodists, Presbyterians, Quakers, and Catholics who were manufacturers, stevedores, and merchants. The Irish in Cincinnati have always contributed to the culture, politics, and business life of the city. Their traditional strengths are found in churches, schools, and fraternal organizations like the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick and the Ancient Order of Hibernians. There is also richness in their ethnic heritage that includes art, dance, music, literature, and festivals involving everything from the annual mock theft of the St. Patrick statue in Mt. Adams, the St. Patrick's Day parade, and the various ceili throughout the year to the events at the Cincinnati Irish Heritage Center. Using rare and evocative images, Irish Cincinnati embraces 200 years of their lives in the Queen City.

During the pre-Civil War period, Cincinnati was the fastest growing and, according to many contemporary observers, most interesting city in America. This classic study, completed in the early 1970s, focusses on the community in 1840 to explain its success but also to suggest some broader patterns in the city's development and American urbanization. Using local census records, city directories, Walter Stix Glazer describes the demographic, social, economic, and political structure of the adult white male population in 1840 and then develops a unified model of its social and functional organizations. This analysis (based on computerized records of thousands of Cincinnatians) also documents some broader trends between 1820 and 1860: the volatility of Cincinnati's labor force, the career patterns of its homeowners, and the leadership of a small group of successful citizens active in a broad range of voluntary associations. This statistical analysis is complemented with sections of traditional historical narrative and biographical profiles that illustrate the general themes of the book. Glazer argues that Cincinnati's success up to 1840 was due to a unified booster vision and a cohesive community elite that gradually broke down, as a result of ethnic and economic division, over the next twenty years. This story has broader implications in terms of the character of Jacksonian democracy and American urbanization.

In this major new work of urban geography, Allan Pred interprets the process by which major cities grew and the entire city-system of the United States developed during the antebellum decades. The book focuses on the availability and distribution of crucial economic information. For as cities developed, this information helped determine the new urban areas in which business opportunities could be exploited and productive innovations implemented. Pred places this original approach to urbanization in the context of earlier, more conventional studies, and he supports his view by a wealth of evidence regarding the flow of commodities between major cities. He also draws on an analysis of newspaper circulation, postal services, business travel, and telegraph usage. Pred's book goes far beyond the usual "biographies" of individual cities or the specialized studies of urban life. It offers a large and fascinating view of the way an entire city-system was put together and made to function. Indeed, by providing the first full account of these two decades of American urbanization, Pred has supplied a vital and hitherto missing link in the history of the United States.

In 1785 lands of the Northwest Territory were offered for sale to the public. By 1800 four land offices were established and sales from the Zanesville office, which included tracts originally reserved for the Marietta and Steubenville offices and, more importantly, parts of the United States Military District, reserved for veterans of the Revolutionary War, form the basis of this volume. In addition, this volume also includes records from the Steubenville office for the period 1820-1840, the first twenty years of sales records having already been published. In tabular format this volume has a complete list of 22,770 persons who bought land in central and east central Ohio between 1800 and 1840. Data includes the name of the purchaser (in alphabetical order), date of purchase, place of residence at the time of purchase, and the range, township, and section of the purchased land, thus enabling the researcher to ascertain the exact location of the ancestor's land see also Items 480 and 481).

"Provides a rich prism through which to explore the social, economic, and political development of black Cincinnati. These studies offer insight into both the dynamics of racism and a community's changing responses to it." -- Peter Rachleff, author of Black Labor in Richmond

Late in the 18th-century, people began to head west in America in search of new frontiers and new lives. Many of them, including immigrants, found their way down the Ohio River to Cincinnati, Ohio, the “Queen City of the West.” In Oldest Cincinnati, follow their journey and learn the story of the city as you’ve never heard it before. Read about a ferry that helped early settlers cross the Ohio River to Augusta, Kentucky, began in 1798 and that’s still in business today. Likewise, a stagecoach inn that began providing shelter for early travelers opened in Lebanon, Ohio, in 1803 continues welcoming guests to this day. As one of the first settlements in the Northwest Territory, called “Losantiville” before it was dubbed Cincinnati, there are still many “firsts” and “oldests” to be found locally. The first museum—focused on natural history and science—was launched in 1818. It’s now located in Cincinnati’s oldest train station. In 1866 the oldest bridge across the Ohio River connected downtown Cincinnati to Covington, Kentucky. The oldest art museum west of the Allegheny Mountains opened in 1881. While the character of Cincinnati dramatically changed in the mid-19th century as German immigrants came in waves, the city would continue to boom culturally. They brewed beer, of course, but they also loved music, launching the oldest choral music festival in the Western Hemisphere. Local historian and author Rick Pender goes to great lengths to research and pay homage to more than two centuries of Cincinnati’s oldests, firsts, and finests. Read about all of these and more in this informative book that brings history and people to life.