An analysis of the political economy, social development and history of Cleveland from 1796 to the present. As one of the oldest communities in the United States, the author looks at it as a model of transformation for other industrial cities.

In cooperation with Western Reserve Historical Society Euclid Avenue, which runs through the heart of downtown Cleveland, was for 60 years one of the finest residential streets of any city in 19th century America. Showplace of America is the fascinating account of the rise and fall of this elegant promenade, including portrayals of the eminent architects who created its opulent residences and colorful details about the lives of the wealthy people who occupied them. The families who resided within this linear, four-mile neighborhood epitomized Midwestern grandeur in the second half of the 19th century. The 1893 Baedeker's travel guide to the United States labeled it "one of the most beautiful residence-streets in America," as others hailed it "Millionaires' Row," the finest avenue in the west, and the most beautiful street in the world." Modeled after the grand boulevards of Europe, this magnificent neighborhood was distinguished for the prominence of its architects as well as the families who lived there. Local architects Jonathan Goldsmith, Charles W. Heard, Levi T. Scofield, Charles F. Schweinfurth, and Coburn & Barnum and national firms Peabody & Stearns and McKim, Mead & White created houses that were stunning monuments to Cleveland and America's growing prosperity. Ironically, the tremendous success of Cleveland's industry and commerce, which had nurtured the rise of this grand avenue, fostered its fall. Downtown commerce expanded along the avenue at the sacrifice of its leading entrepreneurs' residential have. The houses were demolished as the avenue became what is today--a neglected urban thoroughfare. Photographs and illustrations from the archives of the Western Reserve Historical Society and other repositories are published here for the first time, documenting both the glory and decline of the "showplace of America."

"The documents range from an Indian captivity narrative to narratives of exploration to records left by a missionary to a young girl's remarkable record of growing up on the "frontier" to accounts by immigrants of life in a new world."--BOOK JACKET.

This highly successful short history of Cleveland has now been revised and brought up to date through 1996, the bicentennial year, including two new chapters, and new illustrations and charts.

Lake Effects is a history of urban policy making in the large Midwestern industrial city of Cleveland, Ohio. Urban policy making requires goal setting in four critical areas: economic development, urban growth, services, and wealth redistribution. Ronald Weiner shows how urban policy was conceived and implemented by the local governing elites, or regimes, between 1825 and 1929. Each regime-Merchant, Populist, Corporate, and Realty-set policy goals in the four areas; set priorities among the goals; and used their power, public and private, to guide the city toward these ends. Each regime dominated policy making for at least twenty years, and the successes and failures of each regime contribute to our understanding of how Cleveland became the city that it is today. The successes of the Merchant Regime's economic development policy made Cleveland's industrialization possible. The urban growth policy of the Corporate Regime built the downtown civic center and University Circle. However, the Populist, Corporate, and Realty regimes' failures to plan for Cleveland's economic future helped set in motion the declining economic fortunes so harshly in evidence today, and the triumph of the expansionist Realty Regime's urban growth policy promoted heedless suburban development at the expense of the central business district and inner city. Book jacket.

Moral Geography traces the development of a moral basis for American expansionism, as Protestant missionaries, using biblical language and metaphors, imaginatively conjoined the cultivation of souls with the cultivation of land and made space sacred. While the political implications of the mapping of American expansion have been much studied, this is the first major study of the close and complex relationship between mapping and missionizing on the American frontier. Moral Geography provides a fresh approach to understanding nineteenth-century Protestant home missions in Ohio's Western Reserve. Through the use of maps, letters, religious tracts, travel narratives, and geographical texts, Amy DeRogatis recovers the struggles of settlers, land surveyors, missionaries, and geographers as they sought to reconcile their hopes and expectations for a Promised Land with the realities of life on the early American frontier.