As the state of Ohio prepares to celebrate its bicentennial in 2003, Andrew R. L. Cayton offers an account of ways in which diverse citizens have woven its history. Ohio: The History of a People, centers around the many stories Ohioans have told about life in their state. The founders of Ohio in 1803 believed that its success would depend on the development of a public culture that emphasized what its citizens had in common with each other. But for two centuries the remarkably diverse inhabitants of Ohio have repeatedly asserted their own ideas about how they and their children should lead their lives. The state's public culture has consisted of many voices, sometimes in conflict with each other. Using memoirs, diaries, letters, novels, and paintings, Cayton writes Ohio's history as a collective biography of its citizens. Ohio, he argues, lies at the intersection of the stories of James Rhodes and Toni Morrison, Charles Ruthenberg and Lucy Webb Hayes, Carl Stokes and Alice Cary, Sherwood Anderson and Pete Rose. It lies in the tales of German Jews in Cincinnati, Italian and Polish immigrants in Cleveland, Southern blacks and white Appalachians in Youngstown. Ohio is the mingled voices of farm families, steelworkers, ministers, writers, schoolteachers, reformers, and football coaches. Ohio, in short, is whatever its citizens have imagined it to be.

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).

Ohio: A History of the Buckeye State explores the breadth of Ohio’s past, tracing the course of history from its earliest geological periods to the present day in an accessible, single-volume format. Features the most up-to-date research on Ohio, drawing on material in the disciplines of history, archaeology, and political science Includes thematic chapters focusing on major social, economic, and political trends Amply illustrated with maps, drawings, and photographs Receipient of the Ohio Geneological Society's Henry Howe Award in 2014