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 1989, when Ohio and Its People was first published, the state was still reeling from severe economic blows. Now its economy is resurgent. Its cities have made great progress in renewing portions of their downtowns and, in some cases, their neighborhoods.

A firsthand account of the immigrant experience in America Frank Mendez, a child of Mexican immigrants begins his memoir with the story of his father's harrowing migration from Mexico to Texas in 1920 as he escaped from Zapata's guerrrillos and continues with his story of growing up in northeast Ohio. He recounts the Mendez family's experience with the Depression, living in the Lorain, Ohio barrio, labor issues, racism, and World War II. Mendez dropped out of high school in 1943 and enlisted in the Marine Corps where he served twenty-two months in the Pacific theatre. When he returned to Lorain, he received his high school diploma, bachelor's and master's degrees, and a professional engineering license. With an easy, engaging style, Mendez deals directly with the matter of personal identity, addressing the issues that confronted him as he tried to sort out his sometimes conflicting Mexican and American heritage. You Can't Be Mexican comments on the social and political issues of the twentieth century and will appeal to those interested in immigrant studies and ethnicity studies and modern social history. " Every immigrant group which has ever come to this country has its own story to tell. Many of the stories have common threads, however, and Mendez's detailed recollection of the personalities, the emotions, the disappointments and joys relate to the understanding that this is a country of immigrants, whose experience is woven into a shared culture. I know others will enjoy this book as much as I did."--Ambler H. Moss Jr., Professor of International Studies, University of Miami (former U.S. Ambassador to Panama, 1978- 1982)

The bicentennial edition of this publication has been revised and updated and includes an additional chapter which examines Ohio through to the end of the 20th century. George W. Knepper presents contemporary information on the national and state political arenas, the economy and the environment.

Using clues from numerous archives, privately held records, museum collections, and even the soil where early members planted corn and homes, the author reconstructs the cultural experiences by which Kirtland's Latter-day Saints made sense of the revelations Joseph Smith pronounced.