The last place most 19th-century settlers wanted to move was the swampy, fever-ridden Toledo area. However, with the assistance of Irish and German immigrants, among others, Toledo was transformed from a village into a thriving city within 50 years. Captured here is the growth and expansion of the area through the indelible contributions of Toledo's architects. In 1850, Toledo had only 3,800 residents, but the introduction of canals and railroads quadrupled the population. Designated as the new county seat, major public buildings and hotels were built. Isaiah Rogers, one of the most famous architects in the nation, designed the Oliver House Hotel; Toledo's first architect, Frank Scott, planned many notable landscapes in the city as well as some of the most interesting houses; and designing almost every major commercial building in the city was Charles Crosby Miller. All of these, as well as David Stine and Edward Fallis, infused Toledo's pride into local landmarks of the past and present, including the Boody House, the Wheeler Opera House, the mansions of Collingwood Avenue, and the churches and breweries that complete Toledo's neighborhoods and downtown.

A forested borderland dominated by American Indians in 1780, Ohio was a landscape of farms and towns inhabited by people from all over the world in 1830. The Center of a Great Empire: The Ohio Country in the Early Republic chronicles this dramatic and all-encompassing change. Editors Andrew R.L. Cayton and Stuart D. Hobbs have assembled a focused collection of articles by established and rising scholars that address the conquest of Native Americans, the emergence of a democratic political culture, the origins of capitalism, the formation of public culture, the growth of evangelical Protestantism, the ambiguous status of African Americans, and social life in a place that most contemporaries saw as on the cutting edge of human history. Indeed, to understand what was happening in the Ohio country in the decades after the American Revolution is to go a long way toward understanding what was happening in the United States and the Atlantic world as a whole. For The Center of a Great Empire, distinguished historians of the American nation in its first decades question conventional wisdom. Downplaying the frontier character of Ohio, they offer new answers and open new paths of inquiry through investigations of race, education, politics, religion, family, commerce, colonialism, and conquest. As it underscores key themes in the history of the United States,The Center of a Great Empire pursues issues that have fascinated people for two centuries.Andrew R. L. Cayton, distinguished professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, is the author of several books, including Ohio: The History of a People and, with Fred Anderson, The Dominion of War: Liberty and Empire in North America, 1500-2000 . Stuart D. Hobbs is program director for History in the Heartland, a professional development program for middle and high school teachers of history. Hobbs is the author of The End of the American Avant Garde.

The Ohio Country in the eighteenth century was a zone of international strife, and the Delawares, Shawnees, Iroquois, and other natives who had taken refuge there were caught between the territorial ambitions of the French and British. A Country Between is unique in assuming the perspective of the Indians who struggled to maintain their autonomy in a geographical tinderbox.

The Great Black Swamp may have slowed the settlement of northwest Ohio, but it couldn't stop a little town south of Toledo called Bowling Green. It blossomed into an agricultural gold mine with natural gas and oil booms that prospered the modest Wood County seat late in the Nineteenth Century. Now as the home of internationally known Bowling Green State University, the National Championship Tractor Pulling Competition, and the Black Swamp Arts Festival, this formerly uninhabitable swamp continues to attract its fair share of attention. In this pictorial history you will learn how Bowling Green beat the odds to become the city everybody wants to revisit.

The eleven essays in this volume probe multicultural interactions between Indians, Europeans, and Africans in eastern North America's frontier zones from the late colonial era to the end of the early republic. Focusing on contact points between these groups, they construct frontiers as creative arenas that produced new forms of social and political organization. Contributors to the volume offer fresh perspectives on a succession of frontier encounters from the era of the Seven Years' War in Pennsylvania, New York, and South Carolina to the Revolutionary period in the Ohio Valley to the Mississippi basin in the early national era. Drawing on ethnography, cultural and literary criticism, border studies, gender theory, and African American studies, they open new ways of looking at intercultural contact in creating American identities. Collectively, the essays in Contact Points challenge ideas of either acculturation or conquest, highlighting instead the complexity of various frontiers while demonstrating their formative influence in American history. The contributors are Stephen Aron, Andrew R. L. Cayton, Gregory E. Dowd, John Mack Faragher, William B. Hart, Jill Lepore, James H. Merrell, Jane T. Merritt, Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, Elizabeth A. Perkins, Claudio Saunt, and Fredrika J. Teute.