Arthur St. Clair, Governor of the Northwest Territory, warned friends in Congress that the frontier settlers of Ohio were too indigent and ignorant to form a constitution and government for themselves. This is the story of the men who proved him wrong. The author describes the beginning of Ohio through the lives of its founding fathers. Founding fathers include the thirty-five delegates to the convention held in Chillicothe in November, 1802, which decided that Ohio should become a state and then drafted its first constitution, as well as twenty additional men whose activities before and after the convention round out the story of the state's beginning. Revolutionary War veterans, Indian fighters, eastern aristocrats, Appalachian mountain men, and immigrants from Scotland, Ireland, and England combined their talents to lay the foundation for one of the greatest states in the nation.

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.

This Civil War biography chronicles the life of the brave Union artillery officer who refused to retreat from Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg. Lieutenant Alonzo Hereford Cushing may be the most famous lieutenant to be killed during the Civil War. Two years out of West Point, the young artillery officer commanded Battery A of the 4th US Artillery at Gettysburg. Despite severe wounds, Cushing defended his position at Cemetery Ridge against the fearsome Confederate infantry assault. The story of Cushing’s heroic final moments were witnessed and recorded by a battlefield correspondent for The New York Times, who said “the gallantry of this officer is beyond praise.” In 2014, President Barak Obama awarded Cushing a posthumous Medal of Honor. In this biography, Kent Brown presents a lively narrative based on extensive research, including a cache of Cushing’s letters.