| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Ohio: The History of a People. By Andrew R. L. Cayton. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002. viii, 472 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8142-0899-1.)

Writing as much as a native son as an historian, Andrew R. L. Cayton has written a big bicentennial book about the state of Ohio and its people. The result is a complex story that was written, and can be read, at many levels. Here we get the historian successfully shaping a grand contemporary synthesis; we also get the native son writing in the despairing yet elegiac mode honed by two centuries of Ohio writers.

Cayton divides his story of Ohio since statehood into twelve chapters. The first four chapters cover the first sixty years, as "Strangers in Canaan" gradually settle and move on to "Improving Ohio," "Considering Ohio," and "Defining Ohio," a definition crystallized in the antebellum crisis and the Civil War of Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman. The next block of four chapters carries the story through the 1920s, focusing on the impacts of immigration and industrialization, the impulses of reform, and the rise of the most influential generation of Ohio writers, that of William Dean Howells, Sherwood Anderson, and James Thurber. The final four chapters carry the story through the twentieth century, detailing the parallel migrations of Appalachian whites and Deep South blacks into Ohio's industrial cities, the contest over conditions of labor in a culturally divided society, the emerging postwar suburban ethos, and the political traumas and compromises engendered by those transformations.

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