The Ohio canals live again through the eye and hand of artist-historian Frank N. Wilcox. From his years of walking the canal ways and exploring the broken locks to searching old newspapers and musty records, Wilcox built this record. Through his art and writing he tells the story of canal location and construction; guides us through the intricacies of locks and their workings; and restores for today’s readers the texture and flavor of this colorful era.

In Ohio Hill Country, author Carolyn Platt describes how plant and animal life evolved to fill the many niches and microclimates afforded by the area’s weathered sandstones and shales and the ravines cut by area streams. She introduces readers to places such as the Hocking Hills and the Edge of Appalachia in Adams County, which are still home to an exotic and diverse group of flora and fauna.

In the early 1960s, Olaf Prufer argued that the Ohio Hopewell societies who built the mounds that characterize the Middle Woodland Period (200 B.C. to A.D. 400) lived in small, scattered hamlets. Prufer’s thesis was evaluated at the symposium, “Testing the Prufer Model of Ohio Hopewell Settlement Pattern” and at the annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Pittsburgh, April 10, 1992. Several of those essays and others, including two by Professor Prufer, are included in Ohio Hopewell Community Organization.

For a century, Americans have been purchasing picture postcards. Ohio in Historic Postcards presents 208 examples of postcards from early twentieth-century Ohio and places them in their historical context. At the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, the first picture postcards portrayed a range of the fair’s attractions. From that beginning postcards took the nation by storm. The efficiency of the Railway Mail Service together with the sparsity of telephones made the cards a cheap, reliable, and convenient form of communication.

In this classic and coveted volume, artist Frank N. Wilcox tackles the difficult job of mapping the Indian trails of Ohio. Basing his work on the journals and records of early settlers and soldiers, his knowledge of Native American ways, and his intimacy with the Ohio landscape, he locates and documents the major Indian towns and trails that crisscross the state. His maps, drawings, and watercolors beautifully evoke the lives and cultures of Ohio’s first peoples.

Ohio Outback is a unique compilation of writings by Claude Clayton Smith about his experiences of living in Ohio for the past twenty-two years. Smith offers a vibrant, humorous portrait of life that focuses on individuals and events in out-of-the-way places throughout northwest Ohio. The pieces in this book reflect a growing curiosity and fondness for Ohio, with topics ranging from the manufacturing process of NFL footballs and the anatomy of ditches to an Ohio section of a ten-thousandmile drive by interstate highway across the forty-eight states and Smith’s reflections as a licensed professional boxing judge. Ohio Outback also contains “Yard Wars of the Ohio Outback,” a lighthearted piece that forms the book’s narrative core with tales of bird, pool, and driveway battles.

When first published in 1994, Ohio Politics was defined as the first comprehensive survey of the state’s post–World War II politics. A collaborative effort by a team of journalists and political scientists, this collection examines the major political events in Ohio since 1944 and provides insight into the state’s key personalities, institutions, and processes. This revised and updated edition continues the survey from 1994 through the Taft years and the 2006 gubernatorial elections.

Roughly a century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt said, “I think there is only one thing in the world I can’t understand, and that is Ohio politics.” If The Ohio Politics Almanac had existed then, Roosevelt still might not have understood Ohio politics, but it wouldn’t have been for lack of information. A comprehensive and authoritative resource, The Ohio Politics Almanac sheds light on the complexity of Ohio’s electoral statistics. 

In Ohio States: A Twentieth-Century Midwestern, Jeffrey Hammond asserts the quiet mysteries of an ordinary life. More than simply a glimpse of life in the Midwest in the 1950s, this collection of well-crafted, touching narratives finds the author recalling his childhood and youth with a mixture of affection and alarm.

This three-part series won awards from the International Film & TV Festival of New York, the Ohio Association of Historical Societies and Museums, and the American Association of Historical Societies and Museums. A 16-page Teacher/Discussion Guide is included. This series, produced in cooperation with the Canal Society of America, brings to life an almost forgotten period in Ohio’s early history, visiting restored sections of the vital nineteenth-century inland transportation system. Kent State University Press’s award-winning book A Photo Album of Ohio’s Canal Era, 1825–1913, by Jack Gieck, can be purchased along with this DVD.