The Center of a Great Empire: The Ohio Country in the Early Republic

by Andrew R.L. Cayton (Editor), Stuart Hobbs (Editor), Stuart D. Hobbs (Editor)

“The people who lived in what became the seventeenth state in the American Union in 1803 were not only at the center of a great empire, they were at the center of the most important historical developments in the revolutionary Atlantic World.”
— From the introduction Nowhere did the revolutions in politics, commerce, and society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries occur more quickly or more thoroughly than in the Ohio country. 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 by 1830. The Center of a Great The Ohio Country in the Early Republic chronicles this dramatic and all-encompassing change. Andrew R. L. Cayton and Stuart D. Hobbs have assembled an impressive collection of articles by established and rising scholars. They 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 regarded as the cutting edge of human history. For The Center of a Great Empire, distinguished historians of the American nation in its first decades question conventional wisdom. They emphasize contingency rather than inevitability and contention rather than progress. Downplaying the frontier character of Ohio, they offer new interpretations 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.

Genres: History, American History

232 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

A specialist in the history of early America and the Atlantic World, Andrew Robert Lee Cayton was Distinguished Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. A native of Cincinnati, he received a B.A. with high honors from the University of Virginia and an M.A. and Ph.D. in American History from Brown University. He was previously a Visiting Professor of History at The Ohio State University as well as the John Adams (Fulbright) Professor of American Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, The Washington Post Sunday Book World, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Reviews in American History, The Journal of American History, The William and Mary Quarterly, The Journal of the Early Republic and The Great Plains Quarterly.