In The Two-Volume The History of Ohio Law, distinguished legal historians, practicing Ohio attorneys, and judges present the history of Ohio law and the interaction between law and society in the state. The first history of Ohio law in nearly seventy years - and the most comprehensive compilation of essays on any state's law - its twenty-two topics range from the history of Ohio's constitutional conventions and legal institutions to the history of civil procedure, evidence, land use, civil liberties, and utility regulation. The essays describe Ohio's legal institutions, legal procedures, and the substance of Ohio law as it has changed over time. institutions have affected Ohio law and how the law has affected them. The essays provide important information to practitioners and offer attorneys, legal scholars, historians, and the public a broad understanding of the relationship between law and society in Ohio. intersections between law and race, gender, and labor. Insightful essays also discuss the development of Ohio's legal literature, the impact of federal courts, and Ohio's most important contributions to American constitutional development. Written by twenty-two leading lawyers and historians, The History of Ohio Law will be the indispensable reference and invaluable first source for learning about law and society in Ohio.

Explores the origins and nature of political culture in Ohio from the American Revolution until the Civil War. Essays examine such topics as voting practices, the role of the state in national economic development, and the relationship between religion and politics.

Often remembered as the president who died shortly after taking office, William Henry Harrison remains misunderstood by most Americans. Before becoming the ninth president of the United States in 1841, Harrison was instrumental in shaping the early years of westward expansion. Robert M. Owens now explores that era through the lens of Harrison’s career, providing a new synthesis of his role in the political development of Indiana Territory and in shaping Indian policy in the Old Northwest. Owens traces Harrison’s political career as secretary of the Northwest Territory, territorial delegate to Congress, and governor of Indiana Territory, as well as his military leadership and involvement with Indian relations. Thomas Jefferson, who was president during the first decade of the nineteenth century, found in Harrison the ideal agent to carry out his administration’s ruthless campaign to extinguish Indian land titles. More than a study of the man, Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer is a cultural biography of his fellow settlers, telling how this first generation of post-Revolutionary Americans realized their vision of progress and expansionism. It surveys the military, political, and social world of the early Ohio Valley and shows that Harrison’s attitudes and behavior reflected his Virginia background and its eighteenth-century notions as much as his frontier milieu. To this day, we live with the echoes of Harrison’s proclamations, the boundaries set by his treaties, and the ramifications of his actions. Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer offers a much needed reappraisal of Harrison’s impact on the nation’s development and key lessons for understanding American sentiments in the early republic.

Although William Henry Harrison died a month after becoming President, he lived a full and accomplished life before assuming the presidency. As a member of Congress, he sponsored legislation dividing the Northwest Territory. As governor of the Indiana Territory, he led a movement to suspend the provisions of the Northwest Ordinance and earned a reputation for acquiring large land cessions from the Indian tribes, winning the affection of white settlers and the animosity of Native Americans. Serving as brigadier general during the War of 1812, he then served in the Ohio legislature and the U.S. Senate, and was named minister to Colombia. This bibliography provides a guide to the literature on his extensive career.

During the early eighteenth century, three phratries or tribes (Turtle, Turkey, and Wolf) of Delaware Indians left their traditional homeland in the Delaware River watershed and moved west to the Allegheny Valley of western Pennsylvania and eventually across the Ohio River into the Muskingum River valley. As newcomers to the colonial American borderlands, these bands of Delawares detached themselves from their past in the east, developed a sense of common cause, and created for themselves a new regional identity in western Pennsylvania. The Western Delaware Indian Nation, 1730-1795: Warriors and Diplomats is a case study of the western Delaware Indian experience, offering critical insight into the dynamics of Native American migrations to new environments and the process of reconstructing social and political systems to adjust to new circumstances. The Ohio backcountry brought to center stage the masculine activities of hunting, trade, war-making, diplomacy and was instrumental in the transformation of Delaware society and with that change, the advance of a western Delaware nation. This nation, however, was forged in a time of insecurity as it faced the turmoil of imperial conflict during the Seven Years' War and the backcountry racial violence brought about by the American Revolution. The stress of factionalism in the council house among Delaware leaders such as Tamaqua, White Eyes, Killbuck, and Captain Pipe constantly undermined the stability of a lasting political western Delaware nation. This narrative of western Delaware nationhood is a story of the fight for independence and regional unity and the futile effort to create and maintain an enduring nation. In the end the western Delaware nation became fragmented and forced as in the past, to journey west in search of a new beginning. The Western Delaware Indian Nation, 1730-1795: Warriors and Diplomats is an account of an Indian people and their dramatic and arduous struggle for autonomy, identity, political union, and a permanent homeland.

A territory split by slavery, a state forged for union Avenues of Transformation traces the surprising path, marked by shame, ambition, and will that led to Illinois’s admission to the Union in 1818. Historian James A. Edstrom guides the reader through this story by associating each stage of the narrative—the original statehood campaign, the passage of Illinois’s statehood-enabling act by Congress, and Illinois’s first constitutional convention—with the primary leaders in each of those episodes. The lives of these men—Daniel Pope Cook, Nathaniel Pope, and Elias Kent Kane—reflect the momentous tangle of politics, slavery, and geography. This history maps the drive for statehood in the conflict between nation and state, in the perpetuation of slavery, and in the sweep of water and commerce. It underscores the ways in which the Prairie State is uniquely intertwined—economically, socially, and politically—with every region of the Union: North, South, East, and West—and captures the compelling moment when Illinois statehood stood ready to more perfectly unify the nation. This volume is the first full-length book in over a century to describe and analyze Illinois’s admission to the Union. It marks the first time that a historian has analyzed in detail the roll-call votes of the first state constitutional convention, seated evenly by pro- and antislavery delegates. Edstrom’s wit and prose weave a lively narrative of political ambition and human failure. Patiently crafted, Avenues of Transformation will be the first source for readers to turn to for gaining a better understanding of Illinois statehood.

From 1826 to 1829, John Bradford, founder of Kentucky's first newspaper, the Kentucky Gazette, reprinted in its pages sixty-six excerpts that he considered important documents on the settlement of the West. Now for the first time all of Bradford's Notes on Kentucky—the primary historical source for Kentucky's early years—are made available in a single volume, edited by the state's most distinguished historian. The Kentucky Gazette was established in 1787 to support Kentucky's separation from Virginia and the formation of a new state. Bradford's Notes deal at length with that protracted debate and the other major issues confronting Bradford and his pioneering neighbors. The early white settlers were obsessed with Indian raids, which continued for more than a decade and caused profound anxiety. A second vexing concern was overlapping land claims, as swarms of settlers flowed into the region. And as quickly as the land was settled, newly opened fields began to yield mountains of produce in need of outside markets. Spanish control of the lower Mississippi and rumors of Spain's plan to close the river for twenty-five years were far more threatening to the new economy than the continuing Indian raids. Equally disturbing was the British occupation of the northwest posts from which it was believed the northern Indianraids emanated. Not until Anthony Wayne's sweeping campaign against the Miami villages and the signing of the Treaty of Greenville in 1794 was tension from that quarter relieved. Finally, the Jay Treaty with Britain and the Pinckney Treaty with Spain diplomatically cleared the Kentucky frontier for free expansion of the white populace. John Bradford's Notes on Kentucky, now published together for the first time, deal with all of these pertinent issues. No other source portrays so intimately or so graphically the travail of western settlement.