Brief text and numerous historical photographs, engravings, drawings, woodcuts, etc., trace Cincinnati's history from first settlement to the early 1950's.

Cincinnati Magazine taps into the DNA of the city, exploring shopping, dining, living, and culture and giving readers a ringside seat on the issues shaping the region.

Marian Alexander Spencer was born in 1920 in the Ohio River town of Gallipolis, Ohio, one year after the “Red Summer” of 1919 that saw an upsurge in race riots and lynchings. Following the example of her grandfather, an ex-slave and community leader, Marian joined the NAACP at thirteen and grew up to achieve not only a number of civic leadership firsts in her adopted home city of Cincinnati, but a legacy of lasting civil rights victories. Of these, the best known is the desegregation of Cincinnati’s Coney Island amusement park. She also fought to desegregate Cincinnati schools and to stop the introduction of observers in black voting precincts in Ohio. Her campaign to raise awareness of industrial toxic-waste practices in minority neighborhoods was later adapted into national Superfund legislation. In 2012, Marian’s friend and colleague Dot Christenson sat down with her to record her memories. The resulting biography not only gives us the life story of remarkable leader but encapsulates many of the twentieth century’s greatest struggles and advances. Spencer’s story will prove inspirational and instructive to citizens and students alike.

Cincinnati Magazine taps into the DNA of the city, exploring shopping, dining, living, and culture and giving readers a ringside seat on the issues shaping the region.

Small-town boy Luke Binelli could hit a baseball, and he could hit it hard. That one skill would open up a world he could have never imagined; a world of big money, beautiful women, and fast cars. Luke would soon learn that his lifestyle did not come without a price. In an attempt to make his dreams a reality, Luke is drawn into the sordid world of drug smugglers and con artists. 'Greed is a sin against God, just as all mortal sins, in as much as man condemns things eternal for the sake of temporal things.' St. Thomas Aquinas

Opposites attract in this unforgettable favorite from New York Times bestselling author Sherryl Woods Victoria Marshall was an incurable romantic with her antique shop and rustic farmhouse, love poems and yesterday's fashions. She was yearning for a Prince Charming to sweep her off her feet. The dashing Tate McAndrews fit the bill, but alas, the IRS representative overseeing her audit had the soul of a stuffy realist. Tate was so…sensible, so practical…without an impulsive bone in his gorgeous body. How could she yearn with such heated longing for a man her mind knew was wrong for her? Could they share more than a brief romance without driving each other crazy? Love, Victoria knew, would find a way.

Cincinnati Magazine taps into the DNA of the city, exploring shopping, dining, living, and culture and giving readers a ringside seat on the issues shaping the region.

Dressmaking, considered a natural extension of women's proper work in the home, was a common and lucrative employment for women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It afforded creative expression, prestige in the community, and even the possibility of financial independence. Yet as entrepreneurs, dressmakers faced unique business pressures, and with the advent of department stores and widespread mass production of women's clothing, most were forced out of business. Coinciding with the exhibition Cynthia Amneus organized for the Cincinnati Art Museum, this work examines the nineteenth-century ideology of women's separate sphere, the early feminist movement, women in the workplace, and dressmakers as artisans and professionals. More than 140 stunning custom-made garments, historical photographs, and dressmakers' labels document the superb artistic and technical skill of the women who produced fashionable dress in Cincinnati from 1877 to 1922. Bracketing Amneus's incisive study are essays by Anne Bissonnette on the eccentric tea gown, Marla Miller on the pitfalls of researching women's cultural work, and Shirley Teresa Wajda on the dressmakers' wealthy clientele. In all, A Separate Sphere offers a careful look into the lives of women struggling with ideological boundaries. Chronicling choices made by and imposed on both working-class women and their affluent counterparts, it reveals how these women managed to enhance their prescribed sphere for themselves and for the community at large. Anne Bissonnette is costume curator at Kent State University Museum. Her most recent exhibition is The Hours of the Woman of Leisure. Marla Miller teaches history at the University ofMassachusetts, Amherst. Her book on craftswomen in rural New England, 1740-1820, is forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press. Shirley Teresa Wajda teaches history and American studies at Kent State University. Her book "Social Currency: Commercial Portrait Photography and the Fashioning of an American Middle Class, 1839-1889" is forthcoming from Temple University Press.