New Book Releases

Now a bustling city of more than 50,000 residents, Cleveland Heights, situated just six miles from Cleveland's Public Square, boasts a history that begins well before its own incorporation. The region was once home to Native American tribes including the Erie and Seneca, and stalwart pioneers established settlements in the area as early as the late eighteenth century. In the post-Civil War period, as Cleveland was becoming an industrial metropolis, affluent residents began moving to the newly developed "garden suburbs," anxious to live closer to nature and farther from the smoky city and its increasingly diverse population. Born of this same desire, Cleveland Heights was founded in 1901. Here, in this isolated countryside owned by substantial families like the Silsbys, Minors, Comptons, and Taylors, entrepreneurs and city officials envisioned a clean and comfortable suburb for Cleveland's elite. Officially designated a city in 1921, Cleveland Heights quickly became not the homogenized suburb envisioned by early developers, but a community of widely divergent neighborhoods and people. Newcomers belonged to varying class, religious, ethnic, and racial backgrounds. A century after its founding, Cleveland Heights has become an "inner-ring urban suburb," boasting gracious homes of architectural distinction and attractive parks, but also facing the modern challenges of a dwindling population and commercial districts in need of economic revitalization. This new volume illustrates, in both word and image, the evolving life of Cleveland Heights from its beginning as part of East Cleveland Township, one of the region's first suburbs, to the present day.

Truly a model community of the best that small-town America offers, Salem, Ohio, represents good values, a peaceful setting, and a host of men and women grounded in prudence, integrity, and resolve. The combination of Quaker spirituality and pioneer resourcefulness helped its first settlers in the beginning of the nineteenth century to carve out a lasting home in America's beckoning wilderness. Against a backdrop of two centuries, Salem evolved from a simple Quaker outpost into a thriving community—one that would participate and influence many major events in our nation's history. Salem: A Quaker City History documents the town's unique story over the past 200 years, beginning with Elisha Schooley's cabin in 1801 and spanning the town's evolution over the succeeding decades. Within these pages, readers meet the town's earliest citizens and its founding fathers, Zadok Street and John Straughan, and experience firsthand the changing landscape through the struggles and triumphs of Salem's new settlers seeking opportunity and freedom. This devotion to freedom is at the very heart of the town's identity, having served as an outspoken advocate for emancipation and woman's suffrage and providing legions of its young men in service to the country in times of military conflict.

Ed Lentz takes readers on a photographic journey of the Arch city through history from National Road to capital city.

From the enigmatic Moundbuilders who left their mark in the heart of the Buckeye State to the National Road and Ohio Canal that drew an influx of settlers to the burgeoning capital, Columbus blossomed into an industrial hub that became the world's largest producer of buggies. The Arch City--with its illuminated streetcar arches curving gracefully through downtown--struggled through social and political unrest to thrive on its economic success and grow into a diversified capital city.