Ohio Books

I have an interest in ohio history, aspeacialy frontiersmen. The accounts represented in this book are the most accurate Ive read anywhere. The accounts of Lewis Wetzle are the most consistant ive been able to find anywhere. it makes very good reading and I use it for references as well. If you want to learn more about actual events and not just made up story lines then this is the book for you!

What can I say, but woderful DVD!! Well worth the purchase!! Bings out the best and worst in Ohio State Football.

Newspaper reporter and editor Steve Greenberg and practiced legal expert Laura Lanese present Game of My Life: Ohio State Memorable Stories of Buckeye Football, a collection of true stories and vignettes about the individuals who gave their all to Ohio State football. Each of the thirty-six chapters relates the perspective of a different twentieth-century football player, recounting the game that was most unforgettable to him - and not necessarily because it ended in victory! Black-and-white photographs enhance this perfect holiday gift for Buckeye Football fans.

GeoFacts are a series of one-page educational handouts one can get for FREE from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Division of Geological Survey. Please go to their website, [...], to get your FREE PDF file.

The Atlantic February, 1991

We think of them as relatively new situations: Russia shaken from autocratic isolation by new forms of communications; the spread of concern for human rights and constitutional rule from West to East; America's efforts to maintain good relations with autocratic rulers while helping democratic protesters. Yet these are precisely the issues that defined the career of the first American Russia expert, George Kennan, a century ago. M ore than any other single American, this first cousin twice removed of our own era's George F. Kennan "discovered" and described Russia for America during the more than half a century between the American and Russian civil wars.

Kennan was a child of the new communications revolution, first visiting Siberia as part of an ill-fated telegraphic expedition, then making Russia the subject of one of the great lecturing careers of the late nineteenth century and one of the great journalistic careers of the early twentieth. Having discovered Siberia as an adventuresome frontiersman trying to forge a European-American cable connection the long way, across the Bering Strait, Kennan returned to expose the czarist prisons of Siberia and to become perhaps the leading champion in the Western world of democratic revolutionary resistance to the czarist authorities. As such, he struggled against a well-established official American policy of friendship for that particular autocracy. He mobilized American popular opinion in behalf of Russia's suppressed political opposition, and eventually helped change U.S. government policy as well.

IT IS A GREAT strength of this extensively researched new biography by Frederick Travis that we discover how little Kennan really studied Russia, how many mistakes (including deliberate ones) he introduced into his journalism, and yet how little challenged his authority remained within the United States. This was an age when America was absorbed in its own interests and inclined to read foreign countries, if at all, in terms of its own institutions and aspirations. Until the early twentieth century the study of Russia was almost totally absent from universities, and serious literature on Russia almost totally absent from libraries. Dilettantism could triumph if accompanied by the kind of arrogant tenacity and rhetorical panache that Kennan possessed. He presented a picture of Russia that was more a projection of characteristic American hopes, fears, and fantasies in an era of exuberant self-confidence than the product of had-earned knowledge.

His authority was, however, based on firsthand observations, though they were largely focused on the exotic. Kennan first arrived in Russia in 1865, and only after spending two winters in hitherto largely unknown parts of Siberia (later described in his first major book, Tent Life in Siberia) did Kennan visit Moscow and St. Petersburg. On his second trip he passed rapidly through Petersburg in order to reach the Caucasus, describing himself as "a vagabond ... who travels without any definite utilitarian aim ... the vagabond is never a spcialist ... he is ready to become all things with all men and to make himself equally at home in all places." His early travels in Russia were thus a kind of romantic Wanderjahre for a young midwestern Calvinist who was losing both his boyhood religious faith and his adolescent enthusiasm for scientific and technical expeditions. But he developed what grew into a lifelong fascination with the Russian people. There was, initially, no political or social content to his interest, although he generally shared the vague Russophilia in some circles that followed Russian support for the Union in the Civil War and the sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867. Throughout the 1870s and early 1880s Kennan defended Russian policy even when it proved expansionist, first in the Balkans and then in Central Asia, and he also tried to propagate the glories of Russian literature.

His ten-month-long trip to Siberia in 1885 and 1886 turned him from a defender of official Russia into a self-appointed spokesman for the political exiles and prisoners that he discovered there. Romantic infatuation was part of it all, as Kennan himself acknowledged: "With many of them I simply fall dead in love as if I were a girl of eighteen." But he was also moved by the moral purity of the exiles--their continued intellectual earnestness under difficult conditions and their combination of inner dignity and outward affection for this mysterious visitor from distant America. Kennan was particularly impressed by Catherine Breshkovsky, the populist "little grandmother of the Russian Revolution." She bade him farewell in the small Transbaikal village to which she was confined by saying, "We may die in exile, and our grand children may die in exile, but something will come of it at last." One of the Russians explained that until they had met Kennan, "we had been talking either to acknowledged friends or to prejudiced enemies, but never to an impartial observer, who would take on himself to bring the case before the tribunal of universal conscience." Kennan devoted much of the next twenty years to pressing their cause, mainly from the lecture platform.

He lectured before about a million people in the course of the 1890s, inspiring in one of them a "curious craving to see this gaunt land of Siberia and let my own eyes gaze on the starved wretches sent to a living death." Victorians loved to feel both superior to and shocked by distant outrages like those Kennan recounted. A taunt thrown at Victorian liberals--they "cross equinoxial lines in search of objects of charity"--brings to mind the "radical chic" of more recent times: North Americans incensed by events in Southeast Asia, South America, or South Africa.

Travis astutely observes that Kennan "saw in the political exiles the same heroic spirit that had attracted him to Caucasian mountaineers, wandering Koriaks in northeastern Siberia, and reforming drunkards on New York's Water Street." It was something like the spirit that another great journalist, John Reed, later sought first in the Wobblies, then in Mexican revolutionaries, and finally in the Bolsheviks about whom he fantasized so appealingly in Ten Days That Shook the World.

BUT KENNAN'S infatuation with Russia was informed by a sterner moral purpose, which Travis describes as a sense that Kennan was always on the side of civilization against barbarism. His long campaign in behalf of political prisoners was expanded to include persecuted minorities in the Russian empire--particularly the Jews--and the Japanese, who warred with the Russians in 1904-1905. He helped in a fascinating, little-known campaign to educate and politically mobilize Russian prisoners of war in Japan. And he attached great hopes to the Russian Revolution of 1905 and even greater to the democratic revolution of February, 1917.

Kennan was a perceptive analyst of the practical need for democratic and constitutional reform. He was particularly distressed by the czarist repression of student activity after the upheavals of 1905. "A university is a barometer which shows the state of the public mind," Kennan quoted a Russian surgeon as saying. "A wise man does not break the instrument, but learns from it what the weather is likely to be." He accused the czars of breaking the barometers rather than read them. He saw that all russian involvement in modern wars concluded with a period of reform or revolution--in effect, "a recompense for their sacrifices and losses."

All the more bitter, then, was the Bolshevik betrayal of a revolution that Kennan had encouraged in its democratic phase. Unlike John Reed, Kennan vehemently rejected the October Revolution, both because of the Bolsheviks' renunciation of the Allied cause in the war and because the Soviet government lacked the "knowledge, experience, or education to deal successfully with the tremendous problems that have come up for solutions since the overthrow of the Tsar." Kennan criticized Woodrow Wilson for being much too timid in intervening against Bolshevik power, and persisted longer than most Americans in the belief that the Siberians would hold out against the Bolsheviks, because they were a "bolder and more independent people than the Muzhiks of European Russia." Travis tends to be rather condemnatory both of Kennan's extreme opposition to the Bolshevik takeover and of his insistence on the moral obligation to defend the provisional government. Kennan's last epitaph on the Bolshevik Revolution was written in a small-town newspaper, the Medina Tribune, in July of 1923:

The Russian leopard has not changed its spots... The new Bolshevik constitution ... leaves all power just where it has been for the last five years--in the hands of a small group of self-appointed bureaucrats which the people can neither remove nor control.

He died not long after Lenin did, having just finished an article on Japanese education--finding more hope for the future in Japan than in Russia.

ONE IS RELIEVED that Travis's biography does not include the kind of psychological probing or moralistic preaching that has too often been directed at Victorian figures, though his tendency to make this account an exhaustive inventory of Kennan's acquaintances and views results in a certain blandness. Kennan's larger-than-life and even heroic qualities--his physical endurance on Siberian trips and on lecture tours, the majesty of his moralism--never quite come across. But Travis perceptively identifies Kennan's flaws. There was more than a little blindness in the man. He was sympathetic chiefly to political prisoners, who represented a minute fraction of those in Russia's vast penal and exile system. As far as we know, he never visited any prison outside Russia for comparative purposes. He confused political exiles in East Siberia with administrative exiles in West Siberia, and at times he misled his audiences in other ways to dramatize his cause. Kennan never probed deeply into the views of Russians working within the system, whom he could have helped and learned from. Nikolai Yadrintsev, for instance, one of the most interesting and sophisticated publicists in behalf of a semi-independent Siberia, urged a different, more open style of development there. Kennan met him early but seems never to have talked seriously with him or with a number of others who saw then--as many do today--that Siberia itself might ultimately become an example of the kind of liberal democratic development that its prisoners advocated.

The fact remains, however, that Kennan created American public interest in the internal conditions of a remote country, and the story of how he did so supplies an impressive first chapter for a history, yet to be written, on the effects of American journalism on foreign policy. Kennan catalyzed a range of things that eventually helped to change policy: the first English-language opposition journal, Free Russia; the Society of American Friends of Russian Freedom (involving such luminaries as Julia Ward Howe and Mark Twain); and a public campaign against a Senate-approved treaty that would have exposed Jewish emigres to America to possible arrest if they re-entered Russia. State Department officials in the late nineteenth century were as annoyed by Kennan's attempts to affect intergovernmental relations as their successors were many years later by the outcries over immigration and human rights which led to the Jackson-Vanik amendment of 1974. It is easy to forget now, in the wake of the victory of the human-rights agenda in Eastern Europe, how doggedly most of the American foreign-policy establishment resisted the intrusion of such concerns into its realpolitik agenda of security, political, and economic questions. It was Western Europeans, rather than Americans, who took the lead in assuring that human rights were included in "basket three," which became part of the international obligations of all signatories of the Helsinki Final Act. Leaders in the newly emerging democracies of Eastern Europe today express more admiration for moralistic journalists than for realistic diplomats. They are likely, too, to feel greater sympathy for Kennan's buccaneering spirit and his fierce denunciation of autocracy and Bolshevism than for the more cautious and moderate positions taken both by his opponents then and by his biographer now.

As someone whose paternal German grandparents came to Columbus in 1928 and 1930 respectively, I wanted to find a book that would capture that time in my family history. Well, I found it. The book's combination of wonderful black and white photographs and interesting narrative effectively captures the history of the neighborhoods and the people who lived in them. Darbie and Recchie have done their homework, starting with the German immigration to Ohio in the early 19th century to a walk through present-day German Village, which is where my grandparents both lived.

I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a good read on Columbus, Ohio history and/or German ancestry.

I have been a fan of Chris Woodyard since the release of her very first Haunted Ohio book. Now that I am all successful in the same profession, I can completely understand her experiences and way of story telling. This particular book mixes fact with fiction, yet all of the locations are free, accessible and directions/phone numbers are given in the back of the book for you to have the same experiences. I have been to all of the locations Chris wrote about in this book, and I highly suggest it to anyone who is interested in the public-able haunts in Ohio. Chris is a fun, talented writer and medium and coming from one professional ghost hunter and writer to another, I truly appreciate her style! www.rebeccashott.com

As one who has facilitated parent groups, I highly recommend this model to be used in multiple settings. The 2nd edition is well organized, clear in it's meanings, and simple to follow. For anyone interested in forming parents groups, this model provides all the information, methods, cautions, and planning necessary to begin working with parents of gifted children. Since it is written in layman terms, professional degrees are not necessary to profit from the information provided. I highly recommend this book as a reference, even for those already involved in parent groups.

An interested reader, currently residing in Utah

Art collectors living in Cleveland have been well exposed to sculpture made from glass both through the efforts of Tom Reiley of the Reiley-Hawk Galleries and the passion of a group of collectors, most notably Francine & Benson Pilloff and Mike Belkin. A few years ago, the Cleveland Museum exhibited a significant amount of material from local collections in one of the Museum's most popular shows. This is the beautifully illustrated catalog that accompanied the show...and if you enjoy contemporary art, this is a must

Few people are aware that Cleveland was America's first "Motor City" long before Detroit claimed that title. In Golden Wheels, Richard Wager tells the largely unknown story of early American automobiles from Northeast Ohio. This includes venerable names like Winton, Stearns, Peerless, Chandler, Templar, and Jordan. In all, Golden Wheels tells the stories of 80 different automobile marques from the classic era.

Every true automobile enthusiast should know the stories in this book.