Book Review: Guide to the Building Stones and Cultural Geology of Akron

Guide to the Building Stones and Cultural Geology of Akron. By Joseph T. Hannibal. Columbus, Ohio: Division of Geological Survey, 2006. 75 pp. (paper) $11.00, Guidebook No. 19.

Joseph Hannibal weaves together geology, geography, and history to provide a Guide to the Building Stones and Cultural Geology of Akron, an interpretive tour of the built and natural landscape of Akron, Ohio.  The book can be read as a stand-alone work or carried into the field to find and understand the physical traces of Akron’s geologic, architectural, industrial, and commercial past.  Hannibal’s guidebook, number 19 in a series of field guides of Ohio’s geologic history, was written for the 2006 North-Central Section meeting of the Geological Society of America, which met in Akron, Ohio.

The book, organized in the style of a field guide, is arranged to guide visitors through a series of stops in and around modern-day Akron. Continue reading Book Review: Guide to the Building Stones and Cultural Geology of Akron

Book Review: Call Me Mike

Call Me Mike: A Political Biography of Michael V. DiSalle. By Richard G. Zimmerman. Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2003.xi, 322 pp. $34.00, ISBN 0-87338-755-4.

In the years since his death in 1981, Michael V. DiSalle, the Ohio city mayor and state governor, and director of the Office of Price Stabilization under President Harry Truman, has received little extensive examination. He deserves more. Born in 1908 to Italian immigrants living in a New York tenement, Michael’s father soon moved the family to the Midwestern industrial city of Toledo. There young Michael worked at many short-lived jobs before rapidly moving up the political ranks to city, state, and national office. After graduating from Georgetown University, he passed the Ohio bar exam and practiced law in Toledo. Meanwhile, local politics proved attractive in the suffering environment of the Great Depression, suggesting to him, as to New Dealers, that a compassionate government could lighten life’s burdens for people. In 1936 he carried that liberal passion into his successful campaign to become a Democratic member of the Ohio House of Representatives.  Continue reading Book Review: Call Me Mike

Book Review: The Story of My Life

The Story of My Life. By Frank Vlchek, translated and edited by Winston Chrislock. Kent:  The Kent State University Press, 2004, xvi, 392 pp., $34.00, ISBN 0-87338-817-8.

The Story of My Life by Frank Vlchek is an extraordinarily detailed account of the fortunes of a Czech immigrant who arrived in Cleveland in 1888 and went on to become one of the city’s leading manufacturers and a prominent member of Cleveland’s Czech community.  The book was first published in Czechoslovakia in 1928 and in 1929, Fern Long, an employee of the Cleveland Public Library, translated it into English but it has remained in manuscript form until the appearance of this edition edited by Winston Chrislock.  All of those interested in Cleveland’s history will be grateful for its appearance since it contains a wealth of detail about the city’s industrial and ethnic life written from the perspective of an individual who participated in Cleveland’s emergence as a major industrial city. Continue reading Book Review: The Story of My Life

Book Review: Akron’s Better Half

Akron’s Better Half: Women’s Clubs and the Humanization of the City, 1825-1925. By Kathleen L. Endres. Akron: University of Akron Press, 2006. 232 pp. (cloth) 978-1-931968-36-2, $54.95, (paper) 978-1-931968-41-6, $27.95

Most of Akron’s claim to national and international historical significance centers on its former status as the rubber capital of the world characterized by Steve Love’s and David Giffel’s, Wheels of Fortune: The Story of Rubber in Akron and historian and communications professor at the University of Akron, Kathleen Endres, 2000 publication Rosie the Rubber Worker. However, Endres, in Akron’s Better Half: Women’s Clubs and the Humanization of the City, 1825-1925 contends that understanding the history of women’s organizations in Akron, Ohio contributes greatly to the local and national narrative of urbanization and underscores the important work of Akron women beyond the factory floors of Goodyear and Firestone. Continue reading Book Review: Akron’s Better Half

Book Review: “Circumstances are Destiny”

“Circumstances are Destiny”: An Antebellum Woman’s Struggle to Define Sphere. By Tina Stewart Brakebill. (Civil War in the North.) Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. 2006. Pp. xx, 255. $34.95.

“My destiny,” lamented Ohio native Celestia Rice Colby, “is to act, to do life’s humblest duties, in a narrow, unknown sphere, to crush back the upspringing aspirations that rise in my soul, and to strive for the mastery over my own spirit.” (xii)  With this, the reader of Tina Stewart Brakebill’s “Circumstances are destiny”: An Antebellum Woman’s Struggle to Define Sphere, a volume in Kent State University Press’s Civil War in the North Series, is led into one antebellum woman’s thoughts concerning her decades-long struggle against gender-based limitations in American society. Continue reading Book Review: “Circumstances are Destiny”

“Shines the Name, Rodger Young”

By: Carl Becker and Robert Thobaben

He was but five feet, two or three inches tall and weighed only 125 to 130 pounds. He had poor hearing and poor eyesight. Bespectacled, he was timid in appearance. He dropped out of high school after his junior year; his grades sprinkled with F’s, and took employment as a menial laborer. Seemingly, he hardly had the right stuff, physically or mentally, for becoming a hero in combat. Yet Rodger Young proved his mettle on a South Pacific island during World War II and, for a while, was more than an unsung hero, his name on the lips of thousands of Americans as a synonym for bravery. Continue reading “Shines the Name, Rodger Young”

In This Issue: Fall 2008

In The Current Issue:

While you are visiting the journal, please take the time to drop by our new discussion board. Taking advantage of the technology available to us as an electronic journal, we believe this new feature will make our journal more interactive and serve to engender substantive debate, discussion, and exchange of information for all people interested in the history of Ohio .

In addition to the usual book reviews, we also encourage the reader to explore the other features of our site. For those who missed earlier issues, please visit our “Archives” link, which contains the entire contents of previous volumes. We have expanded our “Research Links” feature, adding not only more primary sources but also more links to local historical agencies. We strongly encourage the reader to suggest or send new links for this page. The same is true for items in “Current History,” which is a clearinghouse for information on events of a historical nature in Northeast Ohio . Because we update this section constantly, please feel free to send announcements for it at any time.

We would also like to remind our readers that printer-friendly versions accompany each article and review. These PDF files are not only easier on the eyes when printed, but also contain basic issue data and page numbers for convenience in citation.

As always, please address any inquiries about this project (or about any other aspect of the journal) to the editor at kkern @ uakron. edu. We welcome all comments and suggestions.

Kevin Kern

Continue reading In This Issue: Fall 2008