Introduction by Andrew Cayton

Andrew R. L. Cayton, Distinguished Professor of History at Miami University and the author of Ohio: The History of a People, was born in Cincinnati, grew up in Marietta, and lives in Oxford.

Millions of people have called Ohio home since its creation in 1803 as the seventeenth state in the American union. They include a multitude of well-known names. Ohio has produced national leaders such as U.S. Grant and Gloria Steinem and nurtured writers such as William Dean Howells and Toni Morrison. Among its native sons and daughters are artists and architects such as George Bellows and Maya Lin, actors such as Clark Gable and Paul Newman, inventors such as the Wright Brothers and Thomas Edison, and athletes such as Jesse Owens and Jack Nicklaus. "If I were to give a young man advice as to how he might succeed in life," Wilbur Wright said semi-seriously in 1910, "I would say to him, pick out a good father and mother, and begin life in Ohio."

Shaker Two-Fingered Oval Box with Lid

Of course, most of the people who have lived in Ohio are not famous. We will not find their names in books or engraved on monuments. Instead, we have to look for them in the often anonymous texture of ordinary life. Yankees, Southerners, Mormons, Shakers, Germans, Italians, Jews, African Americans, Appalachians, and Hispanics have come to Ohio to nurture communities that would balance the material benefits of American life with distinctive cultural traditions. Struggling to live on farms, in hundreds of small towns and suburbs, or in a handful of great cities sprawled around centers of commerce and industry, they have cared most consistently about family and friends. Their concerns have been concrete and personal.

We all tell stories about the past because it helps us connect with each other and the millions of people who have preceded us. History makes us collectively immortal. In part, we are interested in our ancestors because we want our progeny to be interested in us. We remember the Civil War, the Underground Railroad, the ethnic communities of Cleveland, the steel mills of Youngstown, the tools on a late nineteenth-century farm, because we want someone a hundred years from now to honor us and keep us alive by talking about us and how we lived our lives.

Butter Churn

The biggest challenge in engaging the past is that we do not know as much about it as we think we do. We sift through whatever the dead have left us, deliberately or accidentally - scraps of paper, letters, newspapers, faded pictures, pieces of pottery, houses, farm utensils, the architecture of a town, clothes, and tombstones - only to discover that history is forever incomplete. We'll never really know what it was like to live in Ohio in 1850. We have to guess, piece something together from the things people forget to throw away, the stuff in boxes piled in a corner in a basement or an attic. Can we trust what people tell us? Can letters or clothes or cooking utensils tell us things about the people who created or used them that they never intended? And how do we organize all these bits and pieces into a coherent narrative of the past? How do we find patterns in the detritus of human beings?

Professional historians tend to focus on large political, economic, and social developments. They want to know why wars happened, why elections were won, how class, race, and gender have mattered as categories of human identity; they like to argue about different ways to answer these and similar questions. The civic value of this kind of history is to help us consider Ohio as a whole as well as its place within our nation and the world beyond it.

Employees of the Lima Machine Works

Professional history, however, cannot satisfy the needs of the many people who are interested in the past for personal reasons, people who want answers to very specific questions. Who were their ancestors? And where did they come from? What did people in Lima wear in the 1890s? What was the first church in Columbus? Who won the World Series in 1919? What did people do for fun on farms in the 1920s? How did Italians live in Cleveland in the 1880s? How many counties did Ohio have in 1820? How many Ohioans fought in World War II? When was a particular building razed? When did the Amish migrate to Ohio?

Since people know history mainly from books, they tend to think of it as cut and dried. But they are only seeing the end of the process, not the process itself. History books often bore readers because the authors are trying to offer definitive answers to questions. They tend to present history as the product of a mysterious inquiry conducted in accordance with rules developed and maintained by other professional historians. Just as doctors and lawyers must behave in certain ways in order to sustain the integrity of their profession, so too historians must abide by commonly accepted procedures.

The Ohio Memory Online Scrapbook allows people of all backgrounds to experience history as a process rather than receive it as a product. No longer are the primary sources of history locked away in repositories with access limited to those with the resources and energy to seek them out. The Ohio Historical Society, in cooperation with more than 300 Ohio libraries, museums, historical societies, and archives, has used the occasion of the state's bicentennial to create a database that will continue to grow in size and to engage Ohioans long after the revelries and speeches of the birthday bash have faded away.

The Ohio Memory Online Scrapbook brings together raw materials into a huge scrapbook, a virtual attic of the state's past. Now anyone with a internet access can access the past. You can experience for yourself the excitement of deciphering handwriting, interpreting the images on a photograph, or humming the melody of a song from tattered sheet music. You can get to know people from the past on their own terms. You can meet them yourself. And, most important, you can ask your own questions of them. You don't need historians any more to tell you what to think. You can do it yourself.

Take baseball. In the decades following the Civil War, baseball swept the United States, especially in the urban north. It became a professional sport and attracted the participation of hundreds of thousands of people. Want to know more about it? Type baseball into the search engine.

Cincinnati Base Ball Club Score Book

In addition to photographs of both the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings and the 1869 Antioch Baseball Club, and an 1894 scorebook from the Cincinnati Base Ball Club, you will find an 1845 Cleveland ordinance banning baseball. "Be it ordained by the City Council of Cleveland," reads the handwritten document, "that from and after this date it shall be unlawful for any person or persons to play at any game of Ball or at any other game or pastime whereby the grass or grounds of any Public place or square shall be defaced or injured." Anyone convicted of such a crime would be subject to a fine of no less than five dollars, the exact amount to be determined by the mayor. Perhaps you'll wonder why the Cleveland council felt it needed to prohibit something that we consider as American as apple pie. Why did they think baseball dangerous? What does the ordinance tell us about the popularity of the sport? How, where, and by whom was the game being played in the 1840s?

Or maybe you're interested in the history of African Americans. The Ohio Memory Online Scrapbook gives you direct access to documents and photographs that permit you to ask your own questions and draw your own conclusions. Here you will see Benjamin W. Arnett, a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church who lived in several Ohio cities and became one of the most prominent black leaders in Ohio. And the 5th Regiment, United States Colored Troops, posing on Sandusky Street in Delaware, Ohio. And Lew and Ben Snowden, popular entertainers in central Ohio in the second half of the nineteenth century, playing a banjo and fiddle. And, less happily, an 1848 petition from 96 white citizens of Massillon demanding that black children "be debarred the privilege and benefits of said Union School erected expressly for the white children of sd [sic] Town of Massillon."

The Great Flood of 1884

Then there are matters of weather and clothes and houses, the kinds of details that filled people's lives but often get left out of history that concentrates on politics, agriculture, and industry. Look at eighteen photographs of the 1884 flood in and around Cincinnati. Learn about a small earthquake in Canton in 1820. Examine weather reports from the 1830s. Or study the wrought-iron eagle weather vane that crowned the first state capitol building in Chillicothe.

If there is plenty to amuse in the Ohio Memory Online Scrapbook, there is also plenty to ponder. While you chart your own course through the state's history, you might also do some of the things that professional historians do: think about the ways in which all these bits of information fit together; look for patterns by juxtaposing seemingly disparate images; ask larger questions about the development of Ohio; its future as well as its past; and consider the extent to which history helps us think about who we are and where we want to go. In playing with fragments of our past, you will experience not only the joy of making long-dead people seem alive again, you will join the common endeavor of keeping the past as a whole vital. You will participate in making history a dynamic collection of thousands of colliding and intersecting stories, both the ones people left us and the ones we make up about them.