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This chapter looks at a linear model created by Frederick Jackson Turner that created a common conception of the American frontier as the meeting point between savagery and civilization. However, this model creates a false dichotomy, oversimplifying the experiences of Americans who participated in settling the continent. The chapter also examines life along the Ohio River Valley, which was one of the Jewish frontiers long after it stopped being a national frontier.

In the second quarter of the eighteenth century many previously dispersed Shawnee groups gathered in the Ohio Valley and, to a lesser extent, on the Tallapoosa River. Focusing on this process, the chapter investigates the political strategies and cultural models which Shawnees employed to construct new forms of unity and cooperation. It shows that Shawnees successfully combined long-standing town and clan autonomy with broader inter-community collaboration. Most importantly, they created diverse forms of sharing power in communal and inclusive decision-making institutions, such as councils. Growing cooperation among the Shawnee communities was a response to the intensifying imperial competition between Great Britain and France over the control of interior North America. From the 1730s on, this rivalry transformed the homelands of the Shawnees into imperial borderlands, and by 1750 the Ohio Shawnees, in particular, faced a two-pronged colonial invasion.

This chapter discusses the European Jewish communities along the Ohio River Valley. Those European Jews who chose to migrate to America were heirs to a Jewish culture that had existed for centuries in a situation of complete subservience within medieval Christendom. Despite a number of upheavals during their history, European Jewish communities held together. This was because as separate corporate entities within Christian feudalism, they were permitted to develop their own internal governance, a comprehensive system known as the kehillah. The restrictions placed on Jews helped foster an atmosphere in which self-help and provisions for mutual security sustained a strong and positive Jewish identity.

This chapter discusses the events that unfolded in the Jewish community in the Ohio River Valley during the Civil War. When General Ulysses S. Grant issued an order to have all Jews removed from their current location, only the Paducah community took it seriously. As a result, they were the only Jews who were hurried onto a boat that headed upriver to Cincinnati. This incident had its roots in a larger issue in the war's western theater. Aside from constricting the export of cotton, war-induced suspicions dogged Jews throughout the Ohio River Valley. The reaction of the Jews to the expulsion has gone down in the annals of American Jewish history as proof of America's exceptionalism in the face of what would have been in Europe unexceptional anti-Semitism.

This chapter explores diplomacy in the Ohio Valley at the end of the colonial era to understand the motives that led colonial and Native leaders to cooperate and form coalitions. Such a study shifts scholars’s understanding of politics in the interwar Ohio Valley. It encourages a focus not on broad categories, such as militant and accommodationist Indians or pro-government and anti-government colonists, but rather on the messy web of political interests and affiliations that such categories often obscure. A diversity of concerns and strategies created the need for coalitions that bridged geographic, political, ideological, ethnic, and racial divisions. Lacking either an effective formal political system or a broad consensus regarding ends and means, Ohio Valley inhabitants could achieve their goals only by cultivating allies with dissimilar interests and priorities. The process of coalition formation therefore centered on the search for allies with overlapping interests, the articulation of those interests in ways that encouraged cooperation, and ongoing attempts to downplay or finesse coalition partners’s differing goals. These activities constituted the core of political life in revolutionary Ohio.

This chapter discusses the rapid population and economic growth which happened along the Ohio River Valley, as communities were slowly founded and built. In response, the governments helped foster this growth with the development of public works. By 1811, the federal government began the construction of the National Road to connect the populous East Coast with the emerging trans-Appalachian West. It also discusses the success of Jewish peddlers and other marketing strategies the Jews employed during the time.

This chapter discusses the immigration of East European Jews to America. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the smaller cities and towns in some parts of the Ohio River Valley experienced Jewish population growth. The integration of the new immigrants was a challenge for all existing American Jewish communities. It is noted that the new and large wave of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe still had a lot in common with the previous Jewish immigrants from German-speaking countries. Further on the chapter looks at how the American Jewish communities adjusted to this new change by making some improvements in their community.

Susan Sleeper-Smith explores the environmentally distinctive nature of the Ohio River Valley in this chapter to show how Indian women’s work created a stable village world during the colonial era. Women’s work led to demographically stable agrarian villages, where Indians were not nomadic. When Indians refused to cede their lands, President George Washington arranged for the kidnapping and imprisonment of women from several villages along the Wabash River, until Indians came to the treaty table to cede their lands.

This chapter explores the relationship between the Turner and the Hopewell sites based on assessing the style and configuration of their earthwork design, mortuary rituals, and the domestic-ceremonial duality. It addresses, utilizing insights from the Turner Earthworks (as well as other sites), the “central puzzle” that has perplexed archaeologists—the apparent contradiction between populations who lived in largely “invisible,” small, scattered habitation sites yet produced earthworks on a monumental scale. It also intriguingly asserts that one mechanism that may have balanced the polluting survival pursuits of everyday life with the labor and time that would have gone into the sanctifying ceremonial activities is for groups separated geographically to have created alliances.

This chapter discusses the slow demise of the Jewish community during the latter half of the twentieth century. It was during this time when the United States was undergoing a remarkable revival of popular interest in religion as a result of several reasons. One of these was the desire to “nest” and create security in a postwar world. At the same time, the demographic base of small-town Jewish communities was eroding, and after 1950, the Ohio River Valley began to lose its population.

This chapter discusses the different debates over the direction of American Judaism. These debates reflected the internal struggle to respond to modernity that had engaged Jews in the Western world for about a century. This was particularly sharpened by the unprecedented conditions of Jewish life in America. The Jews that lived in the large and small towns in the Ohio River Valley were in the eye of the storm. They played a critical role in formulating the response that became institutionalized in American Reform Judaism.

This chapter starts by presenting the reports of early artists and itinerant activity. John James Audubon observed wildlife and painted portraits in Kentucky. He was a naturalist artist and first arrived in Kentucky in August 1807 with his business partner and fellow Frenchman, Ferdinand Rozier. Matthew Harris Jouett embarked upon a career after instruction from Gilbert Stuart. He became the most legendary portraitist in the history of Kentucky. The Steamboat travel launched Kentucky–Mississippi itinerancy. In addition, Chester Harding painted in Paris, Kentucky, and pursued Daniel Boone. The large number of extant unsigned and undocumented portraits in the Ohio River Valley poses an enormous challenge to potential detectives of its art history. One case study involves the portraits of Captain and Mrs. Benjamin Bayless and the careers of Aaron Houghton Corwine and Alonzo Douglass. John Wesley Jarvis visited Louisville and headed south to New Orleans. “Kentucky” West painted Lord Byron and was himself acclaimed a romantic hero. Cincinnati emerged as an urban center and attracted resident portrait artists. Though Thomas Sully never visited Kentucky, his portraiture was well known in the commonwealth. He also attracted students and sitters from Kentucky.

This book begins by showing how histories of the Seven Years' War, especially those written in the United States, often begin with George Washington's blunderings in the Ohio Valley in 1754. Competing British, French, and Indian claims to lands west of the Appalachians formed one of the principal sources of international tension in the early 1750s, and when Washington's Virginia Regiment and Indian allies made contact with a larger French and Indian force east of the Forks of the Ohio, the sparks thrown off by the collision helped ignite a global conflagration. Later in life, when immersed in adversity, Washington enjoyed the inestimable advantage of having made and recovered from serious mistakes before. Examination of 1754 Ohio Valley events clarifies the causes of a major war and the career of a prominent figure.

This chapter begins by addressing the itinerant painters, headless bodies, and plain painters. Several types of itinerant artists can be identified in Kentucky and the Ohio River Valley by the trails left behind by their works. In late 1839, financial crises plaguing Martin Van Buren's administration prompted Henry Clay to seek the Whig Party's nomination for the presidency. The chapter illustrates how Robert Scott Duncanson, an African American artist, responded to Uncle Tom's Cabin. Although George Caleb Bingham is remembered as a Missouri artist, his connection with Kentucky was a source of both nurture and inspiration for his portraiture and political genre painting. Eastman Johnson created an enduring portrait of “Old Kentucky.” The chapter then shows how war raged and how photography displaced portraiture. “Lincoln's most intimate friend” was painted by G. P. A. Healy.

This chapter begins by showing a New England expatriate and a Confederate penitent that address the newly freed slaves. It also explains the fair years in Louisville. It discusses R. J. Menefee's death, the re-interment of Matthew Harris Jouett, and the creation of the Jouett revival. Samuel Woodson Price recalls “old masters of the Bluegrass.” In addition, a Kentucky student of Frank Duveneck painted Louisville's idyllic poet, Madison Cawein. Once photography was introduced, an intervening lens was inserted between artist and sitter, transforming the artist's role into that of a mirror. What truly illuminates the brief backward glance is the impressive array of artists working in Kentucky and the Ohio River Valley, from whose work we may construct diverse aesthetic viewpoints.