Towns and Villages of the Lower Ohio
eBook - PDF

Towns and Villages of the Lower Ohio

  1. 400 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Towns and Villages of the Lower Ohio

About this book

America. Enterprise. Metropolis. Cairo. Rome. These are a few of the grandly named villages and towns along the lower Ohio River. The optimism with which early settlers named these towns reveals much about the history of American expansion. Though none became the next great American city, it was not for lack of ambition or entrepreneurial spirit. Why didn't a major city develop on the lower Ohio? What geographic, economic, and cultural factors caused one place to prosper and another to wither? How did Evansville become the largest and most influential city in the region? How did smaller cities such as Owensboro and Paducah succeed?

Regardless of how appealing a locale looked on the map, luck, fate, culture, and leadership all helped determine success or failure. The fate of Cairo, Illinois—on paper an ideal site for a metropolis—emphasizes the extent to which human decisions, rather than physical landscape, affected a town's prosperity. The location of a canal or railroad terminus, the construction of a factory, or the activities of local boosters all mattered greatly. Darrel Bigham examines these towns and villages from the 1790s, when the first settlements appeared, to the 1920s, when the modern pattern of life associated with automobiles, economic upheaval, and mass culture emerged. Bigham's intimate knowledge of the area offers a true sense of the towns and villages and discloses fundamental truths about the workings of the American dream.

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Yes, you can access Towns and Villages of the Lower Ohio by Darrel E. Bigham in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & North American History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. List of Figures and Maps
  7. Series Foreword
  8. Preface
  9. Introduction
  10. Part 1 Lower Ohio River Settlements, 1792-1818
  11. Part 2 The Age of the Transportation Revolution, 1815-1850
  12. Part 3 Communities in the Civil War Era, 1850-1880
  13. Part 4 The Industrial-Metropolitan Age, 1880-1920
  14. Conclusion: Continuity and Change on the Lower Ohio
  15. Appendix 1: Population Tables
  16. Appendix 2: Settlements on the Lower Ohio River
  17. Notes
  18. Bibliography
  19. Index