Book Reviews

          to serve as a counterweight to whatever seems unusual, as a foil to
          whatever's happening once something actually starts happening.
          Wherever we go, we Buckeyes form a roving band of cultural
           ballast whose heraldic emblem might well be Beige Field
          with Nothing, couchant.  An Ohioan is a walking zero at the 
           intersection of America's x and y axes, a point from which 
           everything else gains distinctiveness by veering away.  Upholding
           this imagined, shifting center is what we were born to do[192].

As a professor of Ohio History, I have assigned this essay (which was originally published in The American Scholar a few years ago) to my classes, and it has never failed to provoke a spirited discussion over what, if anything, it means to be an Ohioan.  Some students agree with Hammond, some disagree, but nearly all concur that it was the best thing they read for class all semester.  While a cynic might point out that this may say as much about my choice of textbooks as it does about Hammond's abilities, I am convinced that any time one can get fifty college students in a required course to read and eagerly discuss a work, due credit must be given to the author.  Neither strictly a history nor a memoir, Ohio States is an idiosyncratic but welcome addition to the literature on Ohio.

Kevin Kern
University of Akron
Akron, Ohio

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