Cincinnati

Cincinnati is a city in the state of Ohio, and is on the borders of Kentucky and Indiana. The metropolitian city had a population of 1,979,202 in 2000.

Architecture

The last great railroad station constructed in the United States, the Cincinnati Union Terminal, officially opened in 1933. The $41 million Art Deco masterpiece was sold to the city in 1975, a victim of postwar America's love affair with the automobile. In 2003, the Union Terminal, home to the Cincinnati Museum Center and serving Amtrak's passenger train the Cardinal, celebrated its 70th year.

History

To 1860

In 1828 wealthy Englishwoman Frances Trollope arrived with a plan to become rich by opening a department store. She opened Trollope's Bazaar, a grandiose structure featuring fancy goods, a coffee house, and a ballroom. Although the bazaar was a spectacular failure, her book, critical of the habits of the citizens of the natives, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), published after she returned to London, made her famous throughout America and remains a delightful read.

The work of Cincinnati's African American painter Robert S. Duncanson expresses the social, political, and economic position of Cincinnati blacks in the 1850s through a union of bucolic and urban themes. As the city emerged as an important regional economic power, its political, cultural, and business leaders also promoted a civic culture of devotion to the common good. In his paintings, which include landscapes, portraits, and illustrations, Duncanson drew together contemporary discourses of the civilizing power of nature, romantic racialism, civic boosterism, and civic virtue to include African Americans in the city's common vision of its citizenry. Such assertions of African American citizenship challenged such manifestations of racism as the city's 1841 race riot sparked by white fears of fugitive slaves entering Ohio.

When a group of upper-class women founded the Cincinnati Orphan Asylum (COA) in 1833, they not only provided care for children of impoverished women, but as these women combed the city searching for wet nurses for abandoned children, they also broke down social barriers between women of different social backgrounds. When Cincinnati created a poor farm in 1853, the COA lost the money that the township had provided for its activities.

Progressive Era

An eye watering issue imn the Progressive Era was the menace of smoke pollution. Middle-class women supporting the Smoke Abatement League led the campaign for smoke abatement; city inspectors issued citations to locomotive firemen. The railroad management blamed the firemen, who in turn complained of poor quality coal and inferior abatement controls. No one wanted dirty air and the middle class was vocal about it. The railroad did not want bad publicity, and workers wanted to keep their jobs. The issue went on for years until the 1940s, when electric engines replaced steam locomotives, but ultimately it was the middle-class view of urban space, where city and home were the same, that prevailed over working-class definitions of city as workplace.

In 1897, Sisters of Charity Justina Segale and Blandina Segale founded the Santa Maria Institute, which responded to urban poverty, particularly the needs of the immigrant poor, by offering religious and vocational education, a residence for girls and young women, and a day nursery. In this way the institute resembled settlement houses established by non-Catholic women such as Jane Addams at Chicago’s Hull House. In the late 19th century, religious vocations offered greater opportunities for leadership and accomplishment than were afforded most Catholic laywomen; thus, within the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati, Justina and Blandina were able to invent a role for themselves in social work. Their cooperation with secular social service authorities was particularly innovative, leading to even greater effectiveness and contributing to the development of social work as a profession. By the 1920s, however, the cost of innovation was autonomy, as the bureaucratic synthesis of Protestant and Catholic charities in Cincinnati led to a narrowing of the Santa Maria Institute's mission.

Sports

Professional baseball began in Cincinnati during 1869-91. The team's rocky relationship with the National League led to its expulsion in 1880, followed by its joining a new league, the American Association, in 1881.

Black Cincinnati boxer Ezzard Charles defeated Joe Lewis to become the world heavyweight champion in 1950.

Sports Franchises

• Cincinnati Bengals (National Football League)
• Cincinnati Reds (Major League Baseball)

Further reading

• Aaron, Daniel. Cincinnati: Queen City of the West, 1819-1838. (1992). 364 pp.
• Abbott, Carl. Boosters and Businessmen: Popular Economic Thought and Urban Growth in the Antebellum Middle West. (1981). 266 pp.
• Condit, Carl W. The Railroad and the City: A Technological and Urbanistic History of Cincinnati. (1977). 335 pp.
• Curl, Donald W. Murat Halstead and the Cincinnati Commercial. (1980). 186 pp. late 19c newspaper and politics
• Dannenbaum, Jed. Drink and Disorder: Temperance Reform in Cincinnati from the Washingtonian Revival to the WCTU. (1984). 245 pp.
• Downard, William L. The Cincinnati Brewing Industry: A Social and Economic History. (1973). 173 pp.
• Giglierano, Geoffrey T. and Obermyer, Deborah A. The Bicentennial Guide to Greater Cincinnati: A Portrait of Two Hundred Years. (1988). 656 pp.
• Glazer, Walter Stix. Cincinnati in 1840: The Social and Functional Organization of Urban Community during the Pre-Civil War Period. (1999). 184 pp.
• Lesick, Lawrence Thomas. The Lane Rebels: Evangelicalism and Antislavery in Antebellum America. (1980). 278 pp.
• Miller, Zane L. Visions of Place: The City, Neighborhoods, Suburbs, and Cincinnati's Clifton, 1850-2000. (2001). 232 pp.
• Miller, Zane. Boss Cox's Cincinnati: Urban Politics in the Progressive Era. (1968). 301 pp.
• Nerone, John. The Culture of the Press in the Early Republic: Cincinnati, 1793-1848. (1989). 307 pp.
• Ross, Steven J. Workers on the Edge: Work, Leisure, and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati, 1778-1890. (1985). 406 pp.
• Sarna, Jonathan D. and Klein, Nancy H. The Jews of Cincinnati. (1989). 190 pp.
• Taylor, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. Race and the City: Work, Community, and Protest in Cincinnati, 1820-1970. (1993). 308 pp.
• Trotter, Joe William. River Jordan (1998) on African Americans in Cincinnati and similar cities
• Vexler, Robert I., ed. Cincinnati: A Chronological and Documentary History, 1676-1970. (1975). 152 pp.
• Vitz, Robert C. The Queen and the Arts: Cultural Life in Nineteenth Century Cincinnati. (1989). 322 pp.