10/9/97
Contact: Richard Gilbert, Ohio University Press, 614/593-1160
Editors/News Directors: Advance copies of the book are available by contacting Gilbert. Media are invited to attend the public reception on Tuesday.
ATHENS, Ohio -- Athens is celebrating its 200th birthday by unwrapping a new book. Athens, Ohio: The Village Years is a colorful account of the town's development through the remembrances of early settlers.
"Athens really has had an interesting and worthy history that needed to be recorded," says author Robert Daniel, Ohio University emeritus professor of American history.
Daniel's text, slated for publication Oct. 30 by Ohio University Press, is based on newspaper accounts, institutional archives, census records and personal diaries of early Athenians. It covers the period from before white settlement to 1920. Daniel is working on a second volume that will follow Athens from 1920 to 2000.
Ohio University Press is sponsoring a free, public reception to promote the book at 5 p.m. Tuesday (Oct. 14) in Baker Center's 1804 Lounge. Daniel will lecture and also be available to sign copies of Athens, Ohio: The Village Years. The book sells for $36.95 in hard cover and $17.95 in paperback.
A resident of Athens since 1957, Daniel said he wanted to create a chronology for townsfolk past and present, not for scholars in Timbuktu." His lively text, supplemented with more than 150 historical photographs, is the result of a decade of research.
He includes just the right amount of detail in his history of the village of Athens," said Gill Berchowitz, senior editor at Ohio University Press. He describes how outside events affected the people of Athens: a group of Athenians founded a mission in Liberia, the Buckeye Rovers went to California in search of gold, and one of the circuses that visited Athens paraded 150 'living wild animals' down Court Street."
In 1800, three years before Ohio became a state, the Ohio Company's Rufus Putnam laid out the village of Athens in a bend of the Hocking River. Ohio University was born out of a contract between the Ohio Company and Congress. The university officially was founded in 1804, but it didn't begin operation as a secondary school until 1808, according to Athens, Ohio: The Village Years. By 1815, there still were less than 10 students enrolled. Scholars such as Pastor Jacob Lindley and the Rev. James Irvine -- now recognized through the buildings named for them -- helped bring collegiate academia to Ohio University in the early 1800s.
Ohio University Press will mark the state's bicentennial in 2003 with a 10-book series on the development of Ohio edited by Kent State University history professor Clarence Wunderlin. Some proposed titles for the Ohio Bicentennial Series are: Transportation in Ohio; Women in Ohio History; Governors of Ohio; and Ohio Technology.