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Blackford Mansel G. . Columbus, Ohio: Two Centuries of Business and Environmental Change. Columbus : Trillium, an imprint of The Ohio State University Press , 2016. xii + 232 pp. ISBN 978-0-8142-1314-8, $69.95 (cloth).
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The urban dimension of environmental history has become an increasingly important focus of the field's literature. A number of good case studies on U.S. cities now exist, but nearly all of them--including works on New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles--focus on large coastal cities. Mansel Blackford, Emeritus Professor of History at Ohio State University, meaningfully extends the scope of this scholarship by examining a medium-sized midwestern city: Columbus, Ohio. His tight but detailed volume argues that Columbus is both typical and atypical in reflecting the contours of environmental and midwestern history. The two major themes he sees throughout the city's history are the tension between the demands of business and environmental change, and the relationship between private business and public policy--"Politics," Blackford insists, "always mattered" (2).
The structure of the book is primarily thematic, focusing in turn on business growth, water use, and land use throughout the city's history. Regarding business, Blackford argues that although the actions of both private and public actors contributed to the city's economic growth--something typical of most cities--Columbus was in many ways atypical because of its status as a planned city built explicitly to serve as the state's capital. The presence of governmental institutions--including the state government itself and government-supported establishments such as Ohio State University--guaranteed a certain amount of population and social capital that could be pressed toward commercial expansion. In addition to both public and private contributions, joint private-public initiatives (such as the downtown market) also played a role in the city's growth. Manufacturing lagged behind commerce in economic importance compared with...