About the author: Dr. Noble received his PhD from the University of Illinois. He is currently Distinguished Professor at the University of Akron. Earlier books include The Old Barn Book: A Field Guide to North American Barns and Other Farm Structures (Rutgers); the award-winning Wood, Brick and Stone: The North American Settlement Landscape (University of Massachusetts Press) and Ohio: An American Heartland.
1999 0-7734-8046-3 This is the first study which examines how each of the early immigrant communities (German, Irish, Welsh, Polish, Italian) changed the geographical shape of the city. Group identity was so strong that even a century after the first peoples began to arrive, different neighborhoods, and even larger sections of the city, retained the imprint of the immigrants. It is also the story of adaptive strategies followed by each community in responding to economic and social constraints imposed upon it. The study is oriented to the spatial perspective of the urban-cultural geographer. The internal movement of the groups is traced and the rationale for the particular directions of movement is related to physical, economic and cultural factors.