Flat, Fast, and Frequently Important: An Irreverent History of Ohio is the story of the state that somehow keeps ending up in the middle of everything while maintaining the energy of a place people mostly drive through on the way somewhere else.

In this sharp, funny, and deeply researched history, Jordan Blake Carter traces Ohio’s transformation from glacial wilderness and ancient Indigenous crossroads to industrial powerhouse, political kingmaker, and recurring main character in the American story. Along the way there are frontier wars, canal booms, labor battles, economic collapses, presidential overproduction, and at least one river catching fire.

Ohio helped shape westward expansion, fueled the rise of American industry, transformed transportation, influenced national elections, and produced an improbable number of generals, inventors, astronauts, and presidents. It was a key battleground in debates over slavery and freedom, a center of manufacturing might, and later, a symbol of both industrial success and industrial decline.

This is not a dry march through dates and memorized facts. It is a lively, irreverent look at the ambitions, disasters, contradictions, and questionable decisions that built one of America’s most consequential states. Smart, entertaining, and occasionally chaotic in the way Ohio itself tends to be, this book explores how a place so often overlooked became impossible to ignore.

Ohio did not ask to be interesting.

But history kept dragging it into the conversation anyway.