The S. J. Clarke Publishing Company specialized in city and county histories, including biographical sketches of residents, and they produced a very large number of such histories from the 1890s to the 1930s. Volume 1 of this set covers the history of Cincinnati to 1911 in the publisher’s standard approach to city history. Volume 2 covers city institutions, with an emphasis on their status at the time of publication, but generally with some historical background. Volumes 3 and 4 are entirely devoted to biographical sketches, mainly of men alive at the time of publication rather than historical figures. Volumes 1 and 2 have Tables of Contents at the front of those volumes. An index for all the biographical sketches is found at the end of Volume 4.

Reverend Charles Frederic Goss (1852-1930), the editor and the author of the first volume, was a native of New York and the pastor of a Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati from 1894. He wrote a number of religious works of fiction, including the 1900 best-seller, Redemption of David Corson. For more about him, see the glowing biographical sketch on page 24 of Volume 4.