In 1975, some members of Clifton Town Meeting approached Zane Miller and Henry Shapiro about writing a pamphlet on the history of Clifton for their 1976 house tour. Having conducted much of the research in their own studies and teaching at the University of Cincinnati, Shapiro and Miller produced a concise description of Clifton's development from an elite rural village several miles from Cincinnati to a modern neighborhood of that city. Shapiro and Miller fleshed out the stages of that transformation in chronologically arranged "chapters," each of which examined Clifton's past from the point of view of problem definition and resolution by its residents and sometimes by outsiders.