What forces transformed a community in which industrial workers and other citizens exercised a real measure of power over their lives into a metropolis whose inhabitants were utterly dependent on Big Steel? How did a city that fervidly embraced the labor struggle of 1877 turn into the city which so fiercely repudiated the labor struggle of 1919? The Remaking of Pittsburgh is the history of this transformation. The cultural dimensions of industrialization come to life as Couvares calls upon labor history, urban history, and the history of popular culture to depict the demise of the "craftsman's empire" and the birth of a cosmopolitan bourgeois society. The book explores the impact of immigration on the shaping of modern Pittsburgh and the emergence of mass culture within the community. In the midst of these processes of transformation, the giant steel corporations were continually reshaping the life of the city.

What forces transformed a community in which industrial workers and other citizens exercised a real measure of power over their lives into a metropolis whose inhabitants were utterly dependent on Big Steel? How did a city that fervidly embraced the labor struggle of 1877 turn into the city which so fiercely repudiated the labor struggle of 1919? The Remaking of Pittsburgh is the history of this transformation. The cultural dimensions of industrialization come to life as Couvares calls upon labor history, urban history, and the history of popular culture to depict the demise of the “craftsman's empire” and the birth of a cosmopolitan bourgeois society. The book explores the impact of immigration on the shaping of modern Pittsburgh and the emergence of mass culture within the community. In the midst of these processes of transformation, the giant steel corporations were continually reshaping the life of the city.

A landmark work from one of the preeminent historians of our time: the first published biography of Andrew W. Mellon, the American colossus who bestrode the worlds of industry, government, and philanthropy, leaving his transformative stamp on each. Andrew Mellon, one of America’s greatest financiers, built a legendary personal fortune from banking to oil to aluminum manufacture, tracking America’s course to global economic supremacy. As treasury secretary under Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and finally Hoover, Mellon made the federal government run like a business–prefiguring the public official as CEO. He would be hailed as the architect of the Roaring Twenties, but, staying too long, would be blamed for the Great Depression, eventually to find himself a broken idol. Collecting art was his only nonprofessional gratification and his great gift to the American people, The National Gallery of Art, remains his most tangible legacy.

Pittsburgh’s explosive industrial and population growth between the mid-nineteenth century and the Great Depression required constant attention to city-building. Private, profit-oriented firms, often with government involvement, provided necessary transportation, energy resources, and suitable industrial and residential sites. Meeting these requirements in the region’s challenging hilly topographical and riverine environment resulted in the dramatic reshaping of the natural landscape. At the same time, the Pittsburgh region’s free market, private enterprise emphasis created socio-economic imbalances and badly polluted the air, water, and land. Industrial stagnation, temporarily interrupted by wars, and then followed deindustrialization inspired the formation of powerful public-private partnerships to address the region’s mounting infrastructural, economic, and social problems. The sixteen essays in Making Industrial Pittsburgh Modern examine important aspects of the modernizing efforts to make Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania a successful metropolitan region. The city-building experiences continue to influence the region’s economic transformation, spatial structure, and life experience.

The first comprehensive history of theater in Pittsburgh is offered in this volume that relates the significant influence and interpretation of urban socioeconomic trends in the theatrical arts and the role of the theater as an agent of social change.

Remaking the Rust Belt tells the story of how local leaders throughout the Rust Belt adapted internationally circulating ideas about postindustrial redevelopment to create the jobs and amenities they believed would attract middle-class professionals, but in so doing widened and deepened economic inequality among urban residents.

At the beginning of the century, Pittsburgh was the center of one of the nation's most powerful industries: iron and steel. It was also the site of an unprecedented effort to study the effects of industry on one American city. The Pittsburgh Survey (1909-1914) brought together statisticians, social workers, engineers, lawyers, physicians, economists, labor investigators, city planners, and photographers. They documented Pittsburgh's degraded environment, corrupt civic institutions, and exploited labor force and made a compelling case - in four books and two collections of articles - for reforming corporate capitolism.In its literary history and visual power, breadth, and depth, the Pittsburgh Survey remains an undisputed classis of social science research. Like the Lynds' Middletown studies of the 1920s, the Survey captured the nation's attention, and Pittsburgh came to symbolize the problems and way of life of industrial America as a whole.A landmark volume in its own right, this book of thirteen essays examines the accuracy and impact of the Pittsburgh Survey, both on social science as a discipline and on Pittsburgh itself. It also places the Survey firmly in the context of the social reform movement of the early twentieth century.

From submarines to the suburbs—the remaking of Pittsburgh during the Cold War During the early Cold War, research facilities became ubiquitous features of suburbs across the United States. Pittsburgh’s eastern and southern suburbs hosted a constellation of such facilities that became the world’s leading center for the development of nuclear reactors for naval vessels and power plants. The segregated communities that surrounded these laboratories housed one of the largest concentrations of nuclear engineers and scientists on earth. In Nuclear Suburbs, Patrick Vitale uncovers how the suburbs shaped the everyday lives of these technology workers. Using oral histories, Vitale follows nuclear engineers and scientists throughout and beyond the Pittsburgh region to understand how the politics of technoscience and the Cold War were embedded in daily life. At the same time that research facilities moved to Pittsburgh’s suburbs, a coalition of business and political elites began an aggressive effort, called the Pittsburgh Renaissance, to renew the region. For Pittsburgh’s elite, laboratories and researchers became important symbols of the new Pittsburgh and its postindustrial economy. Nuclear Suburbs exposes how this coalition enrolled technology workers as allies in their remaking of the city. Offering lessons for the present day, Nuclear Suburbs shows how race, class, gender, and the production of urban and suburban space are fundamental to technoscientific networks, and explains how the “renewal” of industrial regions into centers of the tech economy is rooted in violence and injustice.

Presbyterians from the Irish province of Ulster were among the first to push the wild frontier west and found the city of Pittsburgh. By the 1840s, the flow of Irish Catholic immigrants had become a flood. Fleeing the great hunger and facing resentment in the city, they established themselves as key members of the community, building railroads and canals and establishing schools, hospitals and fraternal orders. During the Civil War, 156 women, many of them Irish, made the ultimate sacrifice for their new country when the Allegheny Arsenal exploded. The Fenians fought Southern Rebels under a green flag and made a little-known invasion of Canada in 1866. In the twentieth century, the sons and daughters of Erin took on roles as political leaders, labor agitators and entrepreneurs. Exploring tales of saints, sinners and visionaries, author Gerard F. O'Neil offers a beguiling and fascinating history of the Pittsburgh Irish.

Born in 1902, Edward Condon made significant contributions to quantum theoretical physics. Nearly ten years at Princeton University sealed his reputation as a leading figure in the field. Then, in 1937, he gave it all up to pursue an industrial career, first at the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, and then, by way of the federal government, the National Bureau of Standards. In a radical departure from professional norms, Condon sought to redefine the relationship between academic science and technological innovation in industry. He envisioned intimate cooperation with the universities to serve the needs of his employers and also the broader business community. This book explores the birth, life, and death of that vision during the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War. Condon’s cooperative model of R&D evolved over time, and by consequence, laid bare sharp disagreements among academic, corporate, and government stakeholders about the practical value of new knowledge, where and how it should be produced, and ultimately, on whose behalf it ought to be put to use.