Steel and Steelworkers: Race and Class Struggle in Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh

by John Hinshaw

Overview

Steel and Steelworkers is a fascinating account of the forces that shaped Pittsburgh, big business, and labor through the city's rapid industrialization in the mid-nineteenth century, its lengthy era of industrial "maturity," its precipitous deindustrialization toward the end of the twentieth century, and its reinvention from "hell with the lid off" to America's most livable (post-industrial) city. Hinshaw examined a wide variety of company, union, and government documents, oral histories, and newspapers to reconstruct the steel industry and the efforts of labor, business, and government to refashion it. A compelling report of industrialization and deindustrialization, in which questions of organization, power, and politics prove as important as economics, Steel and Steelworkers shows the ways in which big business and labor helped determine the fate of steel and Pittsburgh.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780791489406
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	02/01/2012
Series:	SUNY series in American Labor History
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	348
File size:	904 KB

About the Author

John Hinshaw is Assistant Professor of History at Lebanon Valley College. He is the coeditor, with Paul LeBlanc, of U.S. Labor in the Twentieth Century: Studies in Working-Class Struggles and Insurgency and, with Peter Stearns, of ABC-CLIO World History Companion to the Industrial Revolution.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

A Note on Historiography

1. The Secret of Industrialization in Pittsburgh

2. From Great Depression to Great Fear: The "Warfare State" in Steel

3. Cold War Pittsburgh: 1949–1959

4. The Road to Deindustrialization: Pittsburgh and the Steel Industry, 1960–1977

5. The Lean Years: 1978–2000

Notes

Index

Name Index

Editorial Reviews

Hinshaw (history, Lebanon Valley College) explores the competing efforts of unions, rank and file workers, government, and the steel bosses to define and control the political and social realities of Pittsburgh from the late 1800s to the year 2000. Of particular importance to the discussion is the struggle of African-American workers to achieve civil rights (both on the job and in private life) and to achieve equal power in the unions. Similar weight is given to consideration of competing efforts of communists and anti-communists within the unions to shape the struggle. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

"...a well-researched, ambitious attempt to analyze the intersection of race and gender in the steel industry in Western Pennsylvania over nearly four decades. It effectively conveys a sense of shop floor dynamics while also taking account of important developments in the structure of the industry and in political and community life." — Martin Halpern, author of UAW Politics in the Cold War Era

"This book analyzes the history of racial discrimination in the steel industry in the context of an original model of the political economy of steel production and labor relations." — Robert Asher, Labor Divided: Race and Ethnicity in United States Labor Struggles, 1835–1960

From the Publisher