Pittsburgh Rising

In the tradition of David McCollough, the authors display the rare gift of making academic knowledge accessible.

Muller and Ruck do a fantastic job of giving a sense of what the actual conditions were like in the iron forges, steel mills, and glass workshops of Pittsburgh. The day-to-day specifics of labor are conveyed with ease and accessibility. They extend this focus to the capital class as well, explaining the economics and technology that altered industrial production, as well as the personalities of men like Carnegie, Frick, Westinghouse, and Heinz, who changed the city forever. In addition to that familiar story, they add nuance to the narrative of immigration to Pittsburgh, both from Europe and in the form of Black migration from the South, by emphasizing the ways in which regionalism from country of origin effected the American experience of different groups.

In its first 150 years, Pittsburgh was a place shaped by geography, natural resources, immigration, class and ethnic identity, and the quest for power and profit. This is a history of the people who fashioned lives in Pittsburgh and the material and social structures in which they lived those lives. Muller and Ruck offer a masterful sense of cause and effect, leading the reader into a sense of change over time. They present the messy limitations and possibilities of Pittsburghers’ lives.

Muller and Ruck detail how tycoons like Carnegie, Frick, and Mellon built their empires, even as they emphasize the brutal exploitation of the largely immigrant workforce that made those fortunes possible—and the ethnic social clubs and other organizations that helped those workers and their families survive. Still, the authors pay heed to underrepresented aspects of local history.