A Town Without Steel

Looks at a community centered around the steel industry and its attempts to cope with massive unemployment of the mid-1980s and its effects on individuals, families, and the town. Interviews with 45 men and women shed light on the ways in which the mill closing affected the town across age, gender, and racial lines, and stark b&w photos depict the social landscape and the town's residents.

Carnegie Mellon University's Judith Modell (writer) and Chalee Brodsky (photographer) have interesting insights in picking apart their interviewees' perceptions, contrasting them with others' and with other aspects of the historical record. And there are some dramatic views of the change that "deindustrialization" has brought, along with wry comparisons with earlier studies of Homestead's rising industrialization, and excellent attention to racial disparities and problems.

In this rich book Judith Modell interviews the men and women of the "steel valley." Through their own words she records their agony, their hopes, and most of all their courage; and Charlee Brodsky's photographs reveal their streets, their homes, their faces and their souls. The more we read, and the more we look, the more deeply we tap into the vulnerability of ordinary people in our wolrld of merciless economic and technological change. But every page of this evocative and powerful book also reminds us of the opposite, that the strength of ordinary people and their sense of community are the best resource we have for the construction of recovery."

The author of A Town Without Steel has an uncanny ability to integrate several voices; including those of the observer, the interviewer and the social analyst. The seamless quality of the book is one of its most attractive qualities. It is especially commendable that the author has presented the social science and history in such a way as to invite the general reader to her table.

This is a fine book. It will be read by professionals in a variety of fields: historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and those involved in policy issues. The additions of Brodsky's photographs can only add to the sense of immediacy conveyed by Modell's superb handling of her interview material.

A Town Without Steel is about what happens about that center of gravity that has imploded. It's an intimate and revealing portrait of the myriad ways in which people coped or failed to cope with working in steel after it collapsed. . . . Complex, nuanced, yet analytical and grounded in solid historical account, A Town Without Steel is a model worth considering for anyone seeking to understand how people convey their sense of past.

It is a wonderful example of how one can use the synthesis of photographs and interviews to understand the evolution of a landscape, an environment, and a community. If you want to know why scrapbooks and field notes are important, read this book.

Modell and Brodsky effectively integrate and anthropological and photographic perspective to envision a steel community before and after the mill closing. Their cultural approach illuminates the pivotal roles of family, church, and neighborhood and highlight gender and race elements.