Books

With the development of a strong parliamentary system, Orlow shows how close Prussia came to realizing its goal of lasting democracy for the entire Reich, and how far it fell when the Nazis took power.

This book created a sensation when it appeared in 1903 and remains a striking insider’s narrative of the American steel industry in the late nineteenth century. Bridge was a fisthand witness to the confrontations of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, the eventual sale of Carnegie Steel and the formation of U.S. Steel.

In The Meaning of Freedom scholars from a wide variety of disciplines contemplate the aftermath of slavery, focusing on Caribbean societies and the southern United States. They attempt to answer the questions about culture, economics, and politics central to this issue.

In The Battle for Homestead, Paul Krause calls upon the methods and insights of labor history, intellectual history, anthropology, and the history of technology to situate the events of the lockout and their significance in the broad context of America’s Guilded Age. Utilizing extensive archival material, much of it heretofore unknown, he reconstructs the social, intellectual, and political climate of the burgeoning post-Civil War steel industry.

A Richly Illustrated Account of a Crucial Moment in US Labor History

American Mosaic presents the recollections of 140 immigrants from six continents and fifty countries who have settled all across the United States.

Winner of the 2009 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought

An insider’s look at the Soviet dissident movement—the intellectuals who, during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, dared to challenge an oppressive system and demand the rights guaranteed by the Soviet constitution. Fired from their jobs, hunted by the KGB, “tried,” and imprisoned, Alexeyeva and other activists, through their dedication and sacrifices, focused international attention on thuman rights in the USSR.

Crisis in Bethlehem provides an insider’s look at Bethlehem Steel’s bonanza years, its collapse, how it coped (and did not cope) with crisis, and the human costs involved.

This book is a fascinating re-creation of the lives of women in the time of great social change that followed the end of the French and Indian War in western Pennsylvania. Keeping House: Women’s Lives in Western Pennsylvania, 1790-1850, tells how the daughters, wives, and mothers who crossed the Allegheny Mountains responded and adapted to unaccustomed physical and psychological hardships as they established lives for themselves and their families in their new homes.

From 1909-1914 the Pittsburgh Survey brought together statisticans, social workers, engineers, lawyers, physicians, economists, and city planners to study the effects of industrialization on the city of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh Surveyed examines the accuracy and the impact of the influential Pittsburgh Survey, emphasizing its role in the social reform movement of the early twentieth century.

Environmental History, formerly Environmental History Review, has helped define an entire discipline through the publication of the finest scholarship of humanists, social and natural scientists, and a variety of other professionals. Out of the Woods gathers the best of this scholarship.

A study of the immigrants who flocked to this Central Pennsylvania steel town in the late nineteenth century in search of employment. Comprised primarily of Southern blacks and Eastern European immigrants, they formed the lower class of this town. Analyzes the social structure and dominance of the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant elite.

Kenneth Straus contemplates the question: Was there social support for the Stalin regime among the Soviet working class during the 1930s, and if so, why? In his well-researched answer he analyzes the daily lives of Soviet workers, and compares the ideologies of western and Soviet thought.

In an unusually powerful book that will appeal to the general reader as well as to the specialist, Louis A. Perez, Jr., recounts the story of the critical years when Cuba won its independence from Spain only to fall in the American orbit.

In 1986, with little warning, the USX Homestead Works closed. Thousands of workers who depended on steel to survive were left without work. A Town Without Steel looks at the people of Homestead as they reinvent their views of household and work and place in this world.