Regional

The Steel Workers remains a readable and timeless account of labor conditions in the early years of the steel industry. An introduction by the noted historian Roy Lubove places the book in political and historical context.

This unique collection features double-page spreads of Douglas Cooper’s charcoal and paper drawings, the inspiration for his artistic vision, formal properties of his art and how it relates to architecture; and essay excerpts from Pittsburgh authors: poetry, historical accounts, and stories of the daily lives of Pittsburghers. Through words and art, his work shows the urban landscape of Pittsburgh as you have never seen it before.

A detailed, carefully wrought business biography of Henry Clay Frick, one of the leading entrepreneurs in American heavy industry during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kenneth Warren has provided not only insight into the life of Henry Clay Frick, but a major contribution to our understanding of the history of the basic industries, the shaping of society, locality, and region – and thereby of laying the foundations for the value systems and landscapes of present-day America.

The first thorough guide to the design and history of “Kentuck,” designed in 1953-1954 by Frank Lloyd Wright, only seven miles from Fallingwater. Donald Hoffmann includes more than fifty photographs, drawings, diagrams, and a descriptive text to illustrate the structural peculiarities of the house based on the equilateral triangle.

Unforgettable photographs from Roy Stryker’s Pittsburgh Photographic Library (PPL) capture the convergence of destruction and rejuvenation that is the essence of an urban renaissance–all the anxiety and hope of the fifties is reflected in these poignant photographs and explained through essays and narrative.

As she did in Appalachian Spring and Appalachian Autumn, Bonta offers a day-by-day account of the natural life of one place—her 648-acre property in south central Pennsylvania. In her minute observations of one place, one season, Marcia Bonta lays bare the connections we retain to the natural world, which is, finally, our own.

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.

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.

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.

Andrew Carnegie, industrialist and a major American philanthropist, sought to bring world-class art and culture to Pittsburgh. This book looks at how the Carnegie International exhibit came into being in 1895, the early exhibitions, the art, artists, and the public reception to it.

This volume traces the major decisions, events, programs, and personalities that transformed the city of Pittsburgh during its urban renewal project, which began in 1977. Roy Lubove demonstrates how the city showed united determination to attract high technology companies in an attempt to reverse the economic fallout from the decline of the local steel industry. Lubove also separates the successes from the failures, the good intentions from the actual results.

Now back in print, this is a pioneering analysis of an elite driven, post-World War II urban renewal, that has become the classic model for all such redevelopment projects.

The new edition of this long unavailable classic features an extensive analytical introduction by the noted architectural historian Dell Upton. Containing 416 black-and-white photographs, 81 measured drawings and an extensive text, this volume presents a splendid array of the early dwellings, barns, and other outbuildings, churches, arsenals, banks, inns, commercial buildings, tollhouses, mills, and even tombstones of western Pennsylvania.

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.

Like her popular Appalachian Spring, Marcia Bonta’s new book offers a day-by-day account of the changing world of nature in the mountains of central Pennsylvania. This time she chronicles the beauties of the autumn months as she walks the familiar roads and trails of her 500-acre mountain-top farm, noting the minute transformations of the season as well as the more dramatic ones.