Download or read book Making Industrial Pittsburgh Modern written by Edward K. Muller and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2019-10-22 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pittsburgh’s explosive industrial and population growth between the mid-nineteenth century and the Great Depression required constant attention to city-building. Private, profit-oriented firms, often with government involvement, provided necessary transportation, energy resources, and suitable industrial and residential sites. Meeting these requirements in the region’s challenging hilly topographical and riverine environment resulted in the dramatic reshaping of the natural landscape. At the same time, the Pittsburgh region’s free market, private enterprise emphasis created socio-economic imbalances and badly polluted the air, water, and land. Industrial stagnation, temporarily interrupted by wars, and then followed deindustrialization inspired the formation of powerful public-private partnerships to address the region’s mounting infrastructural, economic, and social problems. The sixteen essays in Making Industrial Pittsburgh Modern examine important aspects of the modernizing efforts to make Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania a successful metropolitan region. The city-building experiences continue to influence the region’s economic transformation, spatial structure, and life experience.
Download or read book Before Renaissance written by John F. Bauman and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2006-10-29 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before Renaissance examines a half-century epoch during which planners, public officials, and civic leaders engaged in a dialogue about the meaning of planning and its application for improving life in Pittsburgh.Planning emerged from the concerns of progressive reformers and businessmen over the social and physical problems of the city. In the Steel City enlightened planners such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and Frederick Bigger pioneered the practical approach to reordering the chaotic urban-industrial landscape. In the face of obstacles that included the embedded tradition of privatism, rugged topography, inherited built environment, and chronic political fragmentation, they established a tradition of modern planning in Pittsburgh.Over the years a melange of other distinguished local and national figures joined in the planning dialogue, among them the park founder Edward Bigelow, political bosses Christopher Magee and William Flinn, mayors George Guthrie and William Magee, industrialists Andrew Carnegie and Howard Heinz, financier Richard King Mellon, and planning luminaries Charles Mulford Robinson, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., Harland Bartholomew, Robert Moses, and Pittsburgh's Frederick Bigger. The famed alliance of Richard King Mellon and Mayor David Lawrence, which heralded the Renaissance, owed a great debt to Pittsburgh's prior planning experience. John Bauman and Edward Muller recount the city's long tradition of public/private partnerships as an important factor in the pursuit of orderly and stable urban growth. Before Renaissance provides insights into the major themes, benchmarks, successes, and limitations that marked the formative days of urban planning. It defines Pittsburgh's key role in the vanguard of the national movement and reveals the individuals and processes that impacted the physical shape and form of a city for generations to come.
Download or read book Pennsylvania in Public Memory written by Carolyn Kitch and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-06-26 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What stories do we tell about America’s once-great industries at a time when they are fading from the landscape? Pennsylvania in Public Memory attempts to answer that question, exploring the emergence of a heritage culture of industry and its loss through the lens of its most representative industrial state. Based on news coverage, interviews, and more than two hundred heritage sites, this book traces the narrative themes that shape modern public memory of coal, steel, railroading, lumber, oil, and agriculture, and that collectively tell a story about national as well as local identity in a changing social and economic world.
Download or read book Making the Modern written by Terry Smith and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Smith reveals how this visual revolution played an instrumental role in the complex psychological, social, economic, and technological changes that came to be known as the second industrial revolution. From the role of visualization in the invention of the assembly line, to office and building design, to the corporate and lifestyle images that filled new magazines such as Life and Fortune, he traces the extent to which the second wave of industrialization engaged the visual arts to project a new iconology of progress.
Download or read book Bodies of Work written by Edward Slavishak and published by Duke University Press Books. This book was released on 2008-09-16 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the end of the nineteenth century, Pittsburgh emerged as a major manufacturing center in the United States. Its rise as a leading producer of steel, glass, and coal was fueled by machine technology and mass immigration, developments that fundamentally changed the industrial workplace. Because Pittsburgh’s major industries were almost exclusively male and renowned for their physical demands, the male working body came to symbolize multiple often contradictory narratives about strength and vulnerability, mastery and exploitation. In Bodies of Work, Edward Slavishak explores how Pittsburgh and the working body were symbolically linked in civic celebrations, the research of social scientists, the criticisms of labor reformers, advertisements, and workers’ self-representations. Combining labor and cultural history with visual culture studies, he chronicles a heated contest to define Pittsburgh’s essential character at the turn of the twentieth century, and he describes how that contest was conducted largely through the production of competing images. Slavishak focuses on the workers whose bodies came to epitomize Pittsburgh, the men engaged in the arduous physical labor demanded by the city’s metals, glass, and coal industries. At the same time, he emphasizes how conceptions of Pittsburgh as quintessentially male limited representations of women in the industrial workplace. The threat of injury or violence loomed large for industrial workers at the turn of the twentieth century, and it recurs throughout Bodies of Work: in the marketing of artificial limbs, statistical assessments of the physical toll of industrial capitalism, clashes between labor and management, the introduction of workplace safety procedures, and the development of a statewide workmen’s compensation system.
Download or read book Imagining the Modern written by Rami el Samahy and published by The Monacelli Press, LLC. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagining the Modern explores Pittsburgh's ambitious modern architecture and urban renewal program that made it a gem of American postwar cities, and set the stage for its stature today. In the 1950s and '60s an ambitious program of urban revitalization transformed Pittsburgh and became a model for other American cities. Billed as the Pittsburgh Renaissance, this era of superlatives--the city claimed the tallest aluminum clad building, the world's largest retractable dome, the tallest steel structure--developed through visionary mayors and business leaders, powerful urban planning authorities, and architects and urban designers of international renown, including Frank Lloyd Wright, I.M. Pei, Mies van der Rohe, SOM, and Harrison & Abramovitz. These leaders, civic groups, and architects worked together to reconceive the city through local and federal initiatives that aimed to address the problems that confronted Pittsburgh's postwar development. Initiated as an award-winning exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 2014, Imagining the Modern untangles this complicated relationship with modern architecture and planning through a history of Pittsburgh's major sites, protagonists, and voices of intervention. Through original documentation, photographs and drawings, as well as essays, analytical drawings, and interviews with participants, this book provides a nuanced view of this crucial moment in Pittsburgh's evolution. Addressing both positive and negative impacts of the era, Imagining the Modern examines what took place during the city's urban renewal era, what was gained and lost, and what these histories might suggest for the city's future.
Download or read book Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity written by Kimberly Elman Zarecor and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2011-04-10 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eastern European prefabricated housing blocks are often vilified as the visible manifestations of everything that was wrong with state socialism. For many inside and outside the region, the uniformity of these buildings became symbols of the dullness and drudgery of everyday life. Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity complicates this common perception. Analyzing the cultural, intellectual, and professional debates surrounding the construction of mass housing in early postwar Czechoslovakia, Zarecor shows that these housing blocks served an essential function in the planned economy and reflected an interwar aesthetic, derived from constructivism and functionalism, that carried forward into the 1950s. With a focus on prefabricated and standardized housing built from 1945 to 1960, Zarecor offers broad and innovative insights into the country's transition from capitalism to state socialism. She demonstrates that during this shift, architects and engineers consistently strove to meet the needs of Czechs and Slovaks despite challenging economic conditions, a lack of material resources, and manufacturing and technological limitations. In the process, architects were asked to put aside their individual creative aspirations and transform themselves into technicians and industrial producers. Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity is the first comprehensive history of architectural practice and the emergence of prefabricated housing in the Eastern Bloc. Through discussions of individual architects and projects, as well as building typologies, professional associations, and institutional organization, it opens a rare window into the cultural and economic life of Eastern Europe during the early postwar period.
Download or read book The Age of Smoke written by Frank Uekötter and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2009-02-15 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1880, coal was the primary energy source for everything from home heating to industry. Regions where coal was readily available, such as the Ruhr Valley in Germany and western Pennsylvania in the United States, witnessed exponential growth-yet also suffered the greatest damage from coal pollution. These conditions prompted civic activism in the form of "anti-smoke" campaigns to attack the unsightly physical manifestations of coal burning. This early period witnessed significant cooperation between industrialists, government, and citizens to combat the smoke problem. It was not until the 1960s, when attention shifted from dust and grime to hazardous invisible gases, that cooperation dissipated, and protests took an antagonistic turn.The Age of Smoke presents an original, comparative history of environmental policy and protest in the United States and Germany. Dividing this history into distinct eras (1880 to World War I, interwar, post-World War II to 1970), Frank Uekoetter compares and contrasts the influence of political, class, and social structures, scientific communities, engineers, industrial lobbies, and environmental groups in each nation. He concludes with a discussion of the environmental revolution, arguing that there were indeed two environmental revolutions in both countries: one societal, where changing values gave urgency to air pollution control, the other institutional, where changes in policies tried to catch up with shifting sentiments.Focusing on a critical period in environmental history, The Age of Smoke provides a valuable study of policy development in two modern industrial nations, and the rise of civic activism to combat air pollution. As Uekoetter's work reveals, the cooperative approaches developed in an earlier era offer valuable lessons and perhaps the best hope for future progress.
Download or read book The Workers State written by Mark Pittaway and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2010-11-23 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1956, Hungarian workers joined students on the streets to protest years of wage and benefit cuts enacted by the Communist regime. Although quickly suppressed by Soviet forces, the uprising led to changes in party leadership and conciliatory measures that would influence labor politics for the next thirty years. In The Workers' State, Mark Pittaway presents a groundbreaking study of the complexities of the Hungarian working class, its relationship to the Communist Party, and its major political role during the foundational period of socialism (1944-1958). Through case studies of three industrial centers—Ujpest, Tatabanya, and Zala County—Pittaway analyzes the dynamics of gender, class, generation, skill level, and rural versus urban location, to reveal the embedded hierarchies within Hungarian labor. He further demonstrates how industries themselves, from oil and mining to armaments and textiles, possessed their own unique labor subcultures. From the outset, the socialist state won favor with many workers, as they had grown weary of the disparity and oppression of class systems under fascism. By the early 1950s, however, a gap between the aspirations of labor and the goals of the state began to widen. In the Stalinist drive toward industrialization, stepped up production measures, shortages of goods and housing, wage and benefit cuts, and suppression became widespread. Many histories of this period have focused on Communist terror tactics and the brutal suppression of a pliant population. In contrast, Pittaway's social chronicle sheds new light on working-class structures and the determination of labor to pursue its own interests and affect change in the face of oppression. It also offers new understandings of the role of labor and the importance of local histories in Eastern Europe under communism.
Download or read book London written by John Broich and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As people crowded into British cities in the nineteenth century, industrial and biological waste byproducts, and then epidemic followed. Britons died by the thousands in recurring plagues. Figures like Edwin Chadwick and John Snow pleaded for measures that could save lives and preserve the social fabric. In London: Water and the Making of the Modern City, John Broich follows the politically charged and arduous task of bringing a municipal water supply to one of the world's most complex urban environments.
Download or read book Pittsburgh and the Urban League Movement written by Joe William TrotterJr. and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2020-11-02 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Great Migration, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, became a mecca for African Americans seeking better job opportunities, wages, and living conditions. The city's thriving economy and vibrant social and cultural scenes inspired dreams of prosperity and a new start, but this urban haven was not free of discrimination and despair. In the face of injustice, activists formed the Urban League of Pittsburgh (ULP) in 1918 to combat prejudice and support the city's growing African American population. In this broad-ranging history, Joe William Trotter Jr. uses this noteworthy branch of the National Urban League to provide new insights into an organization that has often faced criticism for its social programs' deep class and gender limitations. Surveying issues including housing, healthcare, and occupational mobility, Trotter underscores how the ULP—often in concert with the Urban League's national headquarters—bridged social divisions to improve the lives of black citizens of every class. He also sheds new light on the branch's nonviolent direct-action campaigns and places these powerful grassroots operations within the context of the modern Black Freedom Movement. The impact of the National Urban League is a hotly debated topic in African American social and political history. Trotter's study provides valuable new insights that demonstrate how the organization has relieved massive suffering and racial inequality in US cities for more than a century.
Download or read book Edward Condon s Cooperative Vision written by Thomas C. Lassman and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a professor of physics at Princeton University for nearly ten years, Edward Condon sealed his reputation as one of the sharpest minds in the field and a pioneer in quantum theoretical physics. Then, in 1937, he left it all behind to pursue an industrial career—first at the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in Pittsburgh and then, by way of the federal government, at the National Bureau of Standards. In a radical departure from professional norms, Condon sought to redefine the relationship between academic science and technological innovation in industry. He envisioned intimate cooperation with the universities to serve the needs of his employers and also the broader business community. Edward Condon’s Cooperative Vision explores the life cycle of that vision during the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the early Cold War. Condon’s cooperative model of research and development evolved over time and by consequence laid bare sharp disagreements among academic, corporate, and government stakeholders about the practical value of new knowledge, where and how it should be produced, and ultimately, on whose behalf it ought to be put to use.
Download or read book Designing Tito s Capital written by Brigitte Le Normand and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2014-07-21 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The devastation of World War II left the Yugoslavian capital of Belgrade in ruins. Communist Party leader Josip Broz Tito saw this as a golden opportunity to recreate the city through his own vision of socialism. In Designing Tito's Capital, Brigitte Le Normand analyzes the unprecedented planning process called for by the new leader, and the determination of planners to create an urban environment that would benefit all citizens. Led first by architect Nikola Dobrovic and later by Milos Somborski, planners blended the predominant school of European modernism and the socialist principles of efficient construction and space usage to produce a model for housing, green space, and working environments for the masses. A major influence was modernist Le Corbusier and his Athens Charter published in 1943, which called for the total reconstruction of European cities, transforming them into compact and verdant vertical cities unfettered by slumlords, private interests, and traffic congestion. As Yugoslavia transitioned toward self-management and market socialism, the functionalist district of New Belgrade and its modern living were lauded as the model city of socialist man. The glow of the utopian ideal would fade by the 1960s, when market socialism had raised expectations for living standards and the government was eager for inhabitants to finance their own housing. By 1972, a new master plan emerged under Aleksandar Dordevic, fashioned with the assistance of American experts. Espousing current theories about systems and rational process planning and using cutting edge computer technology, the new plan left behind the dream for a functionalist Belgrade and instead focused on managing growth trends. While the public resisted aspects of the new planning approach that seemed contrary to socialist values, it embraced the idea of a decentralized city connected by mass transit. Through extensive archival research and personal interviews with participants in the planning process, Le Normand's comprehensive study documents the evolution of 'New Belgrade' and its adoption and ultimate rejection of modernist principles, while also situating it within larger continental and global contexts of politics, economics, and urban planning.
Download or read book Environment and Urbanization in Modern Italy written by Federico Paolini and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2020-05-12 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the second half of the 1940s, when postwar reconstruction began in Italy, there were three notable driving forces of environmental change: the uncontrollable process of urban drift, fueled by considerable migratory flows from the countryside and southern regions toward the cities where large-scale productive activities were beginning to amass; unruly industrial development, which was tolerated since it was seen as the necessary tribute to be paid to progress and modernization; and mass consumption. In his fourth book, Federico Paolini presents a series of essays ranging from the uses of natural resources, to environmental problems caused by means of transport, to issues concerning environmental politics and the dynamics of the environment movement. Paolini concludes the book with a forecast about the environmental problems that will emerge in the public debate of the twenty-first century.
Download or read book The Next Shift written by Gabriel Winant and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Men in hardhats were once the heart of America’s working class; now it is women in scrubs. What does this shift portend for our future? Pittsburgh was once synonymous with steel. But today most of its mills are gone. Like so many places across the United States, a city that was a center of blue-collar manufacturing is now dominated by the service economy—particularly health care, which employs more Americans than any other industry. Gabriel Winant takes us inside the Rust Belt to show how America’s cities have weathered new economic realities. In Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods, he finds that a new working class has emerged in the wake of deindustrialization. As steelworkers and their families grew older, they required more health care. Even as the industrial economy contracted sharply, the care economy thrived. Hospitals and nursing homes went on hiring sprees. But many care jobs bear little resemblance to the manufacturing work the city lost. Unlike their blue-collar predecessors, home health aides and hospital staff work unpredictable hours for low pay. And the new working class disproportionately comprises women and people of color. Today health care workers are on the front lines of our most pressing crises, yet we have been slow to appreciate that they are the face of our twenty-first-century workforce. The Next Shift offers unique insights into how we got here and what could happen next. If health care employees, along with other essential workers, can translate the increasing recognition of their economic value into political power, they may become a major force in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Industrial Genius written by Kenneth Warren and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2007-02-18 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Schwab was known to his employees, business associates, and competitors as a congenial and charismatic person-a 'born salesman.' Yet Schwab was much more than a salesman-he was a captain of industry, a man who streamlined and economized the production of steel and ran the largest steelmaking conglomerate in the world. A self-made man, he became one of the wealthiest Americans during the Gilded Age, only to die penniless in 1939.Schwab began his career as a stake driver at Andrew Carnegie's Edgar Thomson steel works in Pittsburgh at the age of seventeen. By thirty-five, he was president of Carnegie Steel. In 1901, he helped form the U.S. Steel Corporation, a company that produced well over half the nation's iron and steel. In 1904, Schwab left U.S. Steel to head Bethlehem Steel, which after twelve years under his leadership, became the second-largest steel producer in America. President Woodrow Wilson called on Schwab to head the Emergency Fleet Corporation to produce merchant ships for the transport of troops and materials abroad during World War I.Kenneth Warren presents a compelling biography that chronicles the startling success of Schwab's business career, his leadership abilities, and his drive to advance steel-making technology and operations. Through extensive research and use of previously unpublished archival documentation, Warren offers a new perspective on the life of a monumental figure-a true visionary-in the industrial history of America.
Download or read book Pittsburgh Rising written by Edward K. Muller and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2023-05-16 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over 170 years, Pittsburgh rose from remote outpost to industrial powerhouse. With the formation of the United States, the frontier town located at the confluence of three rivers grew into the linchpin for trade and migration between established eastern cities and the growing settlements of the Ohio Valley. Resources, geography, innovation, and personalities led to successful glass, iron, and eventually steel operations. As Pittsburgh blossomed into one of the largest cities in the country and became a center of industry, it generated great wealth for industrial and banking leaders. But immigrants and African American migrants, who labored under insecure, poorly paid, and dangerous conditions, did not share in the rewards of growth. Pittsburgh Rising traces the lives of individuals and families who lived and worked in this early industrial city, jammed into unhealthy housing in overcrowded neighborhoods near the mills. Although workers organized labor unions to improve conditions and charitable groups and reform organizations, often helmed by women, mitigated some of the deplorable conditions, authors Muller and Ruck show that divides along class, religious, ethnic, and racial lines weakened the efforts to improve the inequalities of early twentieth-century Pittsburgh—and persist today.
