Pittsburgh During the American Civil War, 1860-1865

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780976056300
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (563 download)

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Book Synopsis Pittsburgh During the American Civil War, 1860-1865 by : Arthur Berl Fox

Download or read book Pittsburgh During the American Civil War, 1860-1865 written by Arthur Berl Fox and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at the "homefront" in Pittsburgh during the Civil War which includes chapters on the United States Allegheny Arsenal and on the Fort Pitt Foundry and Artillery Proving Grounds.

The Battle For Homestead, 1880-1892

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Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN 13 : 0822971518
Total Pages : 577 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (229 download)

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Book Synopsis The Battle For Homestead, 1880-1892 by : Paul Krause

Download or read book The Battle For Homestead, 1880-1892 written by Paul Krause and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2012-01-12 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of the fifty best books of 1992 by Publishers Weekly More than a century has passed since the infamous lockout at the Homestead Works of the Carnegie Steel Company. The dramatic and violent events of July 6, 1892, are among the mst familiar in the history of American labor. And yet, few historians have adequately addressed the issues and the culture that shaped that day. For many Americans, Homestead remains simply the story of a bloody clash between management and labor. 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. The Battle for Homestead brings to life many of the individuals -both in and outside Homestead- who played a role in the events leading to July 1892. From the inventor of the modern Bessemer steel mill to the most obscure immigrant workers, from Christopher L. Magee, the “boss” of Pittsburgh machine politics, to Thomas A. Armstrong, the tireless editor of the National Labor Tribune, from the “Laird of Skibo” himself (Andrew Carnegie) to the labor leader and mayor of Homestead, “Old Beeswax” (Thomas W. Taylor), Krause shows how all these lives became intertwined, often in surprising and unpredictable ways, as the drama of the lockout unfolded. As the nineteenth century was drawing to a close, the Homestead Lockout dramatized the all-important question: Can the land of industry and technological innovation continue to be “the land of the free”? Can material progress, with its inevitable social and economic inequities, be made compatible with the American commitment to democracy for all? Twentieth-century history has demonstrated all too clearly the intesity of this dilemma. In addressing some of the thorniest issues of the last century, The Battle for Homestead demonstrates the enduring legacy and relevance of Homestead over a century later.

Civil War Pittsburgh

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Publisher : Civil War
ISBN 13 : 9781626190818
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (98 download)

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Book Synopsis Civil War Pittsburgh by : Len Barcousky

Download or read book Civil War Pittsburgh written by Len Barcousky and published by Civil War. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Christmas Day 1860, the "Daily Pittsburgh Gazette "announced that more than one hundred cannons from the nearby U.S. Arsenal were to be shipped south. Fiercely loyal to the Union, Pittsburghers halted the movement of the artillery, which would have been seized by secessionist sympathizers. Over the course of the Civil War, Pittsburgh and Allegheny County provided both troops and equipment--including heavy artillery--in disproportionately large numbers. While no major battles were fought nearby, local soldiers and civilians sacrificed and suffered--the Allegheny Arsenal explosion in September 1862 left seventy-eight dead and was the worst civilian disaster of the war. Thousands dug trenches and joined militia companies to defend their city as others worked to support the wounded soldiers. Reporter Len Barcousky draws on the next-day reporting of the predecessors of the "Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "to craft a gripping and insightful view of the Steel City during the Civil War.

An Alternative History of Pittsburgh

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Publisher : Arcadia Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1953368131
Total Pages : 138 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (533 download)

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Book Synopsis An Alternative History of Pittsburgh by : Ed Simon

Download or read book An Alternative History of Pittsburgh written by Ed Simon and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[An] epic, atomic history of the Steel City . . . a work of literature, a series of linked creative nonfiction essays, an historical story cycle.” ―Phillip Maciak, Los Angeles Review of Books The land surrounding the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers has supported communities of humans for millennia. Over the past four centuries, however, it has been transformed countless times by the many people who call it home. In this brief, lyrical, and idiosyncratic collection, Ed Simon, a staff writer at The Millions, follows the story of Pittsburgh through a series of interconnected segments, covering all manner of beloved people, places, and things, including: • Paleolithic Pittsburgh • The Whiskey Rebellion • The attempted assassination of Henry Frick • The Harmonists • The Mystery, Pittsburgh’s radical, Black nationalist newspaper • The myth of Joe Magarac • Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington, Andy Warhol, and much, much more. Accessible and funny, An Alternative History of Pittsburgh is a must-read for anyone curious about this storied city, and for Pittsburghers who think they know it all too well already. “[A] rich and idiosyncratic history . . . Even Pittsburgh history buffs will learn something new.” —Publishers Weekly “Simon tells the story of the city and all the changes that made it what it is today in a way that's entirely new, by the hand of someone who is deeply familiar.” ―Juliana Rose Pignataro, Newsweek “A sparkling new take on everyone’s favorite Rust Belt metropolis.” ―Justin Velluci, Jewish Chronicle “A brilliant look at how geology and art, politics and religion, disaster and luck combine to build America’s great cities―one that will leave you wondering what secrets your own hometown might be hiding.” ―Anjali Sachdeva, author of All the Names They Used for God

Consecrated Dust

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781977253231
Total Pages : 428 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (532 download)

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Book Synopsis Consecrated Dust by : Mary Frailey Calland

Download or read book Consecrated Dust written by Mary Frailey Calland and published by . This book was released on 2022-06-19 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On September 17, 1862, an explosion at the Allegheny Arsenal in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, kills seventy-eight girls rolling bullet cartridges for the Union army. News of the catastrophe is buried, however, beneath the horrendous casualty reports coming out of the Battle of Antietam, fought on the very same day. Inspired by these two real-life tragedies, Consecrated Dust tells the wartime story of four young northerners - feminist, Clara Ambrose; soldier, Garrett Cameron; industrialist, Edgar Gliddon; and immigrant, Annie Burke - friends, lovers, and bitter rivals. In the teeming streets and factories of Pittsburgh, and on the battlefields of the Army of the Potomac, they struggle to survive, forced to choose between love and duty, sacrifice and greed. Their choices ultimately lead to their presence at both the Arsenal and the Antietam battlefield on that fateful September day, a day that reveals the true meaning of courage - a day not all of them will survive. "Mary Frailey Calland bridges the gap between historian and storyteller, adeptly using characters to walk the reader through the times and events in 1862 Pittsburgh where life and the consequences of war collide. Rich in historic detail, Consecrated Dust is a narrative window to the past." MICHAEL KRAUS, Curator of Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall & Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, and military consultant to the films Gettysburg and Cold Mountain. "The Civil War is seared into American memory for the horrors of the battlefields, North and South. Mary Calland's Consecrated Dust brings the tragedy to the northern home front and Pittsburgh - the Arsenal of the Union - which experienced in a single day the greatest death of civilians during the four year conflict." ANDREW E. MASICH, President & CEO of the Senator John Heinz History Center, Pittsburgh, PA.

The Lincoln Trail in Pennsylvania: A History and Guide

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Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 9780271038964
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (389 download)

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Book Synopsis The Lincoln Trail in Pennsylvania: A History and Guide by :

Download or read book The Lincoln Trail in Pennsylvania: A History and Guide written by and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Making and Remaking Pennsylvania's Civil War

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Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 9780271020792
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (27 download)

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Book Synopsis Making and Remaking Pennsylvania's Civil War by : William Alan Blair

Download or read book Making and Remaking Pennsylvania's Civil War written by William Alan Blair and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many people, Pennsylvania's contribution to the Civil War goes little beyond the battle of Gettysburg. The North in general has received far less attention than the Confederacy in the historiography of the Civil War—a weakness in the literature that this book will help to address. The essays in this volume suggest a few ways to reconsider the impact of the Civil War on Pennsylvania and the way its memory remains alive even today. Making and Remaking Pennsylvania's Civil War contains a wealth of new information about Pennsylvania during the war years. For instance, perhaps as many as 2,000 Pennsylvanians defected to the Confederacy to fight for the Southern cause. And during the advance of Lee's army in 1863, residents of the Gettysburg area gained a reputation throughout North and South as a stingy people who wanted to make money from the war rather than sacrifice for the Union. But the state displayed loyalty as well and commitment to the cause of freedom. Pittsburgh served as the site for one of the first public monuments in the country dedicated to African Americans. Women of the Commonwealth also contributed mightily through organizing sanitary fairs or helping in ways that belied their roles as keepers of the domestic world. And readers will learn from an African American soldier's letters how blacks helped win their own liberation. As a whole, the ten essays contained in Making and Remaking Pennsylvania's Civil War include courage on the battlefield but reflect the current trends to understand the motivations of soldiers and the impact of war on civilians, rather than focusing solely on battles or leadership. The essays also employ interdisciplinary techniques, as well as raise gender and racial questions. They incorporate a more expansive time frame than the four years of the conflict, by looking at not only the making of the war—but also its remaking—or how a public revisits the past to suit contemporary needs.

Bandits and Partisans

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Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN 13 : 9780822971177
Total Pages : 420 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (711 download)

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Book Synopsis Bandits and Partisans by : Erik C. Landis

Download or read book Bandits and Partisans written by Erik C. Landis and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning in the fall of 1920, Aleksandr Antonov led an insurgency that became the largest armed peasant revolt against the Soviets during the civil war. Yet by the summer of 1921, the revolt had been crushed, and popular support for the movement had all but disappeared. Until now, details of this conflict have remained hidden. Erik Landis mines recently opened provincial and central Soviet archives and international collections to provide a depth of detail and historical analysis never before possible in this definitive account of the uprising. Landis examines both sides of the conflict, probing the testimonies of the insurgents, their opponents, and those caught in between. We witness firsthand the frustrations, failures, and internal conflicts of the Bolsheviks and the spirit of rebellion that drove the insurgents and helped drive a localized dispute into a well-organized mass rebellion that struck fear in the hearts of Communist leaders. This political and military threat was influential in bringing about Lenin's conciliatory New Economic Policy, which allowed farmers and villages to sustain themselves in a quasi-market economy. Bandits and Partisans presents a gripping tale of brutality, domination, and revolt, placing readers at the frontlines of the complex and rich history of the Russian civil war and the consolidation of the new Soviet state.

The WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh

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Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN 13 : 0822970848
Total Pages : 433 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (229 download)

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Book Synopsis The WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh by : Laurence Glasco

Download or read book The WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh written by Laurence Glasco and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2012-07-19 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The monumental American Guide Series, published by the Federal Writers’ Project, provided work to thousands of unemployed writers, editors, and researchers in the midst of the Great Depression. Funded by the Works Progress Administration and featuring books on states, cities, rivers, and ethnic groups, it also opened an unprecedented view into the lives of the American people during this time. Untold numbers of projects in progress were lost when the program was abruptly shut down by a hostile Congress in 1939. One of those, “The Negro in Pittsburgh,” lay dormant in the Pennsylvania State Library until it was microfilmed in 1970. The WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh marked the first publication of this rich body of information. This unique historical study of the city’s Black population, although never completed, features articles on civil rights, social class, lifestyle, culture, folklore, and institutions from colonial times through the 1930s. Editor Laurence A. Glasco’s introduction and robust bibliography contextualizes the articles and offers a history on the manuscript itself, guiding contemporary readers through this remarkable work.

Pittsburgh and the Urban League Movement

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Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
ISBN 13 : 0813179939
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (131 download)

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Book Synopsis Pittsburgh and the Urban League Movement by : Joe William TrotterJr.

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.

Pittsburgh's Forgotten Civil War Regiment

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781595719195
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (191 download)

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Book Synopsis Pittsburgh's Forgotten Civil War Regiment by : Ernest D Spisak

Download or read book Pittsburgh's Forgotten Civil War Regiment written by Ernest D Spisak and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author lets the men of the 62nd speak for themselves, describing in letters home, the hardships of long marches and camp life, the homesickness, the deaths, defeats and the victories that defined their experience in the great struggle to save the Union.

The Paris of Appalachia

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Publisher : Carnegie-Mellon University Press
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 162 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis The Paris of Appalachia by : Brian O'Neill

Download or read book The Paris of Appalachia written by Brian O'Neill and published by Carnegie-Mellon University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: - Whitest large metro area in the counrty -- Deer people.

Thunder In the Mountains

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Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN 13 : 0822971429
Total Pages : 333 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (229 download)

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Book Synopsis Thunder In the Mountains by : Lon Savage

Download or read book Thunder In the Mountains written by Lon Savage and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 1985-06-15 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The West Virginia mine war of 1920-21, a major civil insurrection of unusual brutality on both sides, even by the standards of the coal fields, involved thousands of union and nonunion miners, state and private police, militia, and federal troops. Before it was over, three West Virginia counties were in open rebellion, much of the state was under military rule, and bombers of the U.S. Army Air Corps had been dispatched against striking miners.The origins of this civil war were in the Draconian rule of the coal companies over the fiercely proud miners of Appalachia. It began in the small railroad town of Matewan when Mayor C. C. Testerman and Police Chief Sid Hatfield sided with striking miners against agents of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, who attempted to evict the miners from company-owned housing. During a street battle, Mayor Testerman, seven Baldwin-Felts agents, and two miners were shot to death.Hatfield became a folk hero to Appalachia. But he, like Testerman, was to be a martyr. The next summer, Baldwin-Felts agents assassinated him and his best friend, Ed Chambers, as their wives watched, on the steps of the courthouse in Welch, accelerating the miners' rebellion into open warfare.Much neglected in historical accounts, Thunder in the Mountains is the only available book-length account of the crisis in American industrial relations and governance that occured during the West Virginia mine war of 1920-21.

Our Honored Dead

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780979377211
Total Pages : 486 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (772 download)

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Book Synopsis Our Honored Dead by : Arthur Berl Fox

Download or read book Our Honored Dead written by Arthur Berl Fox and published by . This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arthur Fox, after an extensive chapter documenting Civil War era Pittsburgh and Allegheny City as they appeared in the 1860s, ?follows to the front? over 60 Pennsylvania and one West Virginia regiment, consisting of companies recruited in Allegheny County. Following chapters are comprised of the three-month, nine-month, 100-day and three-year infantry, and cavalry regiments; the emergency militias, the Pa. 8th and 9th Reserves, and the heavy and light artillery batteries. Each vignette details the unit?s command staff, with bio-sketches for many of the officers; the regiment?s organizational status and its service history; concluding with a breakdown of each company?s Honor Roll of killed in action or died while in service. Prologues detail the role and organization of infantry, cavalry and artillery arms in the Union Army. Also contained are: Statistics of Allegheny County units, e.g., the highest casualties per regiment or battle, the oldest and youngest men to serve, most famous woman veteran, and the last surviving veterans; Allegheny County Medal of Honor recipients; county African-American soldiers serving with the 54th Massachusetts; Union generals from the county; local Catholic nuns who served in the field; the Allegheny Arsenal payroll; area Civil War monuments; steamships built in the Allegheny County area; a case study of the 1890 Special Census; and PA Civil War repositories. In addition, this large volume is extensively supplemented with 26 maps, 60 photos/illustrations, a comprehensive bibliography, and the first ever publication of the little known color 1859 Palmatary lithograph of Pittsburgh.These fascinating Civil War subjects have, to date, never been available in one source for the historian. This book will make an indispensable companion to Fox?s Pittsburgh during the American Civil War and a welcome addition to Civil War historians? book shelves in the continuing story of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County during the 1860s.

I've Been Here All the While

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Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812297989
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

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Book Synopsis I've Been Here All the While by : Alaina E. Roberts

Download or read book I've Been Here All the While written by Alaina E. Roberts and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-03-12 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of "40 acres and a mule"—the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I've Been Here All the While, we meet the Black people who actually received this mythic 40 acres, the American settlers who coveted this land, and the Native Americans whose holdings it originated from. In nineteenth-century Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), a story unfolds that ties African American and Native American history tightly together, revealing a western theatre of Civil War and Reconstruction, in which Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians, their Black slaves, and African Americans and whites from the eastern United States fought military and rhetorical battles to lay claim to land that had been taken from others. Through chapters that chart cycles of dispossession, land seizure, and settlement in Indian Territory, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction. She connects debates about Black freedom and Native American citizenship to westward expansion onto Native land. As Black, white, and Native people constructed ideas of race, belonging, and national identity, this part of the West became, for a short time, the last place where Black people could escape Jim Crow, finding land and exercising political rights, until Oklahoma statehood in 1907.

Race and Renaissance

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Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN 13 : 0822977559
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (229 download)

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Book Synopsis Race and Renaissance by : Joseph William Trotter Jr.

Download or read book Race and Renaissance written by Joseph William Trotter Jr. and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2010-06-27 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African Americans from Pittsburgh have a long and distinctive history of contributions to the cultural, political, and social evolution of the United States. From jazz legend Earl Fatha Hines to playwright August Wilson, from labor protests in the 1950s to the Black Power movement of the late 1960s, Pittsburgh has been a force for change in American race and class relations. Race and Renaissance presents the first history of African American life in Pittsburgh after World War II. It examines the origins and significance of the second Great Migration, the persistence of Jim Crow into the postwar years, the second ghetto, the contemporary urban crisis, the civil rights and Black Power movements, and the Million Man and Million Woman marches, among other topics. In recreating this period, Trotter and Day draw not only from newspaper articles and other primary and secondary sources, but also from oral histories. These include interviews with African Americans who lived in Pittsburgh during the postwar era, which reveal firsthand accounts of what life was truly like during this transformative epoch. Race and Renaissance illuminates how Pittsburgh's African Americans arrived at their present moment in history. It also links movements for change to larger global issues: civil rights with the Vietnam War; affirmative action with the movement against South African apartheid. As such, the study draws on both sociology and urban studies to deepen our understanding of the lives of urban blacks.

Thomas Mellon And His Times

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Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN 13 : 0822971682
Total Pages : 535 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (229 download)

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Book Synopsis Thomas Mellon And His Times by : Thomas Mellon

Download or read book Thomas Mellon And His Times written by Thomas Mellon and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2010-09-28 with total page 535 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1885, at the age of seventy-two and "in the evening of life," Thomas Mellon published his autobiography in a limited edition exclusively for his family. He was a distinguished and highly successful Pittsburgh entrepreneur, judge, and banker, and his descendants would play major roles in American business, art, and philanthropy. Two of his sons, Andrew William and Richard Beatty, were to join Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller as the four wealthiest men in the United States.Thomas Mellon was an anomaly among the great American capitalists of his time. Highly literate and intelligent, astute and deadly honest about his own life and financial success, and an excellent narrative writer with a chilly but genuine sense of humor, he wrote a perspective and self-revealing book that remains to this day a major autobiography and an important source for American social and business history.That it has found very few readers in the 114 year since its publication is due to the author himself. Warning his descendants in the preface that the book should never "be for sale in the bookstore, nor any new edition published," because it contains "nothing which concerns the public to know, and much which if writing for it I would have omitted," Thomas in effect buried a masterpiece.Nor in later years has it ever been generally available. An abridged version was prepared solely for the Mellon family in 1968, and the book also appeared years ago in an obscure fascimile. Until the University of Pittsburgh Press edition, Thomas Mellon and His Times has been virtually unobtainable.Born in Ulster with a Scotch-Irish heritage, Thomas Mellon immigrated to the United States in 1818 at the age of five. He was raised by his parents on a small, hilly farm at Poverty Point, about twenty miles east of Pittsburgh. When he was nine, he walked to Pittsburgh and, awe-struck, viewed the mansion and steam mill of the Negley family, "impressed . . . with an idea of wealth and magnificence I had before no conception of."Yet the true turning point of his life was a decision he made at the age of seventeen. For years his father, Andrew, had insisted that Thomas become a farmer. One summer day in 1831, leaving his son cutting timber, Andrew rode to the county seat to close on the purchase of an adjoining farm which he intended for Thomas. "Nearly crazed" by the impending collapse of all hope of "acquiring knowledge and wealth," Thomas threw down his axe and ran ten miles to stop the purchase. From this spontaneous decision flowed his later success as a judge, banker, and capitolist who caught the exhilarating tide of the American economy in the second half of the nineteenth century.For this new edition of the book, Paul Mellon, Thomas Mellon's grandson, has written a preface, and David McCullough, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Harry S. Truman, has contributed a foreword. The introduction, notes, and afterword by Mary L, Briscoe, Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and editor of American Autobiography, 1945-1980, provide the historical and social context for the autobiography. The book is illustrated with three maps and approximately twenty-five photographs, many of them rarely seen, from a variety of sources that includes Paul Mellon and other members of the Mellon family.