st rita church connellsville pa bulletin

During the 1950s and again during the 1980s, Pittsburgh’s business and political elite reinvented the city, first as a center of corporate administration and later as a ‘postindustrial’ hub of the high-tech and service sectors. At the same time, I acknowledge the very real impact of political and administrative boundaries that limited governmental and private sector responses to the dual Appalachian and urban crises affecting the area. Divided loosely by theme and geography, my narrative looks beyond the artificial borders of municipal limits and state lines in order to see the real and symbolic bonds knitting diverse communities into a unified region.

The metropolitan framework I adopt to tell the story of the Steel Valley synthesizes urban, economic and environmental histories, while never straying far from the real life choices of the region’s residents. This approach challenges the easy distinctions drawn between Rust Belt and Sunbelt economies by pointing to the important disparities within regions among populations with varying levels of access to employment opportunities. I also move beyond the declension model characterizing recent labor and urban historiography by focusing on the shift from heavy industry to services. The story of the Steel Valley pushes urban historians to accept rural communities and their residents as full-fledged actors on the metropolitan stage instead of merely green spaces waiting for suburban development. By explicitly focusing on the metropolis as a whole, my research provides a new model transcending the urban decay/suburban ascendance divide in favor of a more heterogeneous landscape that includes failing suburbs, gentrified city centers, and de/industrialized rural communities. The narrative traces the evolution of the ‘Steel Valley’ – Pittsburgh and its hinterlands in southeastern Ohio, southwestern Pennsylvania and West Virginia – as residents and communities faced the turmoil caused by the decline of the area’s heavy industrial base. Mines, Mills and Malls is a case study of political and social development in twentieth century America from the perspective of the metropolitan region, a vantage midway between the local community and the national polity.

St rita church connellsville pa bulletin