Category: Projects

Krause, Paul. 1992. The Battle for Homestead, 1880-1892 : Politics, Culture, and Steel. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Laborers at a Russian boarding house by Lewis Hines, Homestead, PA, 1909., Last modified 28 May, 2020, Accessed 01 March, 2025, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Homestead,_Pennsylvania_in_1909_detail,_from_Laborers_at_a_Russian_boarding_house_by_Lewis_Hines,_Homestead,_PA,_1909_(cropped).jpg Homestead Strike – Mob attacking Pinkerton men, Harpers Weekly 1892, July 16, Last modified 29 Dec….

The Great Migration, from the early 1900’s into the 1940’s, saw a dramatic shift of the American black population away from the South and towards northern cities. The industrial steel towns of the Rust Belt were prime destinations for these migrants, and the populations of the 4 cities in the chart above increased most dramatically…

Over the course of collecting and visualizing my data, the charts above emerged from the numbers of steelworkers collected by the U.S Census Bureau between 1900 and 1940. The results showed that the laborers who worked in the steel plants underwent a shift in their composition within this period. In 1900, a pattern had already…

The story of population decline in Pittsburgh is on its face, simply due to the outsourcing of industry and steel jobs in the 80’s. In my previous blog post, I dug deeper and discovered that the decline was already occurring before the 1980’s, and the downsizing of U.S Steel1 and the shuttering of factories was…

When the city of Pittsburgh is mentioned, the association of this town with the steel industry is immediate and powerful, but how did Pittsburgh become the steel capital of the world?I wanted to understand the reasons why Pittsburgh became so prominent, and I found that, as in most cases, the rise of Pittsburgh was not…