The Point of Pittsburgh: Production and Struggle at the Forks of the Ohio

From the rear cover of this 456-page book: "At long last, here is a people's history of Pittsburgh - in the spirit of Howard Zinn - that flips back the stock storyline of the steel city on its head. Here are Pittsburgh stories that you never read in your high school textbooks. McCollester masterfully chronicles the struggles of Native Americans, women, and laborers of all nationalities as they wrestle with the point of Pittsburgh and try to claim a fair share. His narrative is a welcome corrective to the gloss of standard accounts, corporate and paternalistic. It will inspire readers to want to know more - especially what happened after 1960, when this volume ends." And "To our good fortune, McCollester spurns the Great Man theory of history in telling this colorful, vigorous story of Pittsburgh's rise to industrial pre-eminence. Liberated from the dominating shadows of Carnegie, Frick, Mellon, Westinghouse and other corporate leaders, the ordinary men and women who built and labored in the mills, factories, mines, and offices are McCollester's heroes and heroines. The great businessmen receive their due, but this book for the first time records two centuries of struggles by working people (and their unions) to find dignity and justice in what amounted to a revolutionary industrial system."

Charles McCollester is the director of the Pennsylvania Center for the Study of Labor Relations and a professor of Industrial and Labor Relations at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He holds a doctoral degree in philosophy from the University of Louvain in Belgium. He was a machinist and the Chief Steward of UE 610 at the Union Switch and Signal in Swissvale Pennsylvania. He edited Fighter With a Heart: Writings of Charles Owen Rice, Pittsburgh Labor Priest (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996).