For my first book review of 2024, I selected An Alternative History of Pittsburgh by Ed Simon (2021 by Belt Publishing). Simon was born and raised in the city of Pittsburgh.
He attended public school in Pittsburgh from 1st through 12th grade and has a PhD in English from Lehigh University. He has lived in New York, Boston, Washington, DC and is now back in Pittsburgh.
He’s the author of more than a dozen books, and his essays have appeared in major publications. He has also taught as a college instructor for over twenty years.
Pittsburgh has been my adopted home for almost twenty-five years. Before we settled here, we lived all over the country. My knowledge of Pittsburgh was limited to what was taught in history books and visits to my in-laws’ home. Over the years, I have fallen in love with the city of bridges and it’s blue-collar friendliness. I have a Pittsburgh address, but I live in a suburb of the city (a township with home rule status) settled in 1762 by John Fife. This area was originally farmland and the site of several mines in the 19th century. The Whiskey Rebellion has its roots in the South Hills of Pittsburgh.
The South Hills area became popular with wealthy members of Pittsburgh society as a place to flee the pollution and congestion of the city during the weekends and summers. When the Liberty Tunnels were completed in 1924, and the Liberty Bridge in 1928, motorists and pedestrians had a direct route between Pittsburgh and the South Hills without traveling over or around Mt. Washington.
Simon begins the history of Pittsburgh in prehistoric times to demonstrate how geography, weather, fauna, and water created the conditions that would determine Pittsburgh’s place in the development of the United States. It’s a novel approach to history, but it’s spot on. The Pittsburgh area’s rich soil for farming, mineral deposits in the Allegheny Mountains, and the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers which form the Ohio River made it the original gateway to the west.
The Shawnee and several other settled groups of Indigenous Americans lived in the Pittsburgh area. Simon addresses the interactions between these tribes, the French, British, and colonists during America’s westward expansion.
As he tells the story of how Pittsburgh becomes the industrial center of the United States, Simon focuses on the groups of people who provided the labor and expertise and Pittsburgh’s roles during the American Civil War in addition to the famous robber barons who changed the face of Pittsburgh forever. Several important stops along the Underground Railroad were located in Pittsburgh. The Allegheny Arsenal manufactured ammunition for Union troops and the explosion there on September 17, 1862, (the same day as the Battle of Antietam) became the worst civilian disaster during the Civil War. Most of the victims were young women who worked in the factory.
Pittsburgh became a popular destination for formerly enslaved peoples who found work in factories and formed close-knit, though segregated, communities. Simon explores these communities, and the people who fought to try to save their communities from gentrification. These people have become an indelible part of the history of the city such as the playwright August Wilson, the suffragist Daisy Elizabeth Adams Lampkin, and Josh Gibson of the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Homestead Grays of the Negro Baseball League.
What impresses me the most about this book is that Simon shares a factual history of Pittsburgh complete with injustices and shady dealings while still managing to celebrate the spirit of our city and the many wonderful people who have chosen Pittsburgh as their home. We have a long way to go on many social issues, but we are Pittsburgh strong, and if any city can rise to the task it’s the Steel City.
For more information about Ed Simon go to his website, www.edsimon.org
Images used for this article were taken from the author’s website for our readers’ information with no intent of copyright infringement.
Other books by Ed Simon:
America and Other Fictions: On Radical Faith and Post-Religion (2018)
Furnace of this World; or 36 Observations about Goodness (2019)
The Anthology of Babel (2020)
Printed in Utopia: The Renaissance of Radicalism (2020)
The God Beat: What Journalism Says About Faith and Why it Matters (with Costica Bradatan – 2021)
Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology (2022)
Binding the Ghost: Theology, Mystery, and the Transcendence of Literature (2022)
Dispatches from the Rust Belt, Volume V- edited by Ed Simon (Belt Media Collaborative – 2023)
Heaven, Hell, and Paradise Lost (2023)
The Dove and the Dragon: A History of the Apocalypse (2023)
Elysim: An Illustrated History of Angelology (2023)
The Pittsburgh Tarot, a collaboration with Steve Teare is available for preorder and will be published in 2024