Rust On The Allegheny

*** 2022 Independent Publisher Book Awards Bronze Medal Winner, Best Regional Fiction - US Northeast *** A multi-generation family saga set in a Pennsylvania town that changed the world. In 2019, a man takes a copyediting job at his local newspaper. In 1939, a boy stands outside a theater and hatches a plan to sneak in. And on a cold, rainy night in 1982, a college student gives a bloodied hitchhiker a ride. Not one of these individuals is aware of how these seemingly isolated events will change their lives forever, or the inexorable connections between them. Rust on the Allegheny is a historical fiction novel told through the shifting perspectives of multiple generations of the MacCulloch family, a bloodline said to be cursed by perennial misfortune. It is the story of one family's messy and at times dysfunctional relationship with their hometown of Latonia City, Pennsylvania — where moldering Victorian manors and empty art deco theaters tell of the rich heritage and industrial downturn of America's Rust Belt, with glimpses of hope for the future.

Beyond Rust chronicles the rise, fall, and rebirth of metropolitan Pittsburgh, an industrial region that once formed the heart of the world's steel production and is now touted as a model for reviving other hard-hit cities of the Rust Belt. Writing in clear and engaging prose, historian and area native Allen Dieterich-Ward provides a new model for a truly metropolitan history that integrates the urban core with its regional hinterland of satellite cities, white-collar suburbs, mill towns, and rural mining areas. Pittsburgh reached its industrial heyday between 1880 and 1920, as vertically integrated industrial corporations forged a regional community in the mountainous Upper Ohio River Valley. Over subsequent decades, metropolitan population growth slowed as mining and manufacturing employment declined. Faced with economic and environmental disaster in the 1930s, Pittsburgh's business elite and political leaders developed an ambitious program of pollution control and infrastructure development. The public-private partnership behind the "Pittsburgh Renaissance," as advocates called it, pursued nothing less than the selective erasure of the existing social and physical environment in favor of a modernist, functionally divided landscape: a goal that was widely copied by other aging cities and one that has important ramifications for the broader national story. Ultimately, the Renaissance vision of downtown skyscrapers, sleek suburban research campuses, and bucolic regional parks resulted in an uneven transformation that tore the urban fabric while leaving deindustrializing river valleys and impoverished coal towns isolated from areas of postwar growth. Beyond Rust is among the first books of its kind to continue past the collapse of American manufacturing in the 1980s by exploring the diverse ways residents of an iconic industrial region sought places for themselves within a new economic order.