The University of Pittsburgh Press is a publisher with distinguished lists in a wide range of scholarly and cultural fields. They publish books for general readers, scholars, and students. The Press focuses on selected academic areas: Latin American studies, Russian and East European studies, Central Asian studies, composition and literacy studies, environmental studies, urban studies, the history of architecture and the built environment, and the history and philosophy of science, technology, and medicine. Their books about Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania include history, art, architecture, photography, biography, fiction, and guidebooks.
Their renowned Pitt Poetry Series represents many of the finest poets active today, as reflected in the many prestigious awards their work has garnered over the past four decades. In addition, the Press is home to the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and, in rotation with other university presses, the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. They sponsor the prestigious Drue Heinz Literature Prize, which recognises the finest collective works of short fiction available in an international competition.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 312
ISBN: 9780822942610
Pub Date: 20 Sep 2005
Description:
From the colonial era of waterborne transport, through nineteenth-century changes in transportation and communication, to globalization, the history of the Great Lakes Basin has been shaped by the people, goods, and capital crossing and recrossing the U.S.-Canadian border.
During the past three centuries, the region has been buffeted by efforts to benefit from or defeat economic and political integration and by the politics of imposing, tightening, or relaxing the bisecting international border. Where tariff policy was used in the early national period to open the border for agricultural goods, growing protectionism in both countries transformed the border into a bulwark against foreign competition after the 1860s. In the twentieth century, labor migration followed by multinational corporations fundamentally altered the customary pairing of capital and nation to that of capital versus nation, challenging the concept of international borders as key factors in national development. In tracing the economic development of the Great Lakes Basin as borderland and as transnational region, the authors of Permeable Border have provided a regional history that transcends national borders and makes vital connections between two national histories that are too often studied as wholly separate.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 364
ISBN: 9780822942641
Pub Date: 01 Sep 2005
Description:
Foreword by John B. Wilt, Colonel (Retired), U.S.
Airforce Reserve Today, concerns over homeland security have led thousands of Americans to volunteer for various citizen emergency response groups, such as the Civil Air Patrol, U.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 104
ISBN: 9780822958895
Pub Date: 20 Aug 2005
Description:
Winner of the 2004 Donald Hall Prize in PoetryThe Improbable Swervings of Atoms follows the comedic, often painful, physical and emotional travails of a young boy growing up in 1950s America. He watches the McCarthy hearings, conquers the Congo, assassinates the president, has his head stuffed into a toilet, drops his uniform on the fifty-yard line, and tries to make sense of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura. The poems engage history in a very intimate way, revealing how a boy, as he matures, attempts to understand the world around him, his own physical development, the people in his life, and what it means to live in a country and time where it is impossible to disengage oneself from world events—where, in fact, the quest for identity is an act that requires one to rewrite history in personal terms.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 312
ISBN: 9780822958925
Pub Date: 09 Aug 2005
Description:
Every city has an environmental story, perhaps none so dramatic as Pittsburgh's. Founded in a river valley blessed with enormous resources-three strong waterways, abundant forests, rich seams of coal-the city experienced a century of exploitation and industrialization that degraded and obscured the natural environment to a horrific degree. Pittsburgh came to be known as “the Smoky City,” or, as James Parton famously declared in 1866, “hell with the lid taken off.
”Then came the storied Renaissance in the years following World War II, when the city's public and private elites, abetted by technological advances, came together to improve the air and renew the built environment. Equally dramatic was the sweeping deindustrialization of Pittsburgh in the 1980s, when the collapse of the steel industry brought down the smokestacks, leaving vast tracks of brownfields and riverfront. Today Pittsburgh faces unprecedented opportunities to reverse the environmental degradation of its history. In Devastation and Renewal, scholars of the urban environment post questions that both complicate and enrich this story. Working from deep archival research, they ask not only what happened to Pittsburgh's environment, but why. What forces-economic, political, and cultural-were at work? In exploring the disturbing history of pollution in Pittsburgh, they consider not only the sooty skies, but also the poisoned rivers and creeks, the mined hills, and scarred land. Who profited and who paid for such “progress”? How did the environment Pittsburghers live in come to be, and how it can be managed for the future?In a provocative concluding essay, Samuel P. Hays explores Pittsburgh's “environmental culture,” the attitudes and institutions that interpret a city's story and work to create change. Comparing Pittsburgh to other cities and regions, he exposes exaggerations of Pittsburgh's environmental achievement and challenges the community to make real progress for the future. A landmark contribution to the emerging field of urban environmental history, Devastation and Renewal will be important to all students of cities, of cultures, and of the natural world.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 216
ISBN: 9780822958918
Pub Date: 01 Aug 2005
Description:
We Fish is the tale of a father and son's shared dialogue in poetry and in prose, memoir and reflection, as they delight in their time spent fishing while considering the universal challenge of raising good children. Their story and their lesson have the power to teach today's young African American men about friendship, family, and trust; and the potential to save a generation from the dangers of the modern world and from themselves.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 260
ISBN: 9780822958789
Pub Date: 15 Jul 2005
Description:
As Pittsburgh and its surrounding area grew into an important commercial and industrial center, a group of families emerged who were distinguished by their wealth and social position. Joseph Rishel studies twenty of these families to determine the degree to which they formed a coherent upper class and the extent to which they were able to maintain their status over time. His analysis shows that Pittsburgh's elite upper class succeeded in creating the institutions needed to sustain a local aristocracy and possessed the ability to adapt its accumulated advantages to social and economic changes.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 248
ISBN: 9780822958796
Pub Date: 15 Jul 2005
Description:
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 was intended to send a clear message to society that discrimination on the basis of disability is unacceptable. As with most civil rights laws, the courts were given primary responsibility for implementing disability rights policy.Mezey argues that the act has not fulfilled its potential primarily because of the judiciary's \u0022disabling interpretations\u0022 in adjudicating ADA claims.
In the decade of litigation following the enactment of the ADA, judicial interpretation of the law has largely constricted the parameters of disability rights and excluded large numbers of claimants from the reach of the law. The Supreme Court has not interpreted the act broadly, as was intended by Congress, and this method of decision making was for the most part mirrored by the courts below. The high court's rulings to expand state sovereign immunity and insulate states from liability in damage suits has also caused claimants to become enmeshed in litigation and has encouraged defendants to challenge other laws affecting disability rights. Despite the law's strong civil rights rhetoric, disability rights remain an imperfectly realized goal.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 352
ISBN: 9780822958819
Pub Date: 10 Jun 2005
Description:
In the 1950s, Soviet nuclear scientists and leaders imagined a stunning future when giant reactors would generate energy quickly and cheaply, nuclear engines would power cars, ships, and airplanes, and peaceful nuclear explosions would transform the landscape. Driven by the energy of the atom, the dream of communism would become a powerful reality. Thirty years later, that dream died in Chernobyl.
What went wrong? Based on exhaustive archival research and interviews, Red Atom takes a behind-the-scenes look at the history of the Soviet Union's peaceful use of nuclear power. It explores both the projects and the technocratic and political elite who were dedicated to increasing state power through technology. And it describes the political, economic, and environmental fallout of Chernobyl.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 264
ISBN: 9780822958642
Pub Date: 08 Jun 2005
Description:
Most issues in American political life are complex and multifaceted, subject to multiple interpretations and points of view. How issues are framed matters enormously for the way they are understood and debated. For example, is affirmative action a just means toward a diverse society, or is it reverse discrimination?
Is the war on terror a defense of freedom and liberty, or is it an attack on privacy and other cherished constitutional rights? Bringing together some of the leading researchers in American politics, Framing American Politics explores the roles that interest groups, political elites, and the media play in framing political issues for the mass public. The contributors address some of the most hotly debated foreign and domestic policies in contemporary American life, focusing on both the origins and process of framing and its effects on citizens. In so doing, these scholars clearly demonstrate how frames can both enhance and hinder political participation and understanding.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 300
ISBN: 9780822958765
Pub Date: 24 May 2005
Description:
In the urgently expanding field of environmental history, two trends are emerging. Research has internationalized, crossing political and historical borders. And urban spaces are increasingly seen as part of, not apart from, the global environment.
In this book, Jeffry Diefendorf and Kurk Dorsey have gathered much of the important work pushing the field in new directions. Eleven essays by prominent and regionally diverse scholars address how human and natural forces collaborate in the creation of cities, the countryside, and empires. The Cities section features essays that examine pollution and its aftermath in Pittsburgh, the Ruhr Valley (Germany), and Los Angeles. These urban areas are far apart on the globe but closely linked in their histories of how human decision making has affected the environment. Changing rural and suburban spaces are the focus of Countryside. Elizabeth Blackmar \u0022follows the money\u0022 in order to understand why the financing of suburban mall developments makes local resistance difficult. Studies of the fractious history of the creation of a wildlife refuge in Oregon and the ongoing impact of hydraulic mining in the early California goldmining era emphasize the misuse of technology in rural spaces. Such misuse is a central idea of Empires. In \u0022When Stalin Learned to Fish,\u0022 Paul R. Josephson tells the story of Soviet fishing technology designed to \u0022harness fish to the engine of socialism.\u0022 Other essays explore the failures of Western agricultural technology in Africa and the relationship between such technology and disease in European attempts to conquer the Caribbean. In a stirring, wide-ranging consideration of the neo-European colonies (the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand), Thomas R. Dunlap observes the ongoing, unsettled interaction of lands and dreams. An afterword by Alfred W. Crosby, an eminent scholar of environmental history, closes the book with a broad and insightful synthesis of the history and future of this critical field.
Outposts Of The War For Empire
The French And English In Western Pennsylvania
Format: Hardback
ISBN: 9780822942627
Pub Date: 15 May 2005
Description:
Outposts of the War for Empire is being reissued in hardcover format, reproducing the original 1985 edition, to mark the 250th anniversary of the War for Empire, perhaps better known as the French and Indian War. Much has been written on the events of the fifteen years from 1749 to 1764, a conflict that decided the ownership of most of the North American continent. Some historians have addressed the politics of this great conflict; others have focused on the daily lives of the people on the frontier and the ravages they endured in war.
In Outposts of the War for Empire, Charles Stotz brings his specialized knowledge as an architect and architectural historian to tell and show what colonial forts looked like, where they stood, who built them and why, what materials were used in building them, and how they varied in design to fit different military purposes.Stotz describes twenty-two forts built by the French, the English, and the colonists in Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania --from tiny outposts built by the Ohio Company at Wills Creek on the North Branch of the Potomac to the fortresses that guarded the Ohio at Pittsburgh, first the French Fort Duquesne and later the English Fort Pitt. Using mathematically accurate perspective drawings, he shows exactly how the most important of the forts were constructed and documents their twentieth-century reconstruction. Through narrative and illustration, Charles Morse Stotz creates a unique and important perspective on the War for Empire, a world war that had profound and lasting influence on the frontier region of western Pennsylvania.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 240
ISBN: 9780822958833
Pub Date: 05 May 2005
Description:
Originally published to commemorate the bicentennial of Pittsburgh's founding, Drums in the Forest is reissued to mark the 250th anniversary of the French and Indian War. It comprises two parts: the first, by Alfred Proctor James, provides the historical background leading up to the capture of Fort Duquesne by the British; the second, by Charles Morse Stotz, is a description of the five forts built at the forks of the Ohio between 1754 and 1815.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 328
ISBN: 9780822958703
Pub Date: 25 Apr 2005
Description:
As democracy has swept the globe, the question of why some democracies succeed while others fail has remained a pressing concern. In this theoretically innovative, richly historical study, Michael Bernhard looks at the process by which new democracies choose their political institutions, showing how these fundamental choices shape democracy's survival. Offering a new analytical framework that maps the process by which basic political institu-tions emerge, Bernhard investigates four paradigmatic episodes of democracy in two countries: Germany during the Weimar period and after World War II, and Poland between the world wars and after the fall of communism.
Students of democracy will appreciate the broad applicability of Bernhard's findings, while area specialists will welcome the book's accessible and detailed historical accounts.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 264
ISBN: 9780822958741
Pub Date: 25 Apr 2005
Description:
The Language of Experience examines the relationship between literacy and change--both personal and social. Gorzelsky studies three cases, two historical and one contemporary, that speak to key issues on the national education agenda. \u0022Struggle\u0022 is a community literacy program for urban teens and parents.
It encourages them to reflect on, articulate, and revise their life goals and design and implement strategies for reaching them. To provide historical context for this and other contemporary efforts in using literacy to promote social change, Gorzelsky analyzes two radical religious and political movements of the English Civil Wars and the 1930s unionizing movement in the Pittsburgh region. Charting the similarities and differences in the function of literate practices in each case shows how different situations and contexts can foster very different outcomes.Gorzelsky's analytic frame is drawn from Gestalt theory, which emphasizes the holistic nature of perception, communication, and learning. Through it she views how discourse and language structures interact with experience and how this interaction changes awareness and perception.The book is methodologically innovative in its integration of a macro-social view of cultural, social, and discursive structures with a micro-social view of the potential for change embodied in them. Through her analysis and in her use of the voices of the people she studies, Gorzelsky offers a tool for analyzing individual instances of literate practices and their potential for fostering change.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 216
ISBN: 9780822958734
Pub Date: 07 Apr 2005
Description:
In a recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Cullen Murphy wrote that "It is always a little disconcerting when audacious scientific theories come a cropper." In this case, he was speaking of Stephen Hawking's now self-repudiated idea that information swallowed by cosmic black holes might be escaping into "baby universes." John Losee looks at the subject of rejected scientific theories through an analysis of case studies from more than two centuries of science.
Losee excerpts the work of prominent scientists and philosophers of science accompanied by evaluative comments from the fields of science and philosophy. He sets these discussions within an analytical framework developed as answers to a sequence of questions about falsification, rejection, and theory replacement: When observational evidence conflicts with the assumptions of a theory, does this signify the death of the theory? If rival theories are available to account for an experience, how is the choice between them to be made? Are there generally accepted criteria against which competing theories may be assessed? When is the replacement of one theory by another justified? Each excerpt from each scientist or philosopher is of sufficient length to make clear the particular evaluative problem under consideration, and each discussion of scientific evaluative practice includes both what scientists and what philosophers have written on the topic. At a time when increasingly complex scientific questions must be considered and addressed in a variety of public forums, Theories on the Scrap Heap offers guidance for assessing the underlying assumptions and validity of scientific theory and for understanding how the scientific method works in theories formation and rejection.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 130
ISBN: 9780822942603
Pub Date: 04 Apr 2005
Description:
Novelist and essayist Hilary Masters recreates a moment in 1940s Pittsburgh when circumstances, ideology, and a passion for the arts collided to produce a masterpiece in another part of the world. E. J.
Kaufmann, the so-called "merchant prince" who commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, was a man whose hunger for beauty included women as well as architecture. He had transformed his family's department store into an art deco showcase with murals by Boardman Robinson and now sought to beautify the walls of the YM&WHA of which he was the president. Through his son E.
