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Was Pittsburgh's Economic Destiny Set in 1815?
EDWARD K. MULLER
| I first read The Urban Frontier as a graduate student in historical geography many years ago. I naturally focused on the geographical implications of Richard C. Wade's thesis that towns emerged on the Ohio Valley frontier along with the earliest pioneers, "held the West for the approaching population," and accelerated its transformation to a settled region.1 This critical insight into the settlement process anchored my dissertation.2 His view that "towns were the spearheads" and not the culmination of the settlement process, overturned the conventional Turnerian interpretation of frontier urbanization and spurred the work of many subsequent scholars.3 |
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At the time of my initial reading, I paid little attention to Wade's comparative methodology and comprehensive topical coverage. Returning to The Urban Frontier often in the ensuing years, I gained an appreciation of his research, which encompassed five cities and the examination of forty to fifty years of local newspapers, municipal records, and other primary materials. As if unraveling the economic and geographical roles of five cities were not enough, Wade also wrote on everything from municipal governments' structures and their evolving responsibilities to racial relations, cultural activities, and emerging social configurations. He presented a story of a rapidly developing and surprisingly sophisticated urban life on the frontier despite the towns' small populations and relatively brief existences. In this narrative, citizens ambitiously pursued the myriad high-risk economic opportunities of these newly developing regions, while (in another challenge to Turnerian interpretations) they simultaneously emulated older eastern cities by bringing "established institutions and ways" to their towns.4 |
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Twenty years after Harvard University Press published The Urban Frontier, I joined the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh and found myself faced with teaching a course on the city's history. I discovered a wealth of writing on the struggle between France and Britain in the mid-eighteenth century for control of the peninsula formed by the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers. I also found a vigorous and growing literature on the city's industrial era that began a century later. Enthusiastic and productive graduate seminars in American social history begun during the 1960s at both the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University emphasized the seven decades of rapid and extensive industrialization between the 1850s and the end of World War I. Pittsburgh's importance to the nation's industrialization in this period, especially with respect to the iron and steel industry and the labor movement, attracted national and international attention from industrial and social historians beyond the local universities. Accordingly, there was an outpouring of books, theses, and seminar papers on this era of Pittsburgh history. This extensive body of work contrasted with the shockingly thin literature on the city as it had developed in the first half of the nineteenth century.5 |
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This imbalance in the writing of Pittsburgh history remains. Leland D. Baldwin's 1937 history of Pittsburgh from 1750 to 1865 is the only extant comprehensive volume for the frontier and antebellum periods. Baldwin wrote for a general audience, and although he based his book on newspapers, manuscripts, and other primary sources, he admittedly emphasized "feeling, drama, and atmosphere rather than textbook completeness."6 Even as he dramatized and romanticized some events, in other places Baldwin resorted to list-like compilations of city-building achievements and social and cultural developments. In keeping with his generation of historians, he produced a book more in the style of older city biographies than the interpretive scholarly studies of cities which came after Wade. |
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