Review: Beyond Steel: Pittsburgh and the Economics of Transformation by Christopher P. Briem (The Kent State University Press, 2026, 320 pp.)
On May 28, 2009, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs tried to sell reporters on a curious choice of host city for a global summit. The G20, he announced, would meet “in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.” University of Pittsburgh economist Christopher Briem writes that the press corps greeted the line with “murmurs and more than a few audible laughs.” The laugh came from a country that had filed Pittsburgh away as an old-timey artifact: smoke, slag, union halls, the Homestead and Hunky strikes, the city that had helped make the twentieth century and then seemed to have been broken by it.
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