University of Chicago historian Gabriel Winant has written an insightful and thoroughly researched book about modern Pittsburgh, located in the western Appalachian foothills and once the epicenter of the American steel industry. Like other northern cities such as Detroit and Cleveland, Pittsburgh was an industrial powerhouse at the end of World War II. However, these cities were struggling by the 1970s and 1980s, by which time the defeated Axis members Germany and Japan had recovered and emerged as rival manufacturing powers. Furthermore, in the decades following World War II, to save money, many American manufacturers moved their operations to the anti-union Southeast and then across the southern border to Mexico. Historian Judith Stein has written about how the American economy “traded factories for finance” in the 1970s, with cities like New York and Chicago coping with these changes by re-inventing themselves as centers of the financial services sector. Winant focuses...

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