 |
| Welcome to my Blog! Wander through wonderful worlds real and fictional, meet interesting people, visit exciting places and find a few good books to enjoy along the way! |
City of Smoke and Ash
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The city conjures a variety of images, not all of them pleasant. Football and hockey fans will immediately think of the Steelers and the Penguins, while the retired set may remember images from the 1970s when the city was shrouded in smog, and its citizens were choking on fumes. Pittsburgh has been called the “Steel City” due to the region’s once robust steel industry and the “City of Bridges” because there are more bridges in Pittsburgh than Venice, Italy. However, the description I find most fascinating is the one provided by Mark Twain—though there is debate he may have borrowed his phrasing from Boston writer James Parton.
When Mark Twain visited Pittsburgh in December 1884 to promote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he made a stop in Mount Washington to get a bird’s eye view of the city by moonlight. As he peered down on the "lake of fire and flame," he famously said that the city "looked like a miniature hell with the lid off." Twain's grim description of Pittsburgh was so vivid that it stuck for decades. And no wonder! There was truth to it.
Pittsburgh was destined to became a bustling industrial city largely because of its favorable geography and geology. Two navigable rivers—the Monongahela and the Allegheny—met in the middle of a forest and combined to form the Ohio River. This was a logical meeting point for settlement, trade, and industry. The existence of an impressive coal seam near the center of this confluence proved to be particularly advantageous. It was this bituminous coal that would later fuel the region's hundreds of steel mills and darken its skies.
Between 1870 and 1920, the population of Pittsburgh grew almost sevenfold as European immigrants poured into the city. Many came from Great Britain, Ireland, and Germany as in previous decades, but the most common sources after 1870 were poor, rural areas in Eastern and Southern Europe. Immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire, Italy, and the Balkans left their homelands to find work in Pittsburgh's steel mills, coal mines, and factories. Carrying only the bare essentials, they journeyed across the Atlantic in search of prosperity and settled in a region smothered in smoke.
As the Steel City boomed through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it became known for its grime, filth, and smoke. Its perpetually dark sky often necessitated the use of street lamps during the day. But for many of the city’s workers, smoke was a sign of progress. In fact, by 1900, Carnegie Steel was the country’s largest steel company with three million tons of capacity. When J.P Morgan formed the U.S. Steel Corporation the following year by financing the merger of Andrew Carnegie's steel company with seven others, it became the largest private company in the world, controlling the majority of U.S. steel production.
By 1910, Pittsburgh produced 25 million tons of steel—more than 60 percent of the nation’s total. It was the height of the city's golden age of steel. But working conditions in the steel mills of Pittsburgh were brutal, and company owners were largely unsympathetic. Men worked twelve-hour shifts, seven days per week, in front of furnaces heated to over 2500°F. Persistent noise, stifling air filled with mineral dust and furnace exhaust, and unsafe equipment made the mills especially hazardous. According to a profile of Andrew Carnegie in The Economist, fatal accidents in the steel mills accounted for 20% of all male deaths in Pittsburgh in the 1880s. Injured workers were often let go and forced to pay their own medical bills, while the dead were easily replaced by the countless immigrants arriving to the region every day.
Despite the harsh working conditions in Pittsburgh's steel mills, immigrants continued to write to their families and friends in Europe about the opportunities in America. The promise of prosperity enticed many young, healthy workers to trade a life of poverty in their homeland for a chance at the American dream. And while some immigrants were satisfied with their new lives within a few years of their arrival, others suffered disappointment, unthinkable hardships, and even death. But no matter their fates, all of Pittsburgh's immigrants learned to live under an oppressive, smoky sky—in a city that looked like a miniature hell with the lid off.
Beneath the Veil of Smoke and Ash
By Tammy Pasterick
It’s Pittsburgh, 1910—the golden age of steel in the land of opportunity. Eastern European immigrants Janos and Karina Kovac should be prospering, but their American dream is fading faster than the colors on the sun-drenched flag of their adopted country. Janos is exhausted from a decade of twelve-hour shifts, seven days per week, at the local mill. Karina, meanwhile, thinks she has found an escape from their run-down ethnic neighborhood in the modern home of a mill manager—until she discovers she is expected to perform the duties of both housekeeper and mistress. Though she resents her employer’s advances, they are more tolerable than being groped by drunks at the town’s boarding house.
When Janos witnesses a gruesome accident at his furnace on the same day Karina learns she will lose her job, the Kovac family begins to unravel. Janos learns there are people at the mill who pose a greater risk to his life than the work itself, while Karina—panicked by the thought of returning to work at the boarding house—becomes unhinged and wreaks a path of destruction so wide that her children are swept up in the storm. In the aftermath, Janos must rebuild his shattered family—with the help of an unlikely ally.
Impeccably researched and deeply human, Beneath the Veil of Smoke and Ash delivers a timeless message about mental illness while paying tribute to the sacrifices America's im-migrant ancestors made.
Buy Links:
About the author:
A native of Western Pennsylvania, Tammy Pasterick grew up in a family of steelworkers, coal miners, and Eastern European immigrants. She began her career as an investigator with the National Labor Relations Board and later worked as a paralegal and German teacher. She holds degrees in labor and industrial relations from Penn State University and German language and literature from the University of Delaware. She currently lives on Maryland's Eastern Shore with her husband, two children, and chocolate Labrador retriev-er.
Social Media Links:
Website: www.tammypasterick.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TammyPasterick
Amazon Author Page:
Follow the Tour
Twitter Handles: @TammyPasterick @maryanneyarde
Hashtags: #HistoricalFiction
#PittsburghHistory #PennsylvaniaHistory #BlogTour
#CoffeePotBookClub
Tour Schedule Page:
*** ***
You might Also like
Books By Helen Hollick
Website: https://helenhollick.net/
Amazon Author Page: https://viewauthor.at/HelenHollick
 |
| A Mirror Murder #1 in the Jan Christopher Cosy Mystery Series set in a 1970s London library and now... Episode 2!  1971 Jan and her boyfriend DS Laurie Walker spend Christmas in Devon (featuring an owl, a teddy bear, some pigs - and a murder to solve!) https://viewauthor.at/HelenHollick |
 |
A new edition with new additional scenes |
Thank you for hosting today's blog tour stop!
ReplyDeleteMy pleasure
Delete