This book tells an epic story. The Point of Pittsburgh is about how one city was the key to the industrial development that made the United States a world power and how the struggle of the region’s people for democratic rights and a decent standard of living was central to the creation of the American middle-class.

Many books have been written about Carnegie, Mellon and Frick, their ambitions and contributions, and no history of Pittsburgh could be told without them. But most of this book tells a story that has not been told. It is about the Indians and the workers, not the generals or the titans of industry. It is about those who first stood at the Forks of the Ohio, those who dug the coal, tended the furnaces, wrested the iron, steel, glass and aluminum from raw material, who built the boats, the bridges, the rail equipment and the generators, the skyscrapers, the highways, built the homes and raised the families - about the unsung heroes and heroines whose lives burned with the light of genius, as well as those who built the organizations and communities that made life tolerable and fruitful.