Founding Families of Pittsburgh
The Evolution of a Regional Elite, 1760-1910
Joseph F. Rishel
As Pittsburgh and its surrounding area grew into an important commercial and industrial center, a group of families emerged who were distinguished by their wealth and social position. Joseph Rishel studies twenty of these families to determine the degree to which they formed a coherent upper class and the extent to which they were able to maintain their status over time. His analysis shows that Pittsburgh's elite upper class succeeded in creating the institutions needed to sustain a local aristocracy and possessed the ability to adapt its accumulated advantages to social and economic changes.
Joseph F. Rishel is professor of history at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.
June 2005
260 pp. · 5.5 x 8.50-8229-5878-3 · Paper $18.95s
Outposts of the War for Empire
The French and English in Western Pennsylvania: Their Armies, Their Forts, Their People, 1749-1764
Charles Morse Stotz
With a new Foreword by Andrew E. Masich, President and CEO, and David Fridtjof Halass, Museum Division Director, Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center
Outposts of the War for Empire is being reissued in hardcover format, reproducing the original 1985 edition, to mark the 250th anniversary of the War for Empire, perhaps better known as the French and Indian War.
Much has been written on the events of the fifteen years from 1749 to 1764, a conflict that decided the ownership of most of the North American continent. Some historians have addressed the politics of this great conflict; others have focused on the daily lives of the people on the frontier and the ravages they endured in war. In Outposts of the War for Empire , Charles Stotz brings his specialized knowledge as an architect and architectural historian to tell and show what colonial forts looked like, where they stood, who built them and why, what materials were used in building them, and how they varied in design to fit different military purposes.Stotz describes twenty-two forts built by the French, the English, and the colonists in Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania --from tiny outposts built by the Ohio Company at Wills Creek on the North Branch of the Potomac to the fortresses that guarded the Ohio at Pittsburgh, first the French Fort Duquesne and later the English Fort Pitt. Using mathematically accurate perspective drawings, he shows exactly how the most important of the forts were constructed and documents their twentieth-century reconstruction.
Through narrative and illustration, Charles Morse Stotz creates a unique and important perspective on the War for Empire, a world war that had profound and lasting influence on the frontier region of western Pennsylvania.
Charles Morse Stotz , through his work on the excavation and reconstruction of Fort Ligonier and Fort Pitt, became one of the country's foremost experts on the design of colonial forts. He restored and reconstructed many other early American buildings and wrote extensively on architecture and historic restoration, including The Early Architecture of Western Pennsylvania (1936, reissued 1995).
May 2005
260 pp. · 14.5 x 11
0-8229-4262-3 · Cloth $65.00
Drums in the Forest
Decision at the Forks, Defense in the Wilderness
Alfred Proctor James and Charles Morse Stotz
With a new Foreword by Andrew E. Masich, President and CEO, and David Fridtjof Halass, Museum Division Director, Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center
Originally published to commemorate the bicentennial of Pittsburgh's founding, Drums in the Forest is now reissued to mark the 250th anniversary of the French and Indian War. It comprises two parts: the first, by Alfred Proctor James, provides the historical background leading up to the capture of Fort Duquesne by the British; the second, by Charles Morse Stotz, is a description of the five forts built at the forks of the Ohio between 1754 and 1815.
Alfred Proctor James was professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. Charles Morse Stotz , a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, was author of numerous volumes on the history and architecture of western Pennsylvania.
May 2005
240 pp. · 6 x 9
0-8229-5883-X · Paper $18.95s
New in Paperback
BREAKING THE BACKCOUNTRY
The Seven Years' War in Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1754-1765
Matthew C. Ward
Even as the 250th anniversary of its outbreak approaches, the Seven Years' War (otherwise known as the French and Indian War) is still not wholly understood. Most accounts tell the story as a military struggle between British and French forces, with shifting alliances of Indians, culminating in the British conquest of Canada. Scholarly and popular works alike, including James Fennimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, focus on the action in the Hudson River Valley and the St. Lawrence Seaway. Matthew C. Ward tells the compelling story of the war from the point of view of the region where it actually began, and whose people felt the devastating effects of war most keenly-the backcountry communities of Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Previous wars in North America had been fought largely on the New England and New York frontiers. But on May 28, 1754, when a young George Washington commanded the first shot fired in western Pennsylvania, fighting spread for the first time to Virginia and Pennsylvania. Ward's original research reveals that on the eve of the Seven Years' War the communities of these colonies were isolated, economically weak, and culturally diverse. He shows in riveting detail how, despite the British empire's triumph, the war brought social chaos, sickness, hunger, punishment, and violence, to the backcountry, much of it at the hands of Indian warriors.
Ward's fresh analysis reveals that Indian raids were not random skirmishes, but part of an organized strategy that included psychological warfare designed to make settlers flee Indian territories. It was the awesome effectiveness of this "guerilla" warfare, Ward argues, that led to the most enduring legacies of the war: Indian-hating and an armed population of colonial settlers, distrustful of the British empire that couldn't protect them. Understanding the horrors of the Seven Years' War as experienced in the backwoods thus provides unique insights into the origins of the American republic.
Matthew C. Ward is a lecturer in the department of history at the University of Dundee, Scotland.
October 2003
Papberback October 2004
360 pp. · 6.125 x 9.25 · illus.
0-8229-4214-3 · Cloth $34.95s
0-8229-5865-1 · Paper $21.95
March 4, 2005