The book begins with the railroad workers' strike in 1877 against the Pennsylvania Railroad. The strike is portrayed as popular not only among the workers themselves, but among all the working class people in the city. The railroad was seen as the clear culprit in the dispute, and the workers the victims whose needs had been systematically ignored or trampled by the railroad. The balance of power in the dispute was significantly on the side of the workers.

As Couvares notes in the final chapters, by the end of the second decade of the 20th century, the shift in power was remarkable. Immigrants had altered the population mix in the interceding decades, and though they were increasingly involved in action against the repression of the steel corporations, they were no match for the power of the corporation in their strike efforts.

Couvares clearly believes that the increasing number of immigrants in the ranks of steelworkers was an important factor in the repression of those workers in the second decade of the century. Couvar

Again, however, it would be misleading to state that the unions lost all their power. They were able to gain some victories, but those victories did not change the power relations which increasingly favored the steel owners over the workers. Although Couvares focuses on the period up to 1919, he does not that it was not until the 1930s that the unions began to be able to battle the owners on equal ground. However, it took the Depression and major political, economic and social upheavals before the powerful hold of steel on the city could be loosened in an important way.

We see, then, that Couvares has painted a thorough portrait of the forces at work which resulted in the shift to a steel-controlled city through the four decades covered in the book. Once the process of industrialization had gotten under way, the changes in Pittsburgh appear to have been inevitable. The nature of capitalism as described by Couvares is such that power increasingly accrues to the big corporations, and is increasingly lost to the workers in the industries controlled by those corporations.

Couvares in the next few chapters makes clear that there were other fluctuations in labor and social relations through the 1890s. For example, there was a law and order movement in the 1880s which had little actual impact on the city. On the other hand, that movement was an indirect sign that the city was gradually coming under the control of politicians and powerful social and economic leaders who favored the corporations over