Ed Simon

An Alternative History of Pittsburgh

Taylor

I really had high hopes from the first few chapters that start at the very beginning (c.300 million BCE) and provide some really interesting background on the place not yet known as Pittsburgh's role in the Iroquois Empire. Cool! And then we zip forward to the 17th century and Fort Pitt and it's... not much of an alternative history. It's more of a chronological series of vignettes that form something like a montage of the city, occasionally detouring into something tangentially-related to the city. 

The introduction ends with the claim, "If there is one overreaching argument to An Alternative History of Pittsburgh, it’s nothing more profound than this is a consequential place, this is an important place, this is a place that matters" [emphasis in original]. And maybe that's what feels disingenuous about the mini-chapters that make up the remainder of the text; the point of a history (not even touching on the 'alternative' aspect) is to create a narrative that links together all the snapshots of a place and time and tries to find meaning in that. And sure, this isn't claiming to be a great work of historiography, or comprehensive in any sense. But by taking an isolated event, providing just enough context to place it in some vague conception of a history, and then summarily moving on, I would argue that it actually devalues the idea of "a consequential place[, ] an important place[, ] a place that matters". The events are necessarily detached from their immediate causes and effects by virtue of the chapter structure, which doesn't allow enough narrative cohesion to actually say anything about the subject. What you end up with is a book of micro-essays that are not substantive enough to be read individually and not related enough to be read as a narrative.

Listen, I might have a History degree from Pitt, but I'm by no means a Pittsburgh historian. I'll say to the book's credit that I wrote down a lot of books cited in the text, and read a couple really great Wikipedia entries, like this one on Pittsburgh fakelore hero Joe Magarac. And I will give the benefit of the doubt here and assume that my ARC didn't have references attached yet because it's unfinished, and not because most of the sources go uncited. 

I received an ARC of this book from Edelweiss.

An Alternative History of Pittsburgh

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