San Antonio College Library

Steel Phoenix: The Fall and Rise of the U.S. Steel Industry is a remarkable story. Christopher Hall recounts the great downfall of "Big Steel" in America and the emergence of a new, reinvented steel industry from the ashes of the old. Beginning with the failures of Big Steel to respond to a changing world, Christopher Hall analyzes the powers and drives behind this "most basic" of industries, revealing how the "Rust Belt" of the 1970s and 1980s was...

Ken Iverson led Nucor Corporation from near oblivion to its current place as America's third-largest steel company. In the process, he showed a once-faltering U.S. steel industry the road back to global competitiveness. Plain Talk unveils the rationale that makes Nucor production employees the best paid workers in the steel business, while giving Nucor the industry's lowest labor costs; lets Nucor operate a $3.8 billion corporation with a headquarters...

This biography of Andrew Carnegie emphasizes the economic dimension of his career in industry. It examines his life as a dynamic innovator during the period when the steel industry rapidly expanded and the United States became a major industrial power. Carnegie rose from a poverty-stricken Scottish childhood to a position of international industrial leadership, philanthropy, and peace advocacy, by means of intelligence, entrepreneurship, ambition,...

Best remembered today for his fierce opposition to labor, especially during the Homestead Strike of 1892, Henry Clay Frick was also one of the most powerful and innovative industrialists of the nineteenth century. Kenneth Warren is the first historian to be given unrestricted access to the extensive Frick archives in Pittsburgh. Drawing on Frick's personal and business papers, as well as the records of the H.C. Frick Coal & Coke Company, the Carnegie...

Workers at Weirton Steel in West Virginia fear more layoffs at a plant that was once the largest industrial employer in the state and the economic engine of the town. In a 30th anniversary special, this NewsHour segment returns to Weirton to report on how foreign competition has affected American workers.

A biography of Andrew Carnegie, a Scottish immigrant who quickly accumulated wealth in industrial America and was at the forefront of big business.

"Thomas Bell grew up in the steel-mill town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, enduring the hardships that faced his Slovak family and learning the agonies of life dominated by the mill. He wanted desperately to be a writer. Although he had little formal education, over the years he developed a self-taught style of simple vigor and extraordinary clarity. Eventually he published six novels and won national acclaim. Out of This Furnace, first published in 1941...