Backcountry Crucibles: The Lehigh Valley from Settlement to Steel

Backcountry Crucibles: The Lehigh Valley from Settlement to Steel
ISBN-10
0934223807
ISBN-13
9780934223805
Category
History
Pages
349
Language
English
Published
2008
Publisher
Associated University Presse
Authors
Jean R. Soderlund, Catherine S. Parzynski

Description

American historians have emphasized major cities as cultural and economic centers. This volume explores the vitality of cultural, economic, and political life beyond those cities. The Lehigh Valley is a place where integral events occurred, but is also an example of regional growth outside large cities. Its unique location, close enough to New York and Philadelphia to market grain, iron, coal, and steel, yet distant enough to develop its own cultural life, offers a regional model persisting for more than two centuries heretofore unexplored in American historical scholarship. This persistence of cultural and economic patterns, including the capacity to change, makes Lehigh Valley history particularly intriguing.

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