"Blood on the Forge" with Rivers of Steel

From 1890 to 1970, the Great Migration shifted the American social, cultural, and economic landscape.  By the end of 1919, while escaping the KKK and segregationist Jim Crow laws, around one million black people had left the South for work in northern cities.  The Great Migration created new art, music, and literature; in industrial behemoths like Pittsburgh, black workers profoundly shaped what it meant to live and work for a steel mill.  In 1941, William Attaway published Blood on the Forge, a novel of the Great Migration in Pittsburgh.  This talk considers Blood on the Forge and the journey its main characters take as they endure a harrowing and heartbreaking epic that melds the Great Migration, artistic movement, and Pittsburgh steel.  
 

Dr. Kirsten Paine is the Museum Education & Historic Interpretation Manager at Rivers of Steel.  In addition to public history work related to 19th-century industrial labor, she specializes in 19th-century American women writers.  She earned her PhD in English from the University of Pittsburgh in 2019 where she wrote her dissertation, "Not According to the Regulation of War": Intimate Civil War Writing by Female Nurses, Soldiers, and Spies, which she is currently revising into a book.