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The Face of Decline: the Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century
Youngstown State University
THE FACE OF DECLINE: THE PENNSYLVANIA ANTHRACITE REGION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. By Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2005. 2751 pp. Hardbound, $65.00; Softbound, $24.95.
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The term "deindustrialization" did not come into popular usage until the late 1970s as American heavy industry went into a precipitous decline and the industrial heartland became the "rust belt." For the people of the anthracite coal mining region of eastern Pennsylvania, deindustrialization came much earlier as Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht graphically demonstrate in The Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century (2005). This work joins a growing body of literature that examines the rise, decline, and fall of communities impacted by the slow erosion of heavy industry. Recent works such as Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America's Rust Belt (2003) by Steven High,