February 13, 2018
Speaker: Charles McCollester, Pittsburgh Historian
In 2013 Dr. McCollester spoke to the SHHS on “The Fall and Rise of Pittsburgh Labor”, he now returns to speak to our group about “History of Simon Girty”.
From Post-Gazette May 2017
……this fall, a state historical marker will be erected for Simon Girty in Squirrel Hill. Captured by the Indians as a boy, Girty left American service at Fort Pitt in 1778 and crossed over to the British because he saw them as less of an existential threat to native people’s survival than the land-hungry American colonists. History is complex.
About the Speaker:
Author of “The Point of Pittsburgh”, Charles McCollester is a retired professor of Industrial and Labor Relations at Indiana University of PA.
McCollester has written a new and different history of Pittsburgh –“The Point of Pittsburgh” — and by doing so has assembled in a remarkable way a history of this country. –from:William Serrin, former labor and workplace correspondent for The New York Times
Charles McCollester holds a doctoral degree in philosophy from the University of Louvain in Belgium. He was a machinist and the Chief Steward of UE 610 at the Union Switch and Signal in Swissvale Pennsylvania. He edited Fighter With a Heart: Writings of Charles Owen Rice, Pittsburgh Labor Priest (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996).
Squirrel Hill Historical Society 