Deindustrialization
Increasing economic competition from overseas created hard times for American industry in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of the nation’s once-proud core industries, such as steel, declined precipitously in these decades. This photo shows a steel mill in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, being demolished in 1982. Once the center of American steel production, Pittsburgh suffered hard times in the 1970s and 1980s. The result of such closures was the creation of the so-called Rust Belt in the Northeast and Midwest. Lynn Johnson/National Geographic/Getty Images.