“Unlikely General: “Mad” Anthony Wayne and the Battle for America”

In the spring of 1792, President George Washington chose “Mad” Anthony Wayne to defend America from a potentially devastating threat. Native forces had decimated the standing army and Washington needed a champion to open the country stretching from the Ohio River westward to the headwaters of the Mississippi for settlement. A spendthrift, womanizer, and heavy […]

“William Penn: A Life”

On March 4, 1681, King Charles II granted William Penn a charter for a new American colony. Pennsylvania was to be, in its founder’s words, a bold “Holy Experiment” in religious freedom and toleration, a haven for those fleeing persecution in an increasingly intolerant England and across Europe. An activist, political theorist, and the proprietor […]

PA Books: Remembering Lattimer

On September 10, 1897, a group of 400 striking coal miners–workers of Polish, Slovak, and Lithuanian descent or origin–marched on Lattimer, Pennsylvania. There, law enforcement officers fired without warning into the protesters, killing nineteen miners and wounding thirty-eight others. The bloody day quickly faded into history. Paul Shackel confronts the legacies and lessons of the […]

“Hidden History of Bucks County”

Bucks County was an original county in William Penn’s newly formed Pennsylvania province and has carried the weight of history ever since. Industrial power in the region expanded in the late 1700s as Irish laborers sacrificed life and limb to construct a section of the Pennsylvania Canal and the Durham Furnace. In 1921, a gruesome […]

PA Books: Pittsburgh’s Lost Outpost

As 1753 came to a close, European empires were set on a collision course for a triangular piece of land known as the Forks of the Ohio at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers. The navigable waterways were valuable to the French to complete their control of the Ohio Valley as the British […]

PA Books: “Blue-Blooded Cavalryman”

In May 1863, eighteen-year-old William Brooke Rawle graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and traded a genteel, cultured life of privilege for service as a cavalry officer. Traveling from his home in Philadelphia to Virginia, he joined the Third Pennsylvania Cavalry and soon found himself in command of a company of veterans of two years’ […]

PA Books: The Foreman’s Boys

Employment prospects for many were bleak at the height of the Great Depression. For unmarried recent high school graduates, the prospect of getting a job was mostly non-existent. President Roosevelt’s New Deal plan included the Civilian Conservation Corps, a program specifically targeted to provide employment for those whose job prospects were non-existent. This seventeen to […]

“Underground Philadelphia”

Philadelphia’s relationship with the underground is as old as the city itself, dating back to when Quaker settlers resided in caves alongside the Delaware River more than three hundred years ago. The City of Brotherly Love later became a national and world leader in the delivery of water, gas, steam, and electricity during the industrial […]

“America’s Anchor”

This naval history of the Delaware Estuary spans three centuries, from the arrival of the Europeans to the end of the World War II. The author describes the shipbuilders and infrastructure, and the ships and men who sailed this surprisingly active waterway in peace and in war. From Philadelphia to the Delaware Capes, the story […]

PA Books: They Were Immigrants

“They Were Immigrants” tells the story of Samuel Davis’ grandparents who immigrated to Pennsylvania from Syria in the early 20th century and the lives they created in their new home. They started families. They worked hard. Their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren became teachers, judges, dentists, businessmen and businesswomen, bankers, psychologists, lawyers, doctors, and software developers. […]