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. […]

PA Books: “Abolitionists of South Central Pennsylvania”

Close to the Mason-Dixon line, South Central Pennsylvania was a magnet for slave catchers and abolitionists alike. Influenced by religion and empathy, local abolitionists risked their reputations, fortunes and lives in the pursuit of what they believed was right. The sister of Benjamin Lundy, one of America’s most famous abolitionists, married into an Adams County […]

“Good War, Great Men”

“Good War, Great Men” provides first-hand accounts of more than a dozen soldiers who served together during the Great War. Their stories have been rediscovered by compiling unpublished letters and journals with historical insights to provide a compelling history of the men of the 313th Machine Gun Battalion. Endorsed by the United States World War […]

PA Books: Benjamin Franklin in London

For more than one-fifth of his life, Benjamin Franklin lived in London. He dined with prime ministers, members of parliament, even kings, as well as with Britain’s most esteemed intellectuals—including David Hume, Joseph Priestley, and Erasmus Darwin. In this fascinating history, George Goodwin gives a colorful account of Franklin’s British years. The author offers a […]

PA Books: “Insight Philadelphia”

Each of the nearly 100 essays in Insight Philadelphia tells a succinct, compelling, and little-known tale of the city’s past. Some stories are quirky, like how early gas stations were designed to resemble classical temples, or the saga of how a museum acquired a 2000-year-old Greek statue, then had it demolished with a sledgehammer. Other […]

PA Books: “Archaeology at the Site of the Museum of the American Revolution”

When the Museum of the American Revolution acquired the land at Third and Chestnut streets in Olde City, Philadelphia, it came with the condition that an archaeological investigation be conducted. The excavation that began in the summer of 2014 yielded treasures in the trash: unearthed privy pits provided remarkable finds from a mid-eighteenth-century tavern to […]

PA Books: “John James Audubon: The Nature of the American Woodsman”

John James Audubon’s “The Birds of America” stands as an unparalleled achievement in American art, a huge book that puts nature dramatically on the page. With that work, Audubon became one of the most adulated artists of his time and America’s first celebrity scientist. In this fresh approach to Audubon’s art and science, Gregory Nobles […]

“The Forgotten”

In “The Forgotten,” Ben Bradlee Jr. reports on how voters in Luzerne County, a pivotal county in a crucial swing state, came to feel like strangers in their own land – marginalized by flat or falling wages, rapid demographic change, and a liberal culture that mocks their faith and patriotism. Fundamentally rural and struggling with […]

PA Books: The Indian World of George Washington

In this new biography, Colin Calloway uses the prism of George Washington’s life to bring focus to the great Native leaders of his time–Shingas, Tanaghrisson, Bloody Fellow, Joseph Brant, Red Jacket, Little Turtle–and the tribes they represented: the Iroquois Confederacy, Lenape, Miami, Creek, Delaware; in the process, he returns them to their rightful place in […]

PA Books: “Fire on the Mountain”

Walt Koken, the founding member of the Highwoods Stringband, reminisces about traveling and playing old time music in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and the people he met while barnstorming, before and during his days in the band. Description courtesy of Mudthumper Music. Watch PA Books and more PA History and Culture on cable and the PCN Select Streaming Service.