PA Books: The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania

The Scots Irish were one of early Pennsylvania’s largest non-English immigrant groups. They were stereotyped as frontier ruffians and Indian haters. In The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania, historian Judith Ridner insists that this immigrant group was socio-economically diverse. Servants and free people, individuals and families, and political exiles and refugees from Ulster, they not […]

PA Books: “Lair of the Lion”

Historian Lee Stout and engineering professor Harry H. West show how Penn State’s Beaver Stadium came to be, including a look at its predecessors, “Old” Beaver Field, built in 1893 on a site centrally located northeast of Old Main, and “New” Beaver Field, built on the northwest corner of campus in 1909. Stout and West […]

PA Books: “Calder: The Conquest of Time”

Alexander Calder is one of the most beloved and widely admired artists of the twentieth century. Anybody who has ever set foot in a museum knows him as the inventor of the mobile, America’s unique contribution to modern art. But only now, forty years after the artist’s death, is the full story of his life […]

PA Books: Trumpet Call To Victory

Trumpet Call to Victory tells the story of a small parochial high school located in the Pennsylvania coalfields that reached the summit of basketball glory in the late 1960s. Glorious victories and heartbreaking defeats are chronicled on Saint Gabriel’s path to capturing multiple state championships. Unsung heroes and scholastic superstars take center stage during what, […]

PA Books: Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance

The other great renaissance of black culture, influence, and glamour burst forth joyfully in what may seem an unlikely place—Pittsburgh, PA—from the 1920s through the 1950s. Today black Pittsburgh is known as the setting for August Wilson’s famed plays about noble but doomed working-class strivers. But this community once had an impact on American history […]

PA Books: “Gettysburg Eddie”

Born in Gettysburg, PA only a dozen years after the bloody Civil War battle, Eddie Plank grew up on a farm and was a late-bloomer. By his early twenties, he was a local star on the town ball team and enrolled in the Gettysburg Academy in order to pitch for the Gettysburg College team. Soon […]

PA Books: “Butterflies of Pennsylvania”

Featuring over 900 color illustrations, Butterflies of Pennsylvania is the most comprehensive, user-friendly field guide to date of all of the species of butterflies and skippers ever recorded in Pennsylvania. Information on distinguishing marks, traits, wingspan, habitat, larval host plants, and handy facts offer assistance for field identification. County-by-county maps show where each species has […]

PA Books: Road to Rust

As the twentieth century dawned on western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, the region’s steel industry faced a struggle for unionism. Unionists like Philip Murray, John L. Lewis, Samuel Gompers and Gus Hall battled for fair wages, hours and working conditions. Strong managers like Judge Elbert Gary and Tom Girdler opposed their every move. Tensions from […]

PA Books: The Loyal Son: The War in Ben Franklin’s House

In The Loyal Son, award-winning historian Daniel Mark Epstein throws the spotlight on one of the more enigmatic aspects of Franklin’s biography: his complex and confounding relationship with his illegitimate son William. When he was twenty-four, Franklin fathered a child with a woman who was not his wife. He adopted the boy, raised him, and […]

PA Books: “Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right”

Talk show host and columnist Michael Smerconish has been chronicling local, state, and national events for the Philadelphia Daily News and the Philadelphia Inquirer for more than 15 years. He has sounded off on topics as diverse as the hunt for Osama bin Laden and what the color of your Christmas lights says about you. […]