PA Books: “On a Great Battlefield” with Jennifer Murray (2024)

Of the more than seventy sites associated with the Civil War era that the National Park Service manages, none hold more national appeal and recognition than Gettysburg National Military Park. Welcoming more than one million visitors annually from across the world, the National Park Service at Gettysburg holds the enormous responsibility of preserving the war’s […]

PA Books: “The Soul of Pittsburgh” with Ed Simon

Pittsburgh contains multitudes. The city bestows a character of contradiction, love of place and strength of community on anyone lucky to be born and raised there. A town whose rivers were once lined with belching steel mills but also hosted the world’s first major modern art exhibition is not easily defined. From the decline of […]

PA Books: “Jazz in the Hill” with Colter Harper

From the 1920s through the 1960s, Pittsburgh’s Hill District was the heart of the city’s Black cultural life and home to a vibrant jazz scene. In Jazz in the Hill: Nightlife and Narratives of a Pittsburgh Neighborhood, Colter Harper looks at how jazz shaped the neighborhood and created a way of life. Beyond backdrops for […]

PA Books: “Into the Cold Blue” with John Homan

One of the last great memoirs of World War II, Into the Cold Blue is a riveting account of the air war over Europe, when hell was four miles above the earth. A born daredevil, John Homan joined the Army Air Forces after the attack on Pearl Harbor. By 1944, he was co-piloting a B-24 […]

PA Books: “Gen X Pittsburgh” with David Rullo (2024)

Beginning in the early 1990s, Pittsburgh’s South Side neighborhood began to transform from the post-industrial morass it had been suffering for the last few decades. Artists began to rent empty apartments, what were once shot-and-a-beer bars became hip dive bars and entrepreneurs found inexpensive real estate to follow their visions. It was in this landscape […]

PA Books: “Work, Fight, Or Play Ball” with William Ecenbarger (2024)

In 1918, Bethlehem Steel started the world’s greatest industrial baseball league. Appealing to Major League Baseball players looking to avoid service in the Great War, teams employed “ringers” like Babe Ruth, Rogers Hornsby, and Shoeless Joe Jackson in what became scornfully known as “safe shelter” leagues. In Work, Fight, or Play Ball, William Ecenbarger fondly […]

PA Books: “Voices from Gettysburg” with Allen Guelzo (2024)

Gathering a treasure trove of powerful, rare, and haunting original documents, New York Times bestselling author and award-winning historian Allen C. Guelzo presents a uniquely readable and intimate oral history of the Civil War’s turning point. We hear from a Union staff officer, a Confederate amputee, artilleryman, a sympathetic Northern woman, a Union prisoner-of-war, Union […]

PA Books: “Never To Be Forgotten” with Jim McClure

To borrow an image from a sage historian, York County, Pa.’s story is a stream that bears the things that historians record – pivotal events, breakthrough achievements and regrettable misjudgments. James McClure’s expanded and updated “Never To Be Forgotten” tells the story of this stream but also takes a keen interest in what is happening […]

PA Books: William Trent: Factor of Ambition with Jason Cherry

William Trent was the son of a Philadelphia shipping merchant and the namesake for the capital of New Jersey, Trent’s own legacy as a gentleman, throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century was always remembered for his controversial role at Fort Pitt in “gifting” smallpox blankets to the Indians that early summer of 1763. […]