PA Books: Frontier Country

In “Frontier Country,” Patrick Spero addresses one of the most important and controversial subjects in American history: the frontier. Countering the modern conception of the American frontier as an area of expansion, Spero employs the eighteenth-century meaning of the term to show how colonists understood it as a vulnerable, militarized boundary. The Pennsylvania frontier, Spero […]

PA Books: Playing Through The Whistle

In “Playing Through The Whistle,” celebrated sportswriter S. L. Price tells the story of this remarkable place, its people, its players, and, through it, a wider story of American history from the turn of the twentieth century. Aliquippa has been many things—a rigidly controlled company town, a booming racial and ethnic melting pot, a battleground […]

PA Books: Teen Idol on the Rocks

Bobby Rydell writes of his encounters with such giants of 20th century show business as Frank Sinatra, Ann-Margret, The Beatles, Red Skelton, Jack Benny and Dick Clark, whose Philly-based American Bandstand helped make Rydell the world’s biggest teen idol in the years between Elvis Presley’s army induction and the advent of Beatlemania. Rydell also delves […]

PA Books: Never Caught

When George Washington was elected president, he reluctantly left behind his beloved Mount Vernon to serve in Philadelphia, the temporary seat of the nation’s capital, after a brief stay in New York. In setting up his household he took Tobias Lear, his celebrated secretary, and nine slaves, including Ona Judge, about which little has been […]

PA Books: Shanghai Faithful

Veteran journalist Jennifer Lin takes readers from remote nineteenth-century mission outposts to Philadelphia to the thriving house churches and cathedrals of today’s China. The Lin family—and the book’s central figure, the Reverend Lin Pu-chi—offer witness to China’s tumultuous past, up to and beyond the betrayals and madness of the Cultural Revolution, when the family’s resolute […]

PA Books: The Slide: Leyland, Bonds, & The Star-Crossed Pittsburgh Pirates

In the deciding game of the 1992 National League Championship Series against the Atlanta Braves, the Pittsburgh Pirates suffered the most dramatic and devastating loss in team history when former Pirate Sid Bream slid home with the winning run. Bream’s infamous slide ended the last game played by Barry Bonds in a Pirates uniform and […]

PA Books: “Pennsylvania: A Military History”

Founded in 1682 by a society that had no military, eschewed violence as a means of solving conflicts, and tolerated a wide variety of religions, Pennsylvania began as a “peaceable kingdom”—but war was essential to both Pennsylvania’s founding and its history. Pennsylvania was the site of some of the most important military events in American […]

“The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution”

“The Framers’ Coup” narrates how the Framers’ clashing interests shaped the Constitution–and American history itself. The Philadelphia convention could easily have been a failure, and the risk of collapse was always present. Had the convention dissolved, any number of adverse outcomes could have resulted, including civil war or a reversion to monarchy. Not only does […]

“Year of Desperate Struggle”

Author Monte Akers tracks Major General J.E.B. Stuart and his cavalry from Gettysburg to the Overland Campaign, concluding only when Jeb himself succumbs to a gunshot while fending off a force three times his size at the very gates of Richmond. Gettysburg put paid to the aura of unstoppable victory surrounding the Army of Northern […]

PA Books: “Pittsburgh Drinks”

Pittsburgh’s drinking culture is a story of its people: vibrant, hardworking and innovative. During Prohibition, the Hill District became a center of jazz, speakeasies and creative cocktails. In the following decades, a group of Cuban bartenders brought the nightlife of Havana to a robust café culture along Diamond Street. Disco clubs gripped the city in […]