PA Books: “Autumn of the Black Snake”

When the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, the newly independent United States savored its victory and hoped for a great future. And yet the republic soon found itself losing an escalating military conflict on its borderlands. In 1791, years of skirmishes, raids, and quagmire climaxed in the grisly defeat of American militiamen by a brilliantly […]

PA Books: “Chief Engineer: Washington Roebling, The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge”

“Chief Engineer” tells the story of Washington Roebling, the engineer known for building one of the most iconic American structures, the Brooklyn Bridge. “Chief Engineer” reveals that his father, John-a renowned engineer who made his life in America after humble beginnings in Germany-was a tyrannical presence in Washington’s life, so his own adoption of that […]

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 […]