On the morning of September 8, 1756, a band of about three hundred volunteers of a newly created Pennsylvania militia led by Lt. Col. John Armstrong crept slowly through the western Pennsylvania brush. The night before they had reviewed a plan to quietly surround and attack the Lenape, or Delaware, Indian village of Kittanning. The […]
More than 150 years ago, 27-year-old Irish immigrant Josiah Moore met 19-year-old Jennie Lindsay, a member of one of Peoria, Illinois’s most prominent families. The Civil War had just begun, Josiah was the captain of the 17th Illinois Infantry, and his war would be a long and bloody one. Their courtship and romance, which came […]
The Life and Songs of Stephen Foster offers an engaging reassessment of the life, politics, and legacy of the misunderstood father of American music. Once revered the world over, Foster’s plantation songs, like “Old Folks at Home” and “My Old Kentucky Home,” fell from grace in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement due to […]
Considering Baltimore and Philadelphia as part of a larger, Mid-Atlantic borderland, “The Politics of Black Citizenship” shows that the antebellum effort to secure the rights of American citizenship was central to black politics—it was an effort that sought to exploit the ambiguities of citizenship and negotiate the complex national, state, and local politics in which […]
In 1851, fifteen wealthy New Yorkers wanted to show a group of Philadelphia friends just how impressive a meal could be and took them to Delmonico’s, New York’s finest restaurant. They asked Lorenzo Delmonico to “astonish our Quaker City friends with the sumptuousness of our feast,” and assured him that money was no object, as […]
“Worst. President. Ever.” flips the great presidential biography on its head, offering an enlightening—and highly entertaining!—account of poor James Buchanan’s presidency to prove once and for all that, well, few leaders could have done worse. But author Robert Strauss does much more, leading readers out of Buchanan’s terrible term in office—meddling in the Dred Scott […]
The Mummers Parade is like no other parade in the world. With 10,000 wildly-costumed participants stepping out every New Year’s Day in South Philadelphia, it is one of the most spectacular annual parades in the U.S. This remarkable book is a “family portrait” of the parade. It presents, in pictures and in words, the flamboyantly-attired […]
On a Saturday in March 1941, Jimmy Stewart, America’s boy-next-door actor, left Hollywood behind and took the oath of service in the United States Army Air Corps. Once in the service, Stewart ducked the press at every opportunity and to a large extent for the next four years remained behind the secure perimeters of air […]
Much like the rest of the nation, South Central Pennsylvania struggled with slavery. The institution lingered locally for more than fifty years, although it was virtually extinct everywhere else within Pennsylvania. Gradually, antislavery views prevailed. The Appalachian Mountains and the Susquehanna River provided natural cover for fleeing slaves, causing an influx of travel along the […]
In “Running the Rails,” James Wolfinger uses the history of Philadelphia’s sprawling public transportation system to explore how labor relations shifted from the 1880s to the 1960s. As transit workers adapted to fast-paced technological innovation to keep the city’s people and commerce on the move, management sought to limit its employees’ rights. Raw violence, welfare […]