PA Books: “Telling of the Anthracite” with Philip Mosley (2024)

“Telling of the Anthracite” explores the various ways in which anthracite history has been represented and remembered since 1960, the chosen date for the start of the “posthistorical” era coinciding approximately with the Knox mine disaster (1959) and the beginning of the Centralia mine fire (1962-), two cataclysmic and fateful events that symbolize the beginning […]

PA Books: “Harrisburg in WWI and the 1918 Pandemic” with Rodney Ross

In 1917, at the start of World War I, among global war and a global pandemic, Harrisburgers stepped up, surffered and served. They mustered municipal agencies, associations, churches, clubs and corporations as well as fraternal and female organizations to address the multiple challenges presented by the global events. Women volunteered for the Red Cross and […]

PA Books: “George Washington in the French & Indian War” with Scott Patchan

George Washington has frequently been criticized for his first military campaign, which sparked the French and Indian War. This backwoods campaign between British and French colonials eventually grew into the Seven Years’ War, a global conflict between these European empires. In 1754 Washington was an ambitious yet inexperienced young officer, eager to carry out his […]

PA Books: “Smalltime” with Russell Shorto (2021)

“Smalltime” is a mob story straight out of central casting—but with a difference, for the small-town mob, which stretched from Schenectady to Fresno, is a mostly unknown world. The location is the brawny postwar factory town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The setting is City Cigar, a storefront next to City Hall, behind which Russ and his […]

PA Books: “Philadelphia’s Germans” with Richard Juliani (2022)

In “Philadelphia’s Germans: From Colonial Settlers to Enemy Aliens,” Richard N. Juliani examines the social, cultural, and political life, along with the ethnic consciousness, of Philadelphia’s Germans, from their participation in the founding of the colony of Pennsylvania to the entry of the United States into World War I. This book focuses on their paradoxical […]

PA Books: “The Game That Saved the NHL” with Ed Gruver

In late 1975 and early 1976, at the height of the Cold War, two of the Soviet Union’s long-dominant national hockey teams traveled to North America to play an eight-game series against the best teams in the National Hockey League. The culmination of the “Super Series” was reigning Soviet League champion HC CSKA Moscow’s face-off […]

PA Books: “Bullets and Bandages” with James Gindlesperger

At Gettysburg, PA, during three days of July 1863, 160,000 men fought one of the most fierce and storied battles of the US Civil War. Nearly one in three of those men ended up a casualty of that battle, and when the two armies departed a few days later, 21,000 wounded remained. This book is […]

PA Books: “Hell with the Lid Off” with Ed Gruver and Jim Campbell

“Hell with the Lid Off” looks at the ferocious five-year war waged by Pittsburgh and Oakland for NFL supremacy during the turbulent seventies. The roots of their rivalry dated back to the 1972 playoff game in Pittsburgh that ended with the “Immaculate Reception,” Franco Harris’s stunning touchdown that led the Steelers to a win over the […]

PA Books: “Emotional Brandywine” with Karl Kuerner & Bruce Mowday

The September 11, 1777, battle of Brandywine, a defeat for General George Washington, is too often forgotten by historians. Brandywine was one of the most important engagements of the war, also the largest land battle. Lafayette began his rise to an American hero that afternoon when he shed his blood for American freedom. Artist Karl […]