PA Books: “Joe Louis vs. Billy Conn” with Ed Gruver (2023)

Sports fans had much to occupy themselves with during the memorable summer of ’41, including New York Yankees great Joe DiMaggio’s record-setting consecutive games hit streak and Boston Red Sox star Ted Williams’ dogged pursuit of batting .400. No sports story, however, loomed larger that summer than Joe Louis versus Billy Conn, the hard-hitting heavyweight […]

PA Books: “The Whiskey Rebellion” with Brady Crytzer (2023)

In March 1791 Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton shocked the western frontier when he proposed a domestic excise tax on whiskey to balance America’s national debt. The law, known colloquially as the “Whiskey Act,” disproportionately penalized farmers in the backcountry, while offering favorable tax incentives designed to protect larger distillers. Although Hamilton viewed the law as […]

PA Books: “A Most Gallant Resistance” with James McIntyre (2023)

Most histories of the American War of Independence discuss what are usually regarded as the two major campaigns in 1777. Either they describe the invasion from Canada led by General John Burgoyne which resulted in his subsequent defeat and the surrender of his force at Saratoga, New York, or they focus on William Howe’s Philadelphia […]

PA Books: “George Nakashima Woodworkers Process Book” with Mira Nakashima (2023)

George Nakashima began his furniture business as a reactionary movement against the practice of twentieth century “modern” architecture, design, and art. Through his work, he called for a reclamation of the philosophy of earlier historical periods, in which the human eye and hand determined an individual’s world in relationship to the universe, not the universe […]

PA Books: “Jane Jacobs’s First City” with Glenna Lang (2022)

Jane Jacobs’s First City vividly reveals how this influential thinker and writer’s classic works germinated in the once vibrant, mid-size city of Scranton, Pennsylvania, where Jane spent her initial eighteen years. In the 1920s and 1930s, Scranton was a place of enormous di­versity and opportunity. Small businesses of all kinds abounded and flourished, quality public […]

PA Books: “Kaufmann’s” with Marylynne Pitz and Laura Malt Schneiderman (2022)

In 1868, Jacob Kaufmann, the nineteen-year-old son of a German farmer, stepped off a ship onto the shores of New York. His brother Isaac soon followed, and together they joined an immigrant community of German Jews selling sewing items to the coal miners and mill workers of western Pennsylvania. After opening merchant tailor shops in […]

PA Books: “American Ramble” with Neil King (2023)

A memoir about a 330-mile walk from Washington, D.C., to New York City—an unforgettable pilgrimage to the heart of America across some of our oldest common ground. Neil King Jr.’s desire to walk from Washington, D.C., to New York City began as a whim and soon became an obsession. By the spring of 2021, events […]

PA Books: “American Sirens” with Kevin Hazzard (2023)

Until the 1970s, if you suffered a medical crisis, your chances of survival were minimal. A 9-1-1 call might bring police or even the local funeral home. But that all changed with Freedom House EMS in Pittsburgh, a group of Black men who became America’s first paramedics and set the gold standard for emergency medicine […]

PA Books: “Donora Death Fog” with Andy McPhee (2023)

In October 1948, a seemingly average fog descended on the tiny mill town of Donora, Pennsylvania. With a population of fewer than fifteen thousand, the town’s main industry was steel and zinc mills—mills that continually emitted pollutants into the air. The six-day smog event left twenty-one people dead and thousands sick. Even after the fog […]