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 […]

PA Books: “Small-Town Cops in the Crosshairs” with Bruce Mowday (2023)

The sniper killings of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, policemen William Davis and Richard Posey shocked the American public in November 1972 and garnered national coverage on the major news networks at the time. Fifty years later, this book, the first to cover the slayings, details the cold-blooded ambush of the two small-town law enforcement officers by […]

PA Books: “Surviving the Winters” with Steven Elliott

George Washington and his Continental Army braving the frigid winter at Valley Forge form an iconic image in the popular history of the American Revolution. Such winter camps, Steven Elliott tells us in Surviving the Winters, were also a critical factor in the waging and winning of the War of Independence. Exploring the inner workings […]

PA Books: “Warhol” with Blake Gopnik (2020)

In “Warhol,” esteemed art critic Blake Gopnik takes on Andy Warhol in all his depth and dimensions. “The meanings of his art depend on the way he lived and who he was,” as Gopnik writes. “That’s why the details of his biography matter more than for almost any cultural figure,” from his working-class Pittsburgh upbringing […]

PA Books: “Vigilance” with Andrew Diemer

The remarkable and inspiring story of William Still, an unknown abolitionist who dedicated his life to managing a critical section of the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia—the free state directly north of the Mason-Dixon Line—helping hundreds of people escape from slavery. Born free in 1821 to two parents who had been enslaved, William Still was drawn […]