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 […]

PA Books: “Time of Anarchy” with Matthew Kruer (2022)

In 1675, eastern North America descended into chaos. Virginia exploded into civil war, as rebel colonists decried the corruption of planter oligarchs and massacred allied Indians. Maryland colonists, gripped by fears that Catholics were conspiring with enemy Indians, rose up against their rulers. Separatist movements and ethnic riots swept through New York and New Jersey. […]

January 22: “The Deviant Prison” with Ashley Rubin (2021)

Early nineteenth-century American prisons followed one of two dominant models: the Auburn system, in which prisoners performed factory-style labor by day and were placed in solitary confinement at night, and the Pennsylvania system, where prisoners faced 24-hour solitary confinement for the duration of their sentences. By the close of the Civil War, the majority of […]

PA Books: “River Boots” with Robert Lynn Steiner (2022)

River Boots is a career synopsis, a training manual, a history book and one conservation officer’s slightly twisted view of a quarter century in the business. It is a sometimes “belly laughing” look at a profession that can turn deadly serious in a second and can leave tears running down your face from laughter a […]