On March 28, 1979, the worst nuclear reactor accident in U.S. history occurred at the Three Mile Island power plant in Central Pennsylvania. Radiation Nation tells the story of what happened that day and in the months and years that followed, as local residents tried to make sense of the emergency. The near-meltdown occurred at a pivotal moment when the New Deal coalition was unraveling, trust in government was eroding, conservatives were consolidating their power, and the political left was bec...
Dec 03, 2018•58 min
"A Community Keystone" is a detailed history of the first 217 years of the Williamsport Sun-Gazette and the community that grew up around it from 1801-2018. The Sun-Gazette is the 12th oldest continually published newspaper in The United States of America and the 4th oldest in Pennsylvania. Bernie Oravec is the publisher of the Williamsport Sun-Gazette. L. Lee Janssen is the editor of the Williamsport Sun-Gazette. Description courtesy of the Williamsport Sun-Gazette....
Nov 12, 2018•56 min
Tom Gola is a Philadelphia Big Five basketball icon. He led La Salle to the NIT championship in 1952 and the NCAA championship in 1954, and holds the NCAA record for most rebounds in a career. Gola also helped the Philadelphia Warriors win the NBA championship as a rookie in 1956 and was named an All-Star five times before retiring in 1966. But Gola also had many amazing achievements as a coach. His La Salle Explorer teams were a large part of the national basketball landscape. He was inducted i...
Nov 05, 2018•59 min
"For the Love of Beer: Pennsylvania's Breweries" examines Pennsylvania's brewing history, geography, and cultural richness while highlighting over 100 of the states thriving craft breweries. It explains some of the enjoyable stories and local legends behind the naming of beers, while detailing the unique buildings and architectural treasures that contribute to the renovation of urban areas and revival of small communities. Short descriptions of each brewery provide the reader with an understandi...
Oct 29, 2018•58 min
Frontier Rebels tells story of the "Black Boys," a rebellion on the American frontier in 1765. In 1763, the Seven Years' War ended in a spectacular victory for the British. The French army agreed to leave North America, but many Native Americans, fearing that the British Empire would expand onto their lands and conquer them, refused to lay down their weapons. Under the leadership of a shrewd Ottawa warrior named Pontiac, they kept fighting for their freedom, capturing several British forts and d...
Oct 22, 2018•57 min
Idlewild was developed by Pittsburgh's Mellon family as a picnic grove to boost traffic on the Ligonier Valley Rail Road. When C.C. Macdonald took the helm in 1931, rides, entertainment and other attractions came to Idlewild over the next half century, along with the adjacent Story Book Forest. After joining the Kennywood family of amusement parks, Idlewild added a Wild West town, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood of Make-Believe and a water slide complex. Author Jennifer Sopko tells the heartwarming ...
Sep 24, 2018•57 min
Frank Furness (1839-1912) has remained a curiosity to architectural historians and critics, somewhere between an icon and an enigma, whose importance and impact have yet to be properly evaluated or appreciated. To some, his work pushed pattern and proportion to extremes, undermining or forcing together the historic styles he referenced in such eclectic buildings as the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania Library. To others, he was merely a regional mannerist ...
Sep 17, 2018•58 min
The Scots Irish were one of early Pennsylvania's largest non-English immigrant groups. They were stereotyped as frontier ruffians and Indian haters. In The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania, historian Judith Ridner insists that this immigrant group was socio-economically diverse. Servants and free people, individuals and families, and political exiles and refugees from Ulster, they not only pioneered new frontier settlements, but also populated the state's cities—Philadelphia and Pittsburgh—and ...
Sep 10, 2018•59 min
Three of the greatest detectives in the world--a renowned FBI agent turned private eye, a sculptor and lothario who speaks to the dead, and an eccentric profiler known as "the living Sherlock Holmes"-were heartsick over the growing tide of unsolved murders. Good friends and sometime rivals William Fleisher, Frank Bender, and Richard Walter decided one day over lunch that something had to be done, and pledged themselves to a grand quest for justice. The three men invited the greatest collection o...
Aug 27, 2018•54 min
In just seven years–from 1950 through 1956–Grace Kelly embarked on a whirlwind career that included roles in eleven movies. From the principled Amy Fowler Kane in High Noon to the thrill-seeking Frances Stevens of To Catch a Thief, Grace established herself as one of Hollywood's most talented actresses and iconic beauties. Her astonishing career lasted until her retirement at age twenty-six, when she withdrew from stage and screen to marry a European monarch and became a modern, working princess...
Aug 20, 2018•59 min
Charles L. Blockson, one of the leading authorities on African American history, has compiled one of the nation's largest private collections of black history artifacts, photographs, maps, and books, a culmination of forty years of research. This guide, drawn from his vast collection and research, explores sites significant to the African American experience in Pennsylvania and includes maps with highlighted events from each part of the state. Charles Blockson founded the Afro-American Historica...
Aug 13, 2018•57 min
John Mauchly and Presper Eckert designed and built the first digital, electronic computer. Mauchly and Eckert met by chance in 1941 at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Engineering. They soon developed a revolutionary vision: to use electricity as a means of computing - in other words, to make electricity "think." Ignored by their colleagues, in early 1943 they were fortuitously discovered and funded by the U.S. Army, itself in urgent need of a machine that could quickly calculate...
Aug 07, 2018•58 min
The father fled East Prussia to escape the 1880s pogroms and, as a penniless immigrant boy, hawked newspapers on the streets of Chicago. The son, who lives on Philadelphia's Main Line and on a palatial California estate, is a multibillionaire and America's most generous living philanthropist. Legacy is an epic saga of how Moses and Walter Annenberg built a vast publishing empire and one of the nation's greatest family fortunes. Seeping through the century, the story encompasses brutal circulatio...
Jul 30, 2018•1 hr
Born in Gettysburg, PA only a dozen years after the bloody Civil War battle, Eddie Plank grew up on a farm and was a late-bloomer. By his early twenties, he was a local star on the town ball team and enrolled in the Gettysburg Academy in order to pitch for the Gettysburg College team. Soon after, Connie Mack from the Philadelphia Athletics in the newly-formed American League came calling and the rest is history. Eddie Plank was the mainstay of Connie Mack's early success from 1901 through 1914. ...
Jul 23, 2018•57 min
His name summons up our earliest images of the beloved books we read as children. His illustrations for Scribner's Illustrated Classics (Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Last of the Mohicans, The Yearling) are etched into the collective memory of generations of readers. He was hailed as the greatest American illustrator of his day. For forty-three years, starting in 1902, N.C. Wyeth painted landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and murals, as well as illustrations for a long shelf of world literatu...
Jul 17, 2018•1 hr
The cabin door crashes open-and in a few minutes Regina's life changes forever. Allegheny Indians murder her father and brother, burn their Pennsylvania home to the ground, and take Regina captive. Only her mother, who is away from home, is safe. Torn from her family, Regina longs for the past, but she must begin a new life. She becomes Tskinnak, who learns to catch fish, dance the Indian dance, and speak the Indian tongue. As the years go by, her new people become her family, but she never stop...
Jul 09, 2018•58 min
In this new biography, Colin Calloway uses the prism of George Washington's life to bring focus to the great Native leaders of his time--Shingas, Tanaghrisson, Bloody Fellow, Joseph Brant, Red Jacket, Little Turtle--and the tribes they represented: the Iroquois Confederacy, Lenape, Miami, Creek, Delaware; in the process, he returns them to their rightful place in the story of America's founding. The Indian World of George Washington spans decades of Native American leaders' interactions with Was...
Jun 25, 2018•59 min
As the twentieth century dawned on western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, the region's steel industry faced a struggle for unionism. Unionists like Philip Murray, John L. Lewis, Samuel Gompers and Gus Hall battled for fair wages, hours and working conditions. Strong managers like Judge Elbert Gary and Tom Girdler opposed their every move. Tensions from issues of immigration, class, skill and race erupted throughout the industry. The tribulations led to widespread steel strikes directed by the Am...
Jun 19, 2018•59 min
In The Loyal Son, award-winning historian Daniel Mark Epstein throws the spotlight on one of the more enigmatic aspects of Franklin's biography: his complex and confounding relationship with his illegitimate son William. When he was twenty-four, Franklin fathered a child with a woman who was not his wife. He adopted the boy, raised him, and educated him to be his aide. Ben and William became inseparable. After the famous kite-in-a-thunderstorm experiment, it was William who proved that the elect...
Jun 11, 2018•53 min
Talk show host and columnist Michael Smerconish has been chronicling local, state, and national events for the Philadelphia Daily News and the Philadelphia Inquirer for more than 15 years. He has sounded off on topics as diverse as the hunt for Osama bin Laden and what the color of your Christmas lights says about you. In this collection of 100 of his most memorable columns, Smerconish reflects on American political life with his characteristic feistiness. With a new Afterword for each column, t...
Jun 04, 2018•59 min
This cultural exploration offers an unparalleled presentation of Pennsylvania's ritual healing traditions known as powwowing or Braucherei in Pennsylvania Dutch, through original primary source materials, including manuscripts, ritual objects, and books—most of which have never before been available to English-speaking readers. Although methods and procedures have varied considerably over three centuries of ritual practice within the Pennsylvania Dutch cultural region, the outcomes and experienc...
May 22, 2018•58 min
Everyone knows about Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and his 20th Maine Regiment, but there's much more to the story of Maine at the Battle of Gettysburg. Soldiers from Maine made their presence felt all over the battlefield during three days of fighting in July 1863. There's Oliver Otis Howard, corps commander who helped secure high ground for the Union on the first day. There's Adelbert Ames, who drilled the 20th Maine—including Chamberlain himself—into a fighting regiment and then commanded a bri...
May 14, 2018•59 min
The free black community of Hinsonville sent its sons to serve the Union when called on. As members of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Volunteers, brothers Wesley, William and George Jay survived the bloody battle at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, memorialized in the film Glory. George W. Duffy and Stephen J. Ringgold were part of the only black regiment to lead President Lincoln's funeral procession in Washington. William B. Fitzgerald, Abraham Stout, Samuel H. Blake and Isaac A. Hollingsworth fou...
Apr 30, 2018•59 min
In April 2003, Jim O'Brien was the first Pittsburgher inducted into the U.S. Basketball Writers Hall of Fame. This book is a celebration of 60th anniversary of a career as a professional sports writer. O'Brien was the founding editor of Street & Smith's Basketball Yearbook in 1970 and continued to be associated with the magazine for more than 35 years. It became the No. 1 selling annual of its kind in the country and the official NBA pre-season magazine. O'Brien also edited The Complete Hand...
Apr 23, 2018•59 min
When Prohibition hit the Steel City, it created a level of violence and corruption residents had never witnessed. Illegal producers ran stills in kitchens, basements, bathroom tubs, warehouses and even abandoned distilleries. War between gangs of bootleggers resulted in a number of murders and bombings that placed Pittsburgh on the same level as New York City and Chicago in criminal activity. John Bazzano ordered the killing of the Volpe brothers but did so without the permission of Mafia bosses...
Apr 16, 2018•52 min
In The Fearless Benjamin Lay, renowned historian Marcus Rediker chronicles the transatlantic life and times of a singular man—a Quaker dwarf who demanded the total, unconditional emancipation of all enslaved Africans around the world. Mocked and scorned by his contemporaries, Lay was unflinching in his opposition to slavery, often performing colorful guerrilla theater to shame slave masters, insisting that human bondage violated the fundamental principles of Christianity. He drew on his ideals t...
Apr 10, 2018•58 min
Sen. Robert Jubelirer was first elected to the Pennsylvania Senate in 1974. Watergate was a deep wound on voter psyche, and Jubelirer was the lone Republican freshman Senator elected. Until his loss in a primary election in 2006, Jubelirer would serve skillfully and energetically, making a political career out of his willingness to fight in the face of long odds. Jubelirer was admired and respected on both sides of the political aisle, and while his views an actions were sometimes questioned, hi...
Mar 26, 2018•59 min
Walt Koken, the founding member of the Highwoods Stringband, reminisces about traveling and playing old time music in the 1960's and 1970's, and the people he met while barnstorming, before and during his days in the band. Description courtesy of Mudthumper Music.
Mar 12, 2018•57 min
Historian Lee Stout and engineering professor Harry H. West show how Penn State's Beaver Stadium came to be, including a look at its predecessors, "Old" Beaver Field, built in 1893 on a site centrally located northeast of Old Main, and "New" Beaver Field, built on the northwest corner of campus in 1909. Stout and West explore the engineering and construction challenges of the stadium and athletic fields and reveal the importance of these facilities to the history of Penn State and its cherished ...
Feb 26, 2018•58 min
Alexander Calder is one of the most beloved and widely admired artists of the twentieth century. Anybody who has ever set foot in a museum knows him as the inventor of the mobile, America's unique contribution to modern art. But only now, forty years after the artist's death, is the full story of his life being told in this biography, which is based on unprecedented access to Calder's letters and papers as well as scores of interviews. Jed Perl shows us why Calder was–and remains–a barrier break...
Feb 19, 2018•57 min
