The Wall Street Journal called him "a living legend." The London Times dubbed him "the most famous art detective in the world." In Priceless, Robert K. Wittman, the founder of the FBI's Art Crime Team, pulls back the curtain on his remarkable career for the first time, offering a real-life international thriller to rival The Thomas Crown Affair. Rising from humble roots as the son of an antique dealer, Wittman built a twenty-year career that was nothing short of extraordinary. He went undercover...
Aug 26, 2019•59 min
When President Dwight Eisenhower left Washington, D.C., at the end of his second term, he retired to a farm in historic Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, that he had bought a decade earlier. Living on the farm with the former president and his wife, Mamie, were his son, daughter-in-law, and four grandchildren, the oldest of whom, David, was just entering his teens. In this engaging and fascinating memoir, David Eisenhower—whose previous book about his grandfather, Eisenhower at War, 1943–1945, was a fin...
Aug 19, 2019•1 hr
The doomed Whiskey Rebellion, the Great Fire that destroyed a third of the city in 1845 and Lincoln's speech urging residents to shun talk of secession--all have made the pages of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and its predecessors. Since 1786, the paper has covered local events, and reporter Len Barcousky is a part of this long tradition. This collection of his "Eyewitness" columns draws on next-day stories to tell the history of the city, from President Coolidge's almost-silent visit in 1927 to a...
Aug 13, 2019•1 hr
I'd Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had is television, screen and stage star Tony Danza's absorbing account of a year spent teaching tenth-grade English at Northeast High -- Philadelphia's largest high school with 3600 students. Entering Northeast's crowded halls in September of 2009, Tony found his way to a classroom filled with twenty-six students who were determined not to cut him any slack. They cared nothing about "Mr. Danza's" showbiz credentials, and they immediately put him on ...
Jul 29, 2019•31 min
A definitive biography of one of America's greatest singers and a seminal figure in the American civil rights movement uncovers the life of the first African American soloist at the Met and the first African American singer to perform at the White House. Description courtesy of Amazon
Jul 22, 2019•59 min
More than 40 years after his premature death, the mystique of Mario Lanza continues. He remains a legendary figure, a crossover icon embraced and remembered by an entire generation for bridging the gap between popular and classical music, the acknowledged inspiration of today's Three Tenors. Bessette tells his story with a novelist's eye for the inherent tragedy of Lanza's brief life, the contradictory facets of his personality, his passion for life, and his self-destructiveness. Description cou...
Jul 15, 2019•1 hr
Contemporaries of the modest and unassuming scientist Joseph Leidy (1823–91) revered him as the supreme consultant in questions relating to human anatomy, paleontology, protozoology, parasitology, anthropology, mineralogy, botany, and numerous other scientific fields. Leidy's achievements and the breadth of his scientific interests and knowledge were astonishing. He seemed, in short, to be the man who knew everything. This is the first published biography of the remarkable Joseph Leidy—a leading...
Jul 08, 2019•59 min
This is the rambunctious story of how America came to declare independence in Philadelphia in 1776. As late as that May, the Continental Congress had no plans to break away from England. Troops under General George Washington had been fighting the British for nearly a year—yet in Philadelphia a mighty bloc known as "reconciliationists," led by the influential Pennsylvanian John Dickinson, strove to keep America part of the British Empire. But a cadre of activists—led by the mysterious Samuel Ada...
Jul 01, 2019•1 hr
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the African Methodist Episcopal Church provided an ideological foundation for the African American community that was truly world-embracing. While generally identified with the pursuit of liberty for African Americans, the church's concerns can now be seen to have extended far beyond U.S. borders. In this new study, Lawrence Little describes how the A.M.E. Church reacted to American foreign policy in the years from the partition of Africa in ...
Jun 24, 2019•1 hr
The Knox Mine Disaster is much more than a history of an accident—or an industry, for that matter. Because the book draws on the recollections of miners and their families, industry officials, and individuals involved in the legal aftermath of the disaster, it is an epic drama that is as spellbinding as it is sensational. Candid photographs of members of this cast of characters lend a human element that overshadows the gaping hole in the riverbed, the billions of gallons of water that crashed th...
Jun 17, 2019•58 min
Employment prospects for many were bleak at the height of the Great Depression. For unmarried recent high school graduates, the prospect of getting a job was mostly non-existent. President Roosevelt's New Deal plan included the Civilian Conservation Corps, a program specifically targeted to provide employment for those whose job prospects were non-existent. This seventeen to twenty-five-year-old age group would seize upon this opportunity for full-time employment, enroll for a six-month hitch an...
Jun 10, 2019•59 min
In May 1863, eighteen-year-old William Brooke Rawle graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and traded a genteel, cultured life of privilege for service as a cavalry officer. Traveling from his home in Philadelphia to Virginia, he joined the Third Pennsylvania Cavalry and soon found himself in command of a company of veterans of two years' service, some of whom were more than twice his age. Within eight weeks, he had participated in two of the largest cavalry battles of the war at Brandy S...
Jun 03, 2019•58 min
As 1753 came to a close, European empires were set on a collision course for a triangular piece of land known as the Forks of the Ohio at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers. The navigable waterways were valuable to the French to complete their control of the Ohio Valley as the British looked to create a center for their booming fur trade and westward expansion. Former soldier turned trader William Trent set out for the untamed wilderness to stake Britain's claim. He would bui...
May 28, 2019•59 min
This is the first book-length, critical analysis of Lieutenant General James Longstreet's actions at the Battle of Gettysburg. The author argues that Longstreet's record has been discredited unfairly, beginning with character assassination by his contemporaries after the war and, persistently, by historians in the decades since. By closely studying the three-day battle, and conducting an incisive historiographical inquiry into Longstreet's treatment by scholars, this book presents an alternative...
May 13, 2019•58 min
In the years since the Revolutionary War, legend has obscured the story of the Battle of Paoli, better known in history as the Paoli Massacre. For this first-ever full-length treatment of the battle, the author has uncovered never-before-published primary documents to tell of British General Charles Grey's brutal attack on Anthony Wayne's division of 1,500 men in September 1777. The detailed account follows the action from the arrival of Wayne's division south of the Schuylkill River, near Paoli...
May 06, 2019•58 min
"Good War, Great Men" provides first-hand accounts of more than a dozen soldiers who served together during the Great War. Their stories have been rediscovered by compiling unpublished letters and journals with historical insights to provide a compelling history of the men of the 313th Machine Gun Battalion. Endorsed by the United States World War One Centennial Commission, this project honors the service and sacrifice of American servicemen and women in World War I. Surviving the incessant shel...
Apr 29, 2019•58 min
200 Years ago a Philadelphia newspaper claimed George Washington wasn't the "father of his country." It claimed John Adams really wanted to be king. Its editors were arrested by the federal government. One editor died awaiting trial. The story of this newspaper is the story of America. In this monumental story of two newspaper editors whom Presidents Washington and Adams sought to jail for sedition, American Aurora offers a new and heretical vision of this nation's beginnings, from the vantage p...
Apr 15, 2019•1 hr 2 min
This superb biographical dictionary of Pennsylvania legislators provides elaborate accounts of each Pennsylvania lawmaker who served during the period covered by the volume, with detailed scholarly introductions analyzing the makeup of the legislature and the entire lawmaking process. The introductions alone should be required reading for all students of colonial Pennsylvania. . . . The publication of the first two volumes of this series has set a standard by which similar projects must be measu...
Apr 08, 2019•58 min
In the summer of 1776, fifty-six men put their quills to a dangerous document they called the Declaration of Independence. Among them was a thirty-year-old doctor named Benjamin Rush. One of the youngest signatories, he was also, among stiff competition, one of the most visionary. From improbable beginnings as the son of a Philadelphia blacksmith, Rush grew into an internationally renowned writer, reformer, and medical pioneer who touched virtually every page in the story of the nation's foundin...
Mar 25, 2019•58 min
Considered by scholars and history buffs alike to be the best survey history of the rise and fall of the anthracite mining industry in Pennsylvania, this volume chronicles the discovery of anthracite, the building of canals to transport it to market, the era when anthracite was a major stimulus for the building of railroads and the development of the iron industry, the struggles of miners to organize, and the effects that successive waves of immigrants had on northeastern Pennsylvania. It conclu...
Mar 11, 2019•59 min
Close to the Mason-Dixon line, South Central Pennsylvania was a magnet for slave catchers and abolitionists alike. Influenced by religion and empathy, local abolitionists risked their reputations, fortunes and lives in the pursuit of what they believed was right. The sister of Benjamin Lundy, one of America's most famous abolitionists, married into an Adams County family and spent decades helping runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad. National figures such as Frederick Douglass toured the r...
Mar 04, 2019•56 min
On September 10, 1897, a group of 400 striking coal miners--workers of Polish, Slovak, and Lithuanian descent or origin--marched on Lattimer, Pennsylvania. There, law enforcement officers fired without warning into the protesters, killing nineteen miners and wounding thirty-eight others. The bloody day quickly faded into history. Paul Shackel confronts the legacies and lessons of the Lattimer event. Beginning with a dramatic retelling of the incident, Shackel traces how the violence, and the acq...
Feb 18, 2019•59 min
Each of the nearly 100 essays in Insight Philadelphia tells a succinct, compelling, and little-known tale of the city's past. Some stories are quirky, like how early gas stations were designed to resemble classical temples, or the saga of how a museum acquired a 2000-year-old Greek statue, then had it demolished with a sledgehammer. Other stories turn serious, exploring the tragic deaths of child laborers in the city's textile mills and a century-old case of racial profiling that led to a statio...
Feb 11, 2019•59 min
Sketches of the Higher Classes of Colored Society in Philadelphia, first published in 1841, was written by Joseph Willson, a southern black man who had moved to Philadelphia. He wrote this book to convince whites that the African-American community in his adopted city did indeed have a class structure, and he offers advice to his black readers about how they should use their privileged status. The significance of Willson's account lies in its sophisticated analysis of the issues of class and rac...
Feb 04, 2019•1 hr 1 min
The postwar United States has experienced many forms of populist politics, none more consequential than that of the blue-collar white ethnics who brought figures like Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump to the White House. "Blue-Collar Conservatism" traces the rise of this little-understood, easily caricatured variant of populism by presenting a nuanced portrait of the supporters of Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo. In 1971, Frank Rizzo became the first former police commissioner elected mayor of a maj...
Jan 28, 2019•58 min
When the Museum of the American Revolution acquired the land at Third and Chestnut streets in Olde City, Philadelphia, it came with the condition that an archaeological investigation be conducted. The excavation that began in the summer of 2014 yielded treasures in the trash: unearthed privy pits provided remarkable finds from a mid-eighteenth-century tavern to relics from a button factory dating to the early twentieth century. These artifacts are described and analyzed by urban archaeologist Re...
Jan 21, 2019•56 min
In addition to detailing the life and career of Siegmund Lubin of Philadelphia, this work explores the complex character of America's first Jewish movie mogul and separates his accomplishments as a film pioneer from the myths he himself helped create. Along with descriptions of his studios in Pennsylvania, the book also provides accounts of Lubin's studios in California and Florida and his company's location work in Arizona, New Mexico, New Jersey, and New England. Description courtesy of Amazon...
Jan 07, 2019•59 min
Stephen Foster (1826-1864) was America's first great songwriter and the first to earn his living solely through his music. He composed some 200 songs, including such classics as "Oh! Susanna," "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair," "Old Folks at Home (Way down upon the Swanee River)," and "Camptown Races (Doo-dah! Doo-dah!)." He virtually invented popular music as we recognize it to this day, yet he died at age thirty-seven, a forgotten and nearly penniless alcoholic on the Bowery. The author revea...
Dec 31, 2018•59 min
Goodfella Tapes by George Anastasia is the true story of how the FBI recorded a mob war and brought down a mafia don. A riveting, eye-opening true crime masterwork in the vein of "Wiseguy", "Underboss", "Havana Nocturne", "The Valachi Papers", and other bestselling exposés of life in La Cosa Nostra, Goodfella Tapes is an astonishing story of the brutal acts and remarkable blunders of soldiers, capos, and kingpins of the Philadelphia mob and the ingenuity of government agents that, combined, help...
Dec 24, 2018•1 hr
In "The Forgotten," Ben Bradlee Jr. reports on how voters in Luzerne County, a pivotal county in a crucial swing state, came to feel like strangers in their own land – marginalized by flat or falling wages, rapid demographic change, and a liberal culture that mocks their faith and patriotism. Fundamentally rural and struggling with changing demographics and limited opportunity, Luzerne County can be seen as a microcosm of the nation. In "The Forgotten," Trump voters speak for themselves, explain...
Dec 17, 2018•47 min
