PA BOOKS on PCN

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...

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...

An essential food in Mid-Atlantic kitchens for hundreds of years, scrapple is the often-overlooked king of breakfast meats. Developed by German settlers of Pennsylvania, the slow food byproduct was created to avoid waste in the day's butchering. Pork trimmings were stewed until tender, ground like sausage and blended with the originating broth, cornmeal and buckwheat flour. Crispy slabs of scrappl...

To the rebelling colonies, French assistance made the difference between looming defeat and eventual triumph. Even before the Declaration of Independence was issued, King Louis XVI and French foreign minister Vergennes were aiding the rebels. After the Declaration, that assistance broadened to include wages for our troops; guns, cannon, and ammunition; engineering expertise that enabled victories...

The first volunteer killed defending Robert E. Lee's position in battle was really a German assassin. After fleeing to the United States to escape prosecution for murder, the assassin enlisted in a German company of the Pennsylvania Volunteers in the Mexican-American War and died defending Lee's battery at the Siege of Veracruz in 1847. Lee wrote a letter home, praising this unnamed fallen volunte...

Philadelphia native Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) is recognized as one of the founding figures of American modernism. Initially trained in impressionist landscape painting, he experimented early in his career with compositions inspired by European modernism before developing a linear, hard-edge style now known as Precisionism. Sheeler is best known for his powerful and compelling images of the Machi...

Renowned as a printer, scientist, and diplomat, Benjamin Franklin also published more works on religious topics than any other eighteenth-century American layperson. Born to Boston Puritans, by his teenage years Franklin had abandoned the exclusive Christian faith of his family and embraced deism. But Franklin, as a man of faith, was far more complex than the "thorough deist" who emerges in his au...

Based on a comprehensive amount of research at the Library of Congress, the collections at Mount Vernon, and rare book archives scattered across the country, Kevin Hayes reconstructs in vivid detail the active intellectual life that has gone largely unnoticed in conventional narratives of Washington. Despite being a lifelong reader, Washington felt an acute sense of embarrassment about his relativ...

This major retrospective catalogue explores the impact of time and place on the work of beloved American painter Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009). While previous publications have mainly analyzed Wyeth's work thematically, this publication places him fully in the context of the long 20th century, tracing his creative development from World War I through the new millennium. Published to coincide with the c...

A mostly forgotten episode of US history is brought to life in fascinating detail by historian and author Deborah deBilly dit Courville. Working from primary sources such as letters and household accounts, she has reconstructed the rhythm and rationale of daily life at the 18th century French immigrant colony along the Susquehanna River known as Azilum. Told through the fortunes and fates of one o...

"Gettysburg Rebels" is the gripping true story of five young men who grew up in Gettysburg, moved south to Virginia in the 1850s, joined the Confederate army – and returned "home" as foreign invaders for the great battle in July 1863. Drawing on rarely-seen documents and family histories, as well as military service records and contemporary accounts, Tom McMillan delves into the backgrounds of Wes...

Historian Kathleen Waters Sander tells the story of B&O Railroad President John W. Garrett and the B&O's plan to build a rail line from Baltimore over the Allegheny Mountains to the Ohio River. The B&O's success ignited "railroad fever" and helped to catapult railroading to America's most influential industry in the nineteenth century. After the Civil War, John W. Garrett became one of...

When the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, the newly independent United States savored its victory and hoped for a great future. And yet the republic soon found itself losing an escalating military conflict on its borderlands. In 1791, years of skirmishes, raids, and quagmire climaxed in the grisly defeat of American militiamen by a brilliantly organized confederation of Shawnee, Miami, and Delawar...

"Chief Engineer" tells the story of Washington Roebling, the engineer known for building one of the most iconic American structures, the Brooklyn Bridge. "Chief Engineer" reveals that his father, John-a renowned engineer who made his life in America after humble beginnings in Germany-was a tyrannical presence in Washington's life, so his own adoption of that career was hard won. A young man when t...

In the deciding game of the 1992 National League Championship Series against the Atlanta Braves, the Pittsburgh Pirates suffered the most dramatic and devastating loss in team history when former Pirate Sid Bream slid home with the winning run. Bream's infamous slide ended the last game played by Barry Bonds in a Pirates uniform and sent the franchise reeling into a record twenty-season losing str...

Founded in 1682 by a society that had no military, eschewed violence as a means of solving conflicts, and tolerated a wide variety of religions, Pennsylvania began as a "peaceable kingdom"—but war was essential to both Pennsylvania's founding and its history. Pennsylvania was the site of some of the most important military events in American history, including the destruction of the Braddock Exped...

Pittsburgh's drinking culture is a story of its people: vibrant, hardworking and innovative. During Prohibition, the Hill District became a center of jazz, speakeasies and creative cocktails. In the following decades, a group of Cuban bartenders brought the nightlife of Havana to a robust café culture along Diamond Street. Disco clubs gripped the city in the 1970s, and a music-centered nightlife b...

The 1920s Jazz Age is remembered for flappers and speakeasies, not for the success of a declining labor movement. A more complex story was unfolding among the young women and men in the hosiery mills of Kensington, the working-class heart of Philadelphia. Their product was silk stockings, the iconic fashion item of the flapper culture then sweeping America and the world. Although the young people...

The definitive, up-to-date guide to Pennsylvania's best fly fishing by regional experts and guides. Includes over 200 rivers and streams across the state as well as information on where to fish for trout, smallmouth bass, and other game fish species. First ever guidebook to the state written by a group of regional experts (professional guides, fly fishing instructors, lecturers, fly tiers) to prov...

In 1916, department store magnate and Grand Old Philadelphian John Wanamaker launched plans for a Sesqui-Centennial International Exposition in his hometown in 1926. It would be a magnificent world's fair to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Wanamaker hoped that the "Sesqui" would also transform sooty, industrial Philadelphia into a beautiful Beaux-Arts city. Howe...

Rural Northeastern Pennsylvania was a bucolic farming region in the 1800s—but political tensions churned below the surface. When a group of fugitive slaves dared to settle in the Underground Railroad village of Waverly, near Scranton, before the Civil War, they encountered a mix of support from abolitionists and animosity from white supremacists. Once the war came, 13 of Waverly's black fathers an...

Wendy Lesser's "You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn" is a major exploration of the architect's life and work. Born in Estonia 1901 and brought to America in 1906, the architect Louis Kahn grew up in poverty in Philadelphia. By the time of his mysterious death in 1974, he was widely recognized as one of the greatest architects of his era. Yet this enormous reputation was based on only a handfu...

Historian Abdullah R. Muhammad examines a previously little-known and virtually untold aspect of Delaware's history—the hidden role of Africans in the often brutal mercantile expansionism by European colonizers in the 17th century. Swedish and Finnish communities on the East Coast, called New Sweden, played a significant role in forming the foundation upon which Delaware was eventually built.

As the last Don of the Philadelphia mob, Ralph Natale, the first-ever mob boss to turn state's evidence, provides an insider's perspective on the mafia. Natale's reign atop the Philadelphia and New Jersey underworlds brought the region's mafia back to prominence in the 1990s. Smart, savvy, and articulate, Natale came up in the mob and saw first-hand as it hatched its plan to control Atlantic City'...

Veteran journalist Jennifer Lin takes readers from remote nineteenth-century mission outposts to Philadelphia and to the thriving house churches and cathedrals of today's China. The Lin family—and the book's central figure, the Reverend Lin Pu-chi—offer witness to China's tumultuous past, up to and beyond the betrayals and madness of the Cultural Revolution, when the family's resolute faith led to...