Regional

Total 118 results found.

Mal Goode Reporting

Mal Goode Reporting

The Life and Work of a Black Broadcast Trailblazer
Mal Goode (1908–1995) became network news’s first African American correspondent when ABC News hired him in 1962. Raised in Homestead and Pittsburgh, he worked in the mills, graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, and went on to become a journalist for the Pittsburgh Courier and later for local radio. With his ...
Fields of Play

Fields of Play

Sport, Race, and Memory in the Steel City
Americans love sports, from neighborhood pickup basketball to the National Football League, and everything in between. While no city better demonstrates the connection between athletic games and community than Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the common association of the city’s professional sports teams with its blue-collar industrial past illustrates a white nostalgic ...
Watching the River Run

Watching the River Run

A Photographic Journey down the Youghiogheny
Join celebrated author and photographer Tim Palmer as he takes us down one of America’s most magnificent rivers. From the Youghiogheny’s lofty headwaters to its quiet ending only a dozen miles from Pittsburgh, the river he reveals shines with splendor and beckons to all who walk, bike, paddle, ...
Making the Frontier Man

Making the Frontier Man

Violence, White Manhood, and Authority in the Early Western Backcountry
For western colonists in the early American backcountry, disputes often ended in bloodshed and death. Making the Frontier Man examines early life and the origins of lawless behavior in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio from 1750 to 1815. It provides a key to understanding why the trans-Appalachian West was prone to violent ...
Kaufmann’s

Kaufmann’s

The Family That Built Pittsburgh’s Famed Department Store
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 ...
Youghiogheny

Youghiogheny

Appalachian River, Revised Edition
Turbulent rapids and wild shorelines of the Youghiogheny River highlight natural wonders of the Appalachian Mountains, and midway on the stream’s revealing path, Ohiopyle State Park is a showcase of beauty and has become a recreational hotspot where the river thunders over its iconic falls and cascades through the ...
To Risk It All

To Risk It All

General Forbes, the Capture of Fort Duquesne, and the Course of Empire in the Ohio Country
General John Forbes’s campaign against Fort Duquesne was the largest overland expedition during the Seven Years’ War in America. While most histories of the period include the Forbes Campaign as an aside, McConnell documents how and why Forbes and his army succeeded, and what his success meant to the ...
Iron Artisans

Iron Artisans

Welsh Immigrants and the American Age of Steel
America’s emergence as a global industrial superpower was built on iron and steel, and despite their comparatively small numbers, no immigrant group played a more strategic role per capita in advancing basic industry than Welsh workers and managers. They immigrated in surges synchronized with the stage of America’s ...
Donora Death Fog

Donora Death Fog

Clean Air and the Tragedy of a Pennsylvania Mill Town
Longlist, 2025 WCoNA Book of the Year With a foreword by Jennifer Richmond-Bryant 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 ...
The Shale Renaissance

The Shale Renaissance

How Fracking Has Changed Pennsylvania in the Twenty-First Century
Although a technique for hydraulic fracturing—more commonly known as fracking—was developed and implemented in the 1970s in Texas, fracking of the Marcellus Shale formation that stretches from West Virginia through Pennsylvania to New York did not begin in earnest until the twenty-first century. Unconventional natural gas production via ...
Bound in the Bond of Life

Bound in the Bond of Life

Pittsburgh Writers Reflect on the Tree of Life Tragedy
On October 27, 2018, three congregations were holding their morning Shabbat services at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood when a lone gunman entered the building and opened fire. He killed eleven people and injured six more in the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American history. The story ...
Death of the Daily News

Death of the Daily News

How Citizen Gatekeepers Can Save Local Journalism
The City of McKeesport in southwestern Pennsylvania once had a population of more than fifty thousand people and a newspaper that dated back to the nineteenth century. Technology has caused massive disruption to American journalism, throwing thousands of reporters out of work, closing newsrooms, and leaving vast areas with few ...
American Workman

American Workman

The Life and Art of John Kane
American Workman presents a comprehensive, novel reassessment of the life and work of one of America’s most influential self-taught artists, John Kane. With a full account of Kane’s life as a working man, including his time as a steelworker, coal miner, street paver, and commercial painter in and ...
Homestead

Homestead

The Households of a Mill Town
Forward by Tom Waseleski First published in 1910 in the classic Pittsburgh Survey, this pioneering work of American social history, reproduced in its entirety, describes daily life in a community that was dominated economically and physically by the giant Homestead Works of the United States Steel Corporation. The town of Homestead, ...
Made Free and Thrown Open to the Public

Made Free and Thrown Open to the Public

Community Libraries in Pennsylvania from the Colonial Era through World War II
Made Free and Thrown Open to the Public charts the history of public libraries and librarianship in Pennsylvania. Based on archival research at more than fifty libraries and historical societies, it describes a long progression from private, subscription-based associations to publicly funded institutions, highlighting the dramatic period during the late ...

Total 118 results found.