PA BOOKS on PCN

"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 Their stories have been rediscovered by compiling unpublished letters and journals with historical insights to provide a compelling history of the men of the 313th Machine Gun Battalion.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 shelling and gas attacks were often a matter of luck. Enduring the long marches, muddy trenches, and soaking wet uniforms were routine. Being able to laugh through the misery, finding a swimming hole on a march through the French countryside, or sleeping in late under the warmth of the sun occasionally made it a good war. You'll read about a young Private who colorfully describes the antics of his fellow draftees while they trained at Camp Lee preparing for war. Meet an idealistic officer who provides vivid details of the simple pleasures and the aggravating moments as he marches his company to the front lines. Discover the naïve desires of a Company Commander hoping to get into a ‘real show' which are later extinguished when his unit takes on multiple casualties from a gas attack. Read the honest prose of one officer who reveals a catastrophic mistake made during the harrowing events of the Battle of the Meuse-Argonne.

Andrew Capets is a State Farm insurance agent in Monroeville, PA. He created a local history website traffordhistory.org and was involved in establishing the Trafford Historical Society.

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 point of those who fought in the American Revolution to create a democracy--and lost.

Description courtesy of Amazon

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 measured.

Description courtesy of The American Genealogist

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 founding. He was Franklin's protégé, the editor of Common Sense, and Washington's surgeon general. He was a fierce progressive agitator—a vocal opponent of slavery and prejudice by race, religion or gender, a champion of public education—even as his convictions threatened his name and career, time and again. He was a confidante, and often the physician, of America's first leaders; he brokered the twilight peace between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. As a doctor, he became "the American Hippocrates," whose brilliant, humane insights and institutional reforms revolutionized the understanding and treatment of mental illness in ways that still reverberate.

Stephen Fried is an award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author who teaches at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the University of Pennsylvania.

Description courtesy of Crown Publishing Group.

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 concludes with an examination of the continuing legacy of anthracite mining in the region, and of the economic and technological factors that brought about the decline of the Kingdom of Coal. The chapters on the people of the anthracite region are particularly absorbing.

First published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 1985.

Although the authors have an academic background, Kingdom of Coal is written in an easy-to-read style.

Description courtesy of Amazon

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 region, delivering antislavery orations to mixed receptions. In 1859, John Brown planned his Harpers Ferry raid from Chambersburg while local abolitionists concealed his identity. Author Cooper Wingert reveals the history of the antislavery movement in South Central Pennsylvania.

Cooper Wingert is the author of ten books, including "The Confederate Approach on Harrisburg" and "Slavery and the Underground Railroad in South Central Pennsylvania." He is the recipient of the 2012 Dr. James I. Robertson Literary Award for Confederate History. Wingert currently resides in Enola, Pennsylvania.

Description courtesy of the History Press.