PA BOOKS on PCN

The Martin Archives is a unique inside look into C.F. Martin & Co.'s reign as America's oldest and most revered guitarmaker – viewed through a selection of images, correspondence, documents, and reproduced artifacts chosen from some 700,000 items the company has amassed over nearly two centuries. Many of these have lain unseen in the Martins' attic or vault for generations. From the concert halls of the pre-Civil War United States to the Grand Ole Opry stage to Woodstock, Coachella, and beyond, Martin's instruments have been on hand to give voice to the human spirit. The Martin Archives offers insights into those instruments and the persons who made them, as well as the times the Martins lived through. While some guitarmakers predate the advent of the business computer, Martin predates the typewriter, electric lights, and even the steam locomotive, and its archives reveal what an interesting ride that's been. Dick Boak is the director of the museum, archives, and special projects for the Martin Guitar Company.

Description courtesy of Hal Leonard Books.

The Life and Songs of Stephen Foster offers an engaging reassessment of the life, politics, and legacy of the misunderstood father of American music. Once revered the world over, Foster's plantation songs, like "Old Folks at Home" and "My Old Kentucky Home," fell from grace in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement due to their controversial lyrics. Foster embraced the minstrel tradition for a brief time, refining it and infusing his songs with sympathy for slaves, before abandoning the genre for respectable parlor music. The youngest child in a large family, he grew up in the shadows of a successful older brother and his president brother-in-law, James Buchanan, and walked a fine line between the family's conservative politics and his own pro-Lincoln sentiments. Foster lived most of his life just outside of industrial, smoke-filled Pittsburgh and wrote songs set in a pastoral South—unsullied by the grime of industry but tarnished by the injustice of slavery.

JoAnne O'Connell has a background in history and classical vocal music. She earned her PhD at the University of Pittsburgh where she began researching her revisionist biography of the Pittsburgh born composer Stephen Collins Foster. She has taught at colleges and universities in Pennsylvania and Maryland, and currently spends her time researching and writing.

Description courtesy of Rowman & Littlefield.

When George Washington was elected president, he reluctantly left behind his beloved Mount Vernon to serve in Philadelphia, the temporary seat of the nation's capital, after a brief stay in New York. In setting up his household he took Tobias Lear, his celebrated secretary, and nine slaves, including Ona Judge, about which little has been written. As he grew accustomed to Northern ways, there was one change he couldn't get his arms around: Pennsylvania law required enslaved people be set free after six months of residency in the state. Rather than comply, Washington decided to circumvent the law. Every six months he sent the slaves back down south just as the clock was about to expire. Though Ona Judge lived a life of relative comfort, the few pleasantries she was afforded were nothing compared to freedom, a glimpse of which she encountered first-hand in Philadelphia. So, when the opportunity presented itself one clear and pleasant spring day in Philadelphia, Judge left everything she knew to escape to New England. Yet freedom would not come without its costs. At just twenty-two-years-old, Ona became the subject of an intense manhunt led by George Washington, who used his political and personal contacts to recapture his property.

Erica Armstrong Dunbar is the Blue and Gold Professor of Black Studies and History at the University of Delaware. In 2011, Professor Dunbar was appointed the first director of the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia. She has been the recipient of Ford, Mellon, and SSRC fellowships and is an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer. Her first book, A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City was published by Yale University Press in 2008.

Description courtesy of Atria Books.

Considering Baltimore and Philadelphia as part of a larger, Mid-Atlantic borderland, "The Politics of Black Citizenship" shows that the antebellum effort to secure the rights of American citizenship was central to black politics—it was an effort that sought to exploit the ambiguities of citizenship and negotiate the complex national, state, and local politics in which that concept was determined. In this book Andrew Diemer examines the diverse tactics that free blacks employed in defense of their liberties—including violence and the building of autonomous black institutions—as well as African Americans' familiarity with the public policy and political struggles that helped shape those freedoms in the first place.

Andrew K. Diemer is assistant professor of history at Towson University. His work has been published in the Journal of Military History, Slavery and Abolition, and the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography.

Description courtesy of University of Georgia Press.

In "Playing Through the Whistle," celebrated sportswriter S. L. Price tells the story of a remarkable place, its people, its players, and, through it, a wider story of American history from the turn of the twentieth century. Aliquippa has been many things—a rigidly controlled company town, a booming racial and ethnic melting pot, a battleground for union rights, and, for a brief time, a sort of workers' paradise. Price expertly traces this history, following the growth and decline of industry and the struggles and triumphs of Eastern European immigrants and blacks from the South willing to trade their grueling labor for a better life for their families.

S. L. Price, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated since 1994, is the author of three previous books: Heart of the Game; Pitching Around Fidel, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Far Afield. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his family.