Pennsylvania

As automobile transportation exploded in the first half of the 20th century, the service station became a part of everyday life for a growing number of Americans in Central Pennsylvania.

These roadside stops provided necessary goods and services for the motoring public while featuring diverse aesthetics and promoting brand loyalty. Whether traveling for business or pleasure, motorists passing through central Pennsylvania had an ever-increasing number of service stations from which to choose. With the state capital Harrisburg at its core, this area has experienced marked growth while managing to preserve much of the historic beauty for which it is known. Lost Service Stations of Central Pennsylvania is a showcase of those stations and the people who owned them and a tribute to the beauty of a bygone era.

Celebrating its 150th anniversary of incorporation, Jenkintown captures many familiar sites and organizations as well as those that helped define the area but no longer remain. Marion K. Rosenbaum and the Old York Historical Society utilize images from the historical society’s collection to trace the rise of Jenkintown as a stop on the coaching lines to New York City along the Old York Road to a shopping, transportation, and cultural hub.

Originally part of Abington Township, Jenkintown became an independent municipality on December 4, 1874, with its own school district forming shortly thereafter. Jenkintown has also been the center for numerous social, civic, fraternal, patriotic, and religious organizations, commencing with the founding of the Abington Library Society (known today as the Jenkintown Library) in 1803.

Marion K. Rosenbaum, Jenkintown resident, graduated from Jenkintown High School (1964) and Beaver College (1968). She is a retired librarian, archivist, and genealogist with extensive experience researching history in local depositories in the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania areas. She collaborated with the Old York Road Historical Society, which was founded in 1936 to preserve and promote the history of the communities along and adjacent to the Old York Road. The society’s collections contain over 250,000 photographic images, of which a few were selected for this book, supplemented by photographs in private and institutional collections.

In Currents in the Electric City, an installment in Belt’s City Anthologies series, the story of Scranton gets told by the people who know it best.

Scranton, PA, is more than just the setting for The Office. It's the hub of Northeastern Pennsylvania with a rich industrial and labor history. It’s also a small town in many ways: Are you really from Scranton if your family doesn’t go back several generations (as Maria Johnson asks)? Neighborhood talk can reveal your family secrets before you even know them yourself, as Barbara J. Taylor writes. The essays and poems in this collection show the city as it is today, a Rust Belt city that often serves as a punchline for being stuck in the past but one that is very much alive, with stories to tell. Learn about a Gujarati family’s experience, the small but hearty LGBTQ community, the beauty of the Lackawanna River Valley, and the foreign plants along the roadside that mirror the people who emigrated to the region alongside memories from the past: playing on culm banks, the multigenerational family who thrived in a now-dilapidated home, and even voices from the people buried in Dunmore Cemetery. Through it all runs the juxtaposed desire to leave and pull to stay, or return. Though many have heard of Scranton—through television, as President Joe Biden’s birthplace, or as a so-called relic of the past—nobody knows it like the people who call it home.

Lithuanians came to America to find what they were denied in Eastern Europe: freedom from tyranny, freedom to worship and to live as they chose.

Through centuries of bloody invasions and cruel oppression, their land was denied to them, yet in the anthracite coalfields of Pennsylvania, these immigrants worked to build communities of proud American citizens who continued to celebrate Kucios as well as Kaledos, eat blynai and šaltibaršcia, decorate marguciai, and pray the rosary in their native language. In Schuylkill County, they built the first churches, first schools, and first communities established by Lithuanians in the United States. No matter the hardships - grueling work in coalmines, contempt and violence against recent immigrants, prejudice, or condescension toward foreign names and accents - they believed in their country, the United States. Their stories are essential America.

“Europe stretches to the Alleghenies, America lies beyond.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“They are my people and this is my town and it does my heart good just to be here.” - Art Rooney Sr. 

Pittsburgh contains multitudes. The city bestows a character of contradiction, love of place and strength of community on anyone lucky to be born and raised there. A town whose rivers were once lined with belching steel mills but also hosted the world’s first major modern art exhibition is not easily defined. From the decline of the steel industry and the exodus of a vast diaspora of Pittsburghers to its reinvention as a trendy mid-sized metropolis, the ethos of the Steel City remains ever-changing. Across thirteen interconnected essays, author Ed Simon examines the city’s identity in all of its minutia—U.S. Steel and the U.S. Steelworkers; dive bars and churches; the black and gold and the Black and white; hills, bridges and inclines; and geography as destiny.

Bucks County was an original county in William Penn’s newly formed Pennsylvania province and has carried the weight of history ever since. Join author Jennifer Rogers as she recounts the lesser-known history of Bucks County.

Industrial power in the region expanded in the late 1700s as Irish laborers sacrificed life and limb to construct a section of the Pennsylvania Canal and the Durham Furnace. In 1921, a gruesome train wreck claimed the lives of twenty-seven people, forever leaving its tragic mark on the busy rail lines emerging from Philadelphia. Raised a Quaker in Doylestown, James A. Michener went from local English teacher to Pulitzer Prize–winning author, leaving his philanthropic mark at the art museum named for him.

A part of Belt's City Anthology Series. This collection is stimulating for insiders and outsiders alike, a portrait . . . designed to be from-the-streets, warts-and-all.--Pittsburgh City Paper

Pittsburgh is ever-changing--once dusted with soot from the mills, parts of the city now gleam with the polish of new technologies, and little remains of what had been there before. The essays and artwork in this anthology aim to capture the surprising, elusive stories that have come to define this city in transition. Editor Eric Boyd brings together over forty essays, poems, photographs, and artworks from Pittsburgh natives and transplants. In these pages, you'll find:

- LaToya Ruby Frazier, Portraits of Braddock by LaToya Ruby Frazier, MacArthur-award winning photographer

- Melanie Cox McCluskey on the Mt. Washington Monument

- Paintings of Steelers fans and the Jenkins Arcade

- 15-year-old Nico Chiod, chronicling the doings of the North Side Banjo Club.

Everyone in this book, writes Boyd, is talking about the city, the things surrounding it; all of the pieces have been created with experience, intimacy, and personality. This book, I hope, will speak to you, not at you. Because we all know this city is changing. We're just not exactly sure what that means.

A perfect collection for anyone looking for an insider's view of the City of Bridges, told by the people who live and work there. Or anyone looking for their first peek into one of America's most storied cities.

Pittsburgh is synonymous with winning. From the Penguins and Steelers to the Pirates and Panthers, the Steel City knows championships.

There must be something special in the water to make Pittsburgh so particularly gifted with its sports teams. The most famous teams in the city's history would most likely be the 1970s Steelers, known as the Steel Curtain for obvious reasons, and the Penguins who raised the Stanley Cup five times. Names such as Lemieux, Crosby, Roethlisberger, Bradshaw, Clemente and Stargell are legends of American sport and members of Pittsburgh's most cherished franchises, but for every sports legend and multi-million dollar franchise, there are a dozen more talented players and long-past teams that have been forgotten to history; the Negro League's Crawford and Homestead Grays are too often overlooked in the city's sports history but were as talented as any team that has played there. Author Dave Finoli ranks the fifty greatest teams that won trophies, brought glory and lifted the hearts of Pittsburgh's devoted sports fans.

Visit the alleys of Philadelphia's Kensington and Fishtown neighborhoods for stories from the Speakeasy War and more.

The docks and alleys of Philadelphia's riverward neighborhoods teem with forgotten stories and strange histories. In the overlooked corners of Kensington and Fishtown are the launching of the Industrial Revolution, the bizarre double suicide of the Rusk twins and the violent Cramp Shipyard strike. With a collection of his "The Rest Is History" columns from the Fishtown Star, local historian Kenneth Milano chronicles little-known tales from the Speakeasy War of 1890 to stories of seldom-recognized hometown hero Eddie Stanky, who went on to play for the 1951 New York Giants. Join Milano as he journeys into the secret history of two of the city's oldest neighborhoods.

Lost Coal Country of Northeastern Pennsylvania documents the region's disappearing anthracite history, which shaped the legacy of the United States of America and the industrial revolution.

The coal mines, breakers, coal miners' homes, and railroads have all steadily disappeared. With only one coal breaker left in the entire state, it was time to record what would soon be lost. Unfortunately, one piece of history that persists is underground fires that ravage communities like Centralia. Blazing for over 50 years, the flames of Centralia will not be doused anytime soon. Images featured in the book include the St. Nicholas coal breaker, Huber coal breaker, Steamtown National Historic Site, Lackawanna Coal Mine Tour, Eckley Miners' Village, Centralia, and the Knox Mine disaster. A hybrid history book and travel guide, Lost Coal Country of Northeastern Pennsylvania is one final recounting of what is gone and what still remains.

Venture into flora and fauna of Pennsylvania's Moraine State Park and uncover the hidden histories behind its natural treasures.

About 20,000 years ago, the late Wisconsinan glaciation reached its maximum extent. Glacial deposits identify the moraine, or farthest area covered by the glacier. Muddy Creek was a north-flowing stream that was blocked by the south-advancing glacier, forming a huge lake that lasted until the glacier dam began to retreat. The lake rapidly drained, eventually exposing the vast Muddy Creek basin. Dr. Frank Preston envisioned recreating the ancient glacial lake and worked with the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy to begin the project that became 16,725-acre Moraine State Park. Its centerpiece, man-made Lake Arthur and the surrounds, provide outstanding outdoor recreation and relaxation opportunities.

Historian Thomas Keels tells many ribald stories in his book, ""Wicked Philadelphia: Sin in the City of Brotherly Love,"" including various methods of body snatching and murder. --Marty Moss-Coane, WHYY-FM

Prim and proper Philadelphia has been rocked by the clash between excessive vice and social virtue since its citizens burned the city's biggest brothel in 1800. With tales of grave robbers in South Philadelphia and harlots in Franklin Square, Wicked Philadelphia reveals the shocking underbelly of the City of Brotherly Love. In one notorious scam, a washerwoman masqueraded as the fictional Spanish countess Anita de Bettencourt for two decades, bilking millions from victims and even fooling the government of Spain. From the 1843 media frenzy that ensued after an aristocrat abducted a young girl to a churchyard transformed into a brothel (complete with a carousel), local author Thomas H. Keels unearths Philadelphia's most scintillating scandals and corrupt characters in this rollicking history.