BiblioVault - Books about Middle Atlantic (DC, DE, MD, NJ, NY, PA)

Bagpipe Brothers: The FDNY Band's True Story of Tragedy, Mourning, and Recovery
Kerry Sheridan
Rutgers University Press, 2004
Library of Congress ML421.F39S54 2004 | Dewey Decimal 788.490607471

After the 9/11 World Trade Center terrorist attacks, New York City's Emerald Society Bagpipe Band of firefighter-musicians took out their instruments and prepared to bury their dead--343 brothers in duty and in blood. Many firefighters alternated between playing their instruments at funerals and digging for the missing in the rubble of Ground Zero. The Irish American tradition of funeral bagpiping became the sound of mourning for an entire nation.

Bagpipe Brothers tells the unforgettable story of four firefighters in the band, who struggled to bring peace to their families and themselves while searching for the dead, coping with the endless round of funerals, and rethinking the meaning of faith. Their experiences illustrate the grief and recovery of the nation in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.

Kerry Sheridan has written the first book to cover the ordeal of the massive number of funerals, the importance of recovering bodies in Irish American culture, and the bagpiping ritual, both traditional and modern.

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The Baltimore Book: New Views of Local History
Linda Shopes
Temple University Press, 1993
Library of Congress F189.B157B342 1991 | Dewey Decimal 975.26

Baltimore has a long, colorful history that traditionally has been focused on famous men, social elites, and patriotic events. The Baltimore Book is both a history of "the other Baltimore" and a tour guide to places in the city that are important to labor, African American, and women's history. The book grew out of a popular local bus tour conducted by public historians, the People's History Tour of Baltimore, that began in 1982. This book records and adds sites to that tour; provides maps, photographs, and contemporary documents; and includes interviews with some of the uncelebrated people whose experiences as Baltimoreans reflect more about the city than Francis Scott Key ever did.

The tour begins at the B&O Railroad Station at Camden Yards, site of the railroad strike of 1877, moves on to Hampden-Woodbury, the mid-19th century cotton textile industry's company town, and stops on the way to visit Evergreen House and to hear the narratives of ex-slaves. We travel to Old West Baltimore, the late 19th-century center of commerce and culture for the African American community; Fells Point; Sparrows Point; the suburbs; Federal Hill; and Baltimore's "renaissance" at Harborplace. Interviews with community activists, civil rights workers, Catholic Workers, and labor union organizers bring color and passion to this historical tour. Specific labor struggles, class and race relations, and the contributions of women to Baltimore's development are emphasized at each stop.

In the series Critical Perspectives on the Past, edited by Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier, and Roy Rosenzweig.

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Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a U.S. City
Edited by P. Nicole King, Kate Drabinski, and Joshua Clark Davis
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Library of Congress HT395.U63.B35 2019 | Dewey Decimal 307.76097526

Nicknamed both “Mobtown” and “Charm City” and located on the border of the North and South, Baltimore is a city of contradictions. From media depictions in The Wire to the real-life trial of police officers for the murder of Freddie Gray, Baltimore has become a quintessential example of a struggling American city. Yet the truth about Baltimore is far more complicated—and more fascinating.

To help untangle these apparent paradoxes, the editors of Baltimore Revisited have assembled a collection of over thirty experts from inside and outside academia. Together, they reveal that Baltimore has been ground zero for a slew of neoliberal policies, a place where inequality has increased as corporate interests have eagerly privatized public goods and services to maximize profits. But they also uncover how community members resist and reveal a long tradition of Baltimoreans who have fought for social justice.

The essays in this collection take readers on a tour through the city’s diverse neighborhoods, from the Lumbee Indian community in East Baltimore to the crusade for environmental justice in South Baltimore. Baltimore Revisited examines the city’s past, reflects upon the city’s present, and envisions the city’s future.

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Baltimore Sports: Stories from Charm City
Daniel A. Nathan
University of Arkansas Press, 2016
Library of Congress GV584.5.B35B36 2016

To read a sample chapter, visit www.uapress.com.

Baltimore is the birthplace of Francis Scott Key’s “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the incomparable Babe Ruth, and the gold medalist Michael Phelps. It’s a one-of-a-kind town with singular stories, well-publicized challenges, and also a rich sporting history. Baltimore Sports: Stories from Charm City chronicles the many ways that sports are an integral part of Baltimore’s history and identity and part of what makes the city unique, interesting, and, for some people, loveable.

Wide ranging and eclectic, the essays included here cover not only the Orioles and the Ravens, but also lesser-known Baltimore athletes and teams. Toots Barger, known as the “Queen of the Duckpins,” makes an appearance. So do the Dunbar Poets, considered by some to be the greatest high-school basketball team ever.

Bringing together the work of both historians and journalists, including Michael Olesker, former Baltimore Sun columnist, and Rafael Alvarez, who was named Baltimore’s Best Writer by Baltimore Magazine in 2014, Baltimore Sports illuminates Charm City through this fascinating exploration of its teams, fans, and athletes.

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Battle for Bed-Stuy: The Long War on Poverty in New York City
Michael Woodsworth
Harvard University Press, 2016
Library of Congress HC108.N7.W66 2016 | Dewey Decimal 362.5561097471

Half a century after the launch of the War on Poverty, its complex origins remain obscure. Battle for Bed-Stuy reinterprets President Lyndon Johnson’s much-debated crusade from the perspective of its foot soldiers in New York City, showing how 1960s antipoverty programs were rooted in a rich local tradition of grassroots activism and policy experiments.

Bedford-Stuyvesant, a Brooklyn neighborhood housing 400,000 mostly black, mostly poor residents, was often labeled “America’s largest ghetto.” But in its elegant brownstones lived a coterie of home-owning professionals who campaigned to stem disorder and unify the community. Acting as brokers between politicians and the street, Bed-Stuy’s black middle class worked with city officials in the 1950s and 1960s to craft innovative responses to youth crime, physical decay, and capital flight. These partnerships laid the groundwork for the federal Community Action Program, the controversial centerpiece of the War on Poverty. Later, Bed-Stuy activists teamed with Senator Robert Kennedy to create America’s first Community Development Corporation, which pursued housing renewal and business investment.

Bed-Stuy’s antipoverty initiatives brought hope amid dark days, reinforced the social safety net, and democratized urban politics by fostering citizen participation in government. They also empowered women like Elsie Richardson and Shirley Chisholm, who translated their experience as community organizers into leadership positions. Yet, as Michael Woodsworth reveals, these new forms of black political power, though exercised in the name of poor people, often did more to benefit middle-class homeowners. Bed-Stuy today, shaped by gentrification and displacement, reflects the paradoxical legacies of midcentury reform.

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The Battle For Homestead, 1880-1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel
Paul Krause
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992
Library of Congress HD5325.I5 1892H53 1992 | Dewey Decimal 331.892869142097

Paul Krause calls upon the methods and insights of labor history, intellectual history, anthropology, and the history of technology to situate the events of the lockout and their significance in the broad context of America’s Guilded Age. Utilizing extensive archival material, much of it heretofore unknown, he reconstructs the social, intellectual, and political climate of the burgeoning post-Civil War steel industry.

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The Battle of Gloucester, 1777
Garry Wheeler Stone
Westholme Publishing, 2022

The Marquis de Lafayette, a nineteen-year-old French youth, arrived in Philadelphia at the end of July 1777. He was a rich aristocrat, but he was unpretentious, charming, and eager to learn. Introduced to George Washington, he joined the commander-in-chief at the Battle of Brandywine in September, where he proved that he was courageous. Soon after, the British occupied Philadelphia and prepared to control the Delaware River, vital as a supply route. In November, the marquis volunteered to go to New Jersey with Major General Nathanael Greene and a detachment sent to defend Fort Mercer, a Delaware River fort controlling shipping access to Philadelphia. Mercer was threatened by an approaching enemy column led by Lord Charles Cornwallis. The Continentals were unable to reach Fort Mercer in time to save it, but Lafayette had ridden ahead of Greene to reconnoiter. He discovered a 350-man picket of German riflemen (jägers) guarding Cornwallis’s camp, and with ten light dragoons, 150 riflemen from Daniel Morgan’s Rifle Corps, and perhaps 200 New Jersey militia, he attacked. In forty-five minutes, Lafayette’s little band drove the jägers back two and a half miles, almost to Cornwallis’s camp. When the news of Lafayette’s small victory reached the Continental Congress at York, Pennsylvania, the delegates were elated—this was the only good news amid the gloom over the loss of Philadelphia and control of the Delaware River. Massachusetts delegate James Lovell relayed a glowing account of the skirmish to John Adams, concluding with “Genl. Greene says the Marquis seems determined to court Danger. I wish more were so determined.”
In The Battle of Gloucester, 1777, archaeological historian Garry Wheeler Stone, with the assistance of historian Paul W. Schopp, recreates this minor but important clash during the Philadelphia campaign. Relying on both primary source documents and the latest archaeological interpretations, the authors have determined the course of this fascinating “battle,” as Benjamin Franklin later proclaimed it to be. As a result of this action, when Washington requested that Lafayette be given a division, Congress agreed. On December 4, 1777, the marquis, promoted to major-general, took command of the brigades of Generals Woodford and Scott to begin what would be a glorious career in American service.

Small Battles: Military History as Local History
Mark Edward Lender and James Kirby Martin, Series Editors
Small Battles offers a fresh and important new perspective on the story of America’s early conflicts. It was the small battles, not the clash of major armies, that truly defined the fighting during the colonial wars, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the hostilities on the frontiers. This is dramatic military history as seen through the prism of local history—history with a depth of detail, a feeling for place, people, and the impact of battle and its consequences that the story of major battles often cannot convey. The Small Battles series focuses on America’s military conflicts at their most intimate and revealing level.

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Battlefield Pennsylvania: A Guide to the Keystone State's Most Sacred Ground
Brady J. Crytzer
Westholme Publishing, 2018
Library of Congress F149.C89 2018 | Dewey Decimal 974.8

A History of Pennsylvania through Places of Conflict, from George Washington’s Fort Necessity to the Flight 93 Memorial
Pennsylvania is a battlefield. Fort Necessity. Brandywine. Gettysburg. The Homestead Strike. Flight 93. In many ways battlefields are like scars on the landscape. They remind us that history is real, and their effects stay with us forever. In Battlefield Pennsylvania: A Guide to the Keystone State’s Most Sacred Ground, award-winning historian Brady J. Crytzer takes the reader on a fascinating tour of over three hundred years of Pennsylvania history through twenty-nine of the state’s most significant battlegrounds, based on his popular Pennsylvania Cable Network television program. The author shows that debates and neighborly disputes have been present throughout the history of William Penn’s “Peaceable Kingdom,” but that battles are not the natural resolution of these conflicts; they are a failure of the system. Understanding how these systems break down and descend into violence and chaos is one of the most important purposes of this book. When the forces of Britain and France met on the battleground of North America, they each waged war in the name of a vision—a defense of the future, not merely the present. The same can be said for the Indian warriors and settlers of the backcountry, and the striking workers of the industrial age. When the young men of the American Civil War era donned the Butternut and Blue, they were not just fighting over a hill or a railroad junction, but for an American future. Illustrated with maps and period and contemporary images, Battlefield Pennsylvania presents each event through background information, a description of the battle itself, the legacy of the battle, and what a visitor can see today. Rather than viewing preserved battlefields as a hollow tribute to days gone by, the author demonstrates that these sites are a great inheritance provided by past generations, and just as they entrusted them to us, we will entrust them to future generations as well.

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Battleground New Jersey: Vanderbilt, Hague, and Their Fight for Justice
Johnson, Nelson
Rutgers University Press, 2014
Library of Congress KF373.V3J64 2014 | Dewey Decimal 347.749035092

New Jersey’s legal system was plagued with injustices from the time the system was established through the mid-twentieth century. In Battleground New Jersey, historian and author of Boardwalk Empire, Nelson Johnson chronicles reforms to the system through the dramatic stories of Arthur T. Vanderbilt—the first chief justice of the state’s modern-era Supreme Court—and Frank Hague—legendary mayor of Jersey City. Two of the most powerful politicians in twentieth-century America, Vanderbilt and Hague clashed on matters of public policy and over the need to reform New Jersey’s antiquated and corrupt court system. Their battles made headlines and eventually led to legal reform, transforming New Jersey’s court system into one of the most highly regarded in America.

Vanderbilt’s power came through mastering the law, serving as dean of New York University Law School, preaching court reform as president of the American Bar Association, and organizing suburban voters before other politicians recognized their importance. Hague, a remarkably successful sixth-grade dropout, amassed his power by exploiting people’s foibles, crushing his rivals, accumulating a fortune through extortion, subverting the law, and taking care of business in his own backyard. They were different ethnically, culturally, and temperamentally, but they shared the goals of power.

Relying upon previously unexamined personal files of Vanderbilt, Johnson’s engaging chronicle reveals the hatred the lawyer had for the mayor and the lengths Vanderbilt went to in an effort to destroy Hague. Battleground New Jersey illustrates the difficulty in adapting government to a changing world, and the vital role of independent courts in American society.

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The Battles of Connecticut Farms and Springfield, 1780
Edward G. Lengel
Westholme Publishing, 2020

The Final Significant Clashes of the Revolutionary War in the North
By the spring of 1780, American fortunes were at a low point. Charleston, South Carolina, fell to British forces on May 12. At Morristown, New Jersey, George Washington’s army struggled to recover from the worst winter of the entire war. The national economy failing, his troops short of supplies and on the verge of mutiny, Washington prepared for an all-out assault on British-occupied New York City with the support of approaching French naval and land forces under General Rochambeau. The planned attack was a gamble born of desperation. Washington felt he had to risk it, or face certain defeat. In New York City, German General Wilhelm von Knyphausen sensed opportunity. Commanding there in the absence of British General Henry Clinton, who was on his way back from Charleston, Knyphausen hoped that a quick strike into New Jersey could deliver a staggering blow to Washington’s weakened army. The June 7–8 Battle of Connecticut Farms, however, found American militia and Continentals—mostly soldiers of General William Maxwell’s New Jersey Brigade—to be shockingly stalwart. In a series of sharp engagements, fought hard on both sides, the Americans convinced Knyphausen to turn back. Clinton, fresh from his victory in the South, tried again on June 23 to end the war. His advance into New Jersey, intended to draw Washington into the open and perhaps capture Morristown, culminated in the Battle of Springfield. Once again, though, Washington’s hardened soldiers, led by men like Colonel Israel Angell, Colonel Elias Dayton, and Major “Light Horse Harry” Lee, fought Clinton’s forces to a standstill.
The Battles for Connecticut Farms and Springfield, 1780, by distinguished historian Edward G. Lengel, chronicles these two important battles that marked a turning of the tide in the Revolutionary War. Drawing on newly available primary sources, the author presents a fresh and engaging interpretation of these events, which exposed King George III’s declining military fortunes in North America even as they revealed the resilience of George Washington’s army.

The Small Battles Series: Military History as Local History
Mark Edward Lender and James Kirby Martin, Series Editors
Small Battles offers a fresh and important new perspective on the story of America’s early conflicts. It was the small battles, not the clash of major armies, that truly defined the fighting during the colonial wars, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the hostilities on the frontiers. This is dramatic military history as seen through the prism of local history—history with a depth of detail, a feeling for place, people, and the impact of battle and its consequences that the story of major battles often cannot convey. The Small Battles Series focuses on America’s military conflicts at their most intimate and revealing level.

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The Battles of Germantown: Effective Public History in America
David W. Young
Temple University Press, 2019
Library of Congress F159.G3Y68 2019 | Dewey Decimal 974.811

2020 Philip S. Klein Book Prize Winner, Pennsylvania Historical Association

Known as America’s most historic neighborhood, the Germantown section of Philadelphia (established in 1683) has distinguished itself by using public history initiatives to forge community. Progressive programs about ethnic history, postwar urban planning, and civil rights have helped make historic preservation and public history meaningful. The Battles of Germantown considers what these efforts can tell us about public history’s practice and purpose in the United States.

Author David Young, a neighborhood resident who worked at Germantown historic sites for decades, uses his practitioner’s perspective to give examples of what he calls “effective public history.” The Battles of Germantown shows how the region celebrated “Negro Achievement Week” in 1928 and, for example, how social history research proved that the neighborhood’s Johnson House was a station on the Underground Railroad. These encounters have useful implications for addressing questions of race, history, and memory, as well as issues of urban planning and economic revitalization.

Germantown’s historic sites use public history and provide leadership to motivate residents in an area challenged by job loss, population change, and institutional inertia. The Battles of Germantown illustrates how understanding and engaging with the past can benefit communities today.

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Becoming Philadelphia: How an Old American City Made Itself New Again
Inga Saffron
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Library of Congress NA2543.S6S228 2020 | Dewey Decimal 720.974811

Once dismissed as a rusting industrial has-been—the “Next Detroit”—Philadelphia has enjoyed an astonishing comeback in the 21st century. Over the past two decades, Inga Saffron has served as the premier chronicler of the city’s physical transformation as it emerged from a half century of decline. Through her Pulitzer Prize-winning columns on architecture and urbanism in the Philadelphia Inquirer, she has tracked the city’s revival on a weekly basis.

Becoming Philadelphia collects the best of Saffron’s work, plus a new introduction reflecting on the stunning changes the city has undergone. A fearless crusader who is also a seasoned reporter, Saffron ranges beyond the usual boundaries of architectural criticism to explore how big money and politics intersect with design, profoundly shaping our everyday experience of city life. Even as she celebrates Philadelphia’s resurgence, she considers how it finds itself grappling with the problems of success: gentrification, poverty, privatization, and the unequal distribution of public services.

What emerges in these 80 pieces is a remarkable narrative of a remarkable time. The proverbial first draft of history, these columns tell the story of how a great city shape-shifted before our very eyes.

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Beekmantown, New York: Forest Frontier to Farm Community
By Philip L. White
University of Texas Press, 1979

This volume reports in detail how a particular portion of the American wilderness developed into a settled farming community. To fully comprehend the history of the American people in the early national period, an understanding of this transformation from forest to community—and the pattern of life within such communities where the vast majority of the people live—is essential. Three major conclusions emerge from Philip L. White’s study of Beekmantown, New York. First, the economic advantages of the frontier attracted a first generation of settlers relatively high in social and economic status, but the disappearance of frontier conditions brought a second generation of settlers appreciably lower in status. Second, White rejects the romantic notion that the frontier fostered equality and argues instead that the frontier’s economic opportunities fostered inequality. Finally, in contrast to revisionist arguments, he affirms that in Beekmantown the Jacksonian period does indeed warrant characterization as the era of the “common man.” This book represents a model in community history: the narrative is full of human interest; the scholarship is prodigious; the applications are universal.

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Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880-1914
Tom Goyens
University of Illinois Press, 2007
Library of Congress HX846.N7G69 2007 | Dewey Decimal 320.570893107471

Understanding an infamous political movement's grounding in festivity and defiance

Beer and Revolution examines the rollicking life and times of German immigrant anarchists in New York City from 1880 to 1914. Offering a new approach to an often misunderstood political movement, Tom Goyens puts a human face on anarchism and reveals a dedication less to bombs than to beer halls and saloons where political meetings, public lectures, discussion circles, fundraising events, and theater groups were held.

Goyens brings to life the fascinating relationship between social space and politics by examining how the intersection of political ideals, entertainment, and social activism embodied anarchism not as an abstract idea, but as a chosen lifestyle for thousands of women and men. He shows how anarchist social gatherings were themselves events of defiance and resistance that aimed at establishing anarchism as an alternative lifestyle through the combination of German working-class conviviality and a dedication to the principle that coercive authority was not only unnecessary, but actually damaging to full and free human development as well. Goyens also explores the broader circumstances in both the United States and Germany that served as catalysts for the emergence of anarchism in urban America and how anarchist activism was hampered by police surveillance, ethnic insularity, and a widening gulf between the anarchists' message and the majority of American workers.

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Beethoven in Beijing: Stories from the Philadelphia Orchestra's Historic Journey to China
Jennifer Lin
Temple University Press, 2022
Library of Congress ML28.P5P629 2022 | Dewey Decimal 784.206051

In 1973, Western music was banned in the People’s Republic of China. But in a remarkable breakthrough cultural exchange, the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted a tour of closed-off China, becoming the first American orchestra to visit the communist nation. Jennifer Lin’s Beethoven in Beijing provides a fabulous photo-rich oral history of this boundary-breaking series of concerts the orchestra performed under famed conductor Eugene Ormandy.

Lin draws from interviews, personal diaries, and news accounts to give voice to the American and Chinese musicians, diplomats, journalists, and others who participated in and witnessed this historic event. Beethoven in Beijing is filled with glorious images as well as anecdotes ranging from amusing sidewalk Frisbee sessions and acupuncture treatments for sore musicians to a tense encounter involving Madame Mao dictating which symphony was to be played at a concert.

A companion volume to the film of the same name, Beethoven in Beijing shows how this 1973 tour came at the dawn of a resurgence of interest in classical music in China—now a vital source of revenue for touring orchestras.

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Before Renaissance: Planning in Pittsburgh, 1889-1943
John F. Bauman
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006
Library of Congress HT168.P48B38 2006 | Dewey Decimal 307.12160974886

Before Renaissance examines a half-century epoch during which planners, public officials, and civic leaders engaged in a dialogue about the meaning of planning and its application for improving life in Pittsburgh.

Planning emerged from the concerns of progressive reformers and businessmen over the social and physical problems of the city. In the Steel City enlightened planners such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and Frederick Bigger pioneered the practical approach to reordering the chaotic urban-industrial landscape. In the face of obstacles that included the embedded tradition of privatism, rugged topography, inherited built environment, and chronic political fragmentation, they established a tradition of modern planning in Pittsburgh.

Over the years a mélange of other distinguished local and national figures joined in the planning dialogue, among them the park founder Edward Bigelow, political bosses Christopher Magee and William Flinn, mayors George Guthrie and William Magee, industrialists Andrew Carnegie and Howard Heinz, financier Richard King Mellon, and planning luminaries Charles Mulford Robinson, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., Harland Bartholomew, Robert Moses, and Pittsburgh’s Frederick Bigger. The famed alliance of Richard King Mellon and Mayor David Lawrence, which heralded the Renaissance, owed a great debt to Pittsburgh’s prior planning experience.

John Bauman and Edward Muller recount the city’s long tradition of public/private partnerships as an important factor in the pursuit of orderly and stable urban growth. Before Renaissance provides insights into the major themes, benchmarks, successes, and limitations that marked the formative days of urban planning. It defines Pittsburgh’s key role in the vanguard of the national movement and reveals the individuals and processes that impacted the physical shape and form of a city for generations to come.

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Beneath the Surface: Understanding Nature in the Mullica Valley Estuary
Kenneth W. Able
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Library of Congress QH105.N5 | Dewey Decimal 577.786

2021 winner of Non-fiction popular category: New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance

The Mullica Valley estuary and its watershed, formed over the last 10,000 years, are among the cleanest estuaries along the east coast of the United States. This 365,000-acre ecosystem benefits from a combination of protected watershed, low human population density, and general lack of extensive development. In Beneath the Surface, marine scientist Ken Able helps the reader penetrate the surface and gain insights into the kinds of habitats, animals, and plants that live there. Readers will gain a better understanding of the importance of these shallow waters; how the amount of salt in the water determines where animals and plants are found in estuaries; the day-night, seasonal, and annual variation in their occurrence; and how change is occurring as the result of climate variation. Throughout the book are insightful sidebars telling intimate stories of where various animals came from and where they are going as they travel through the estuary on their way to and from other portions of the east coast. Beneath the Surface emphasizes the kinds and importance of the animals and plants that live beneath the surface of this unique ecosystem.

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Bethlehem Steel: Builder and Arsenal of America
Kenneth Warren
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010
Library of Congress HD9519.B4W37 2008 | Dewey Decimal 338.76691420973

In the late 19th century, rails from Bethlehem Steel helped build the United States into the world's foremost economy. During the 1890s, Bethlehem became America's leading supplier of heavy armaments, and by 1914, it had pioneered new methods of structural steel manufacture that transformed urban skylines. Demand for its war materials during World War I provided the finance for Bethlehem to become the world's second-largest steel maker. As late as 1974, the company achieved record earnings of $342 million. But in the 1980s and 1990s, through wildly fluctuating times, losses outweighed gains, and Bethlehem struggled to downsize and reinvest in newer technologies. By 2001, in financial collapse, it reluctantly filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Two years later, International Steel Group acquired the company for $1.5 billion.

In Bethlehem Steel, Kenneth Warren presents an original and compelling history of a leading American company, examining the numerous factors contributing to the growth of this titan and those that eventually felled it—along with many of its competitors in the U.S. steel industry.
Warren considers the investment failures, indecision and slowness to abandon or restructure outdated “integrated” plants plaguing what had become an insular, inward-looking management group. Meanwhile competition increased from more economical “mini mills” at home and from new, technologically superior plants overseas, which drove world prices down, causing huge flows of imported steel into the United States.

Bethlehem Steel provides a fascinating case study in the transformation of a major industry from one of American dominance to one where America struggled to survive.

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Between Freedom and Equality: The History of an African American Family in Washington, DC
Barbara Boyle Torrey and Clara Myrick Green
Georgetown University Press
Library of Congress F205.N4T67 2021 | Dewey Decimal 975.3020922

An original history of six generations of an African American family living in Washington, DC

Between Freedom and Equality begins with the life of Capt. George Pointer, an enslaved African who purchased his freedom in 1793 while working for George Washington’s Potomac Company. It follows the lives of six generations of his descendants as they lived and worked on the banks of the Potomac, in the port of Georgetown, and in a rural corner of the nation’s capital. By tracing the story of one family and their experiences, Between Freedom and Equality offers a moving and inspiring look at the challenges that free African Americans have faced in Washington, DC, since the district’s founding.

The story begins with an 1829 letter from Pointer that is preserved today in the National Archives. Inspired by Pointer’s letter, authors Barbara Boyle Torrey and Clara Myrick Green began researching this remarkable man who was a boat captain and supervisory engineer for the Potomac canal system. What they discovered about the lives of Pointer and his family provides unique insight across two centuries of Washington, DC, history.

The Pointer family faced many challenges—the fragility of freedom in a slaveholding society, racism, wars, floods, and epidemics—but their refuge was the small farm they purchased in what is now Chevy Chase. However, in the early twentieth century, the DC government used eminent domain to force the sale of their farm and replaced it with an all-white school. Between Freedom and Equality grants Pointer and his descendants their long-overdue place in American history.

This book includes a foreword by historian Maurice Jackson exploring the significance of the Pointer family’s unique history in the capital. In another very personal foreword, James Fisher, an eighth-generation descendant of George Pointer, shares his complex emotions when he learned about his ancestors. Also featured in this important history is a facsimile and transcription of George Pointer’s original letter and a family tree.

Royalties from the sale of the book will go to Historic Chevy Chase DC (HCCDC), which has established a fund for promoting the legacy of George Pointer and his descendants.

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Beyond the City and the Bridge: East Asian Immigration in a New Jersey Suburb
Matsumoto, Noriko
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Library of Congress JV7039.F6M37 2018 | Dewey Decimal 304.874921

Winner of the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Author Award, Scholarly Non-fiction
Winner of the Richard P. McCormick Prize from the New Jersey Historical Association
Honorable Mention, 2019 American Sociological Association Book Award - Asia/Asian American Section

In recent decades, the American suburbs have become an important site for immigrant settlement. Beyond the City and the Bridge presents a case study of Fort Lee, Bergen County, on the west side of the George Washington Bridge connecting Manhattan and New Jersey. Since the 1970s, successive waves of immigrants from East Asia have transformed this formerly white community into one of the most diverse suburbs in the greater New York region. Fort Lee today has one of the largest concentrations of East Asians of any suburb on the East Coast, with Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans forming distinct communities while influencing the structure and everyday life of the borough. Noriko Matsumoto explores the rise of this multiethnic suburb—the complex processes of assimilation and reproduction of ethnicities, the changing social relationships, and the conditions under which such transformations have occurred.

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Big Steel: The First Century of the United States Steel Corporation 1901-2001
Kenneth Warren
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001
Library of Congress HD9519.U58W37 2001

At its formation in 1901, the United States Steel Corporation was the earth’s biggest industrial corporation, a wonder of the manufacturing world. Immediately it produced two thirds of America’s raw steel and thirty percent of the steel made worldwide. The behemoth company would go on to support the manufacturing superstructure of practically every other industry in America. It would create and sustain the economies of many industrial communities, especially Pittsburgh, employing more than a million people over the course of the century.

A hundred years later, the U.S. Steel Group of USX makes scarcely ten percent of the steel in the United States and just over one and a half percent of global output. Far from the biggest, the company is now considered the most efficient steel producer in the world. What happened between then and now, and why, is the subject of Big Steel, the first comprehensive history of the company at the center of America’s twentieth-century industrial life.

Granted privileged and unprecedented access to the U.S. Steel archives, Kenneth Warren has sifted through a long, complex business history to tell a compelling story. Its preeminent size was supposed to confer many advantages to U.S. Steel—economies of scale, monopolies of talent, etc. Yet in practice, many of those advantages proved illusory. Warren shows how, even in its early years, the company was out-maneuvered by smaller competitors and how, over the century, U.S. Steel’s share of the industry, by every measure, steadily declined.

Warren’s subtle analysis of years of internal decision making reveals that the company’s size and clumsy hierarchical structure made it uniquely difficult to direct and manage. He profiles the chairmen who grappled with this “lumbering giant,” paying particular attention to those who long ago created its enduring corporate culture—Charles M. Schwab, Elbert H. Gary, and Myron C. Taylor.

Warren points to the way U.S. Steel’s dominating size exposed it to public scrutiny and government oversight—a cautionary force. He analyzes the ways that labor relations affected company management and strategy. And he demonstrates how U.S. Steel suffered gradually, steadily, from its paradoxical ability to make high profits while failing to keep pace with the best practices. Only after the drastic pruning late in the century—when U.S. Steel reduced its capacity by two-thirds—did the company become a world leader in steel-making efficiency, rather than merely in size.

These lessons, drawn from the history of an extraordinary company, will enrich the scholarship of industry and inform the practice of business in the twenty-first century.

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Biking through History on the Great Allegheny Passage Trail
Edward K. Muller
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016 Dewey Decimal 974.87

The Great Allegheny Passage Trail is a world class biking, hiking, and recreational gateway that stretches nearly 150 miles from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Cumberland, Maryland, where it connects with the C&O Canal Towpath to reach Washington, DC. Showcasing all the natural beauty of the region, this former Indian path, trade route, military road, railway link, and portion of the original National Road is also a journey through American history.

The book’s engaging narrative is complemented by the nature photography of Paul g Wiegman and an extensive selection of historical illustrations, all of which reveal the stunning scenery and history of the biking trail. This book captures the essence of the trail as a journey through both time and space, one that evokes all of the heritage and beauty of a region that would grow to prosper and help forge a nation.

Formerly titled An Uncommon Passage: Traveling through History on the Great Allegheny Passage Trail, this is an updated paperback version with a revised introduction and new material that includes the completed trail area in the city of Pittsburgh.

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Bill Giles and Baseball
John B Lord
Temple University Press, 2014
Library of Congress GV865.G+ | Dewey Decimal 796.357092

Bill Giles oversaw one of the greatest eras of winning that the Philadelphia Phillies ever enjoyed. In Bill Giles and Baseball, John Lord chronicles Giles' remarkable career--which includes 44 years with the Phillies--to provide an insider's view of the business of the sport, which takes place off the field.

Based on extensive interviews, Bill Giles and Baseball spans Giles' life from his childhood growing up in the game to the tumultuous years he spent as the president and managing partner of the Phillies. Purchasing the team in 1981, when baseball experienced its first serious labor stoppages, Giles also watched baseball add franchises, grapple with franchise fees, realign the leagues, and restructure baseball's postseason. Yet Giles, the public face of the Phillies championship teams of 1980, 1983, and 1993, is best remembered for his critical role in creating innovative TV deals, and leading the efforts to build the Phillies' beautiful new ballpark.

A book about the business of baseball as seen through the eyes of one of the architects of the game, Bill Giles and Baseball captures the spectacle of the sport through fascinating behind-the-scenes stories of our national pastime.

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Biz Mackey, a Giant behind the Plate: The Story of the Negro League Star and Hall of Fame Catcher
Rich Westcott
Temple University Press, 2020
Library of Congress GV865.M219W47 2018 | Dewey Decimal 796.357092

“The best all-around catcher in black baseball history”—Cumberland Posey, Owner of the Homestead Grays

National Baseball Hall of Fame catcher James Raleigh “Biz” Mackey’s professional career spanned nearly three decades in the Negro Leagues and elsewhere. He distinguished himself as a defensive catcher who also had an impressive batting average and later worked as a manager of the Newark Eagles and the Baltimore Elite Giants.

Using archival materials and interviews with former Negro League players, baseball historian Rich Westcott chronicles the catcher’s life and remarkable career in Biz Mackey, a Giant behind the Plate as well as providing an in-depth look at Philadelphia Negro League history. Westcott traces Mackey’s childhood in Texas as the son of sharecroppers to his success on the baseball diamond where he displayed extraordinary defensive skills and an exceptional ability to hit and to handle pitchers. Mackey spent one third of his career playing in Philadelphia, winning championships with the Hilldale Daisies and the Philadelphia Stars. Mackey also mentored famed catcher Roy Campanella and had an unlikely role in the story of baseball’s development in Japan.

A celebrated ballplayer before African Americans were permitted to join Major League Baseball, Biz Mackey ranks as one of the top catchers ever to play the game. With Biz Mackey, he finally gets the biography he deserves.

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Black Georgetown Remembered: A History of Its Black Community from the Founding of “The Town of George” in 1751 to the Present Day, 30th Anniversary Edition
Kathleen Menzie Lesko
Georgetown University Press, 2021
Library of Congress F202.G3L47 2021 | Dewey Decimal 975.3

Georgetown's little-known Black heritage shaped a Washington, DC, community long associated with white power and privilege.

Black Georgetown Remembered reveals a rich but little-known history of the Georgetown Black community from the colonial period to the present. Drawing on primary sources, including oral interviews with past and current residents and extensive research in church and historical society archives, the authors record the hopes, dreams, disappointments, and successes of a vibrant neighborhood as it persevered through slavery and segregation, war and peace, prosperity and depression.

This thirtieth anniversary edition of Black Georgetown Remembered, first published in 1991, features more than two hundred illustrations, including portraits of prominent community leaders, sketches, maps, and nineteenth-century and contemporary photographs. A new chapter includes a conversation with former and current Georgetown residents reflecting on the community, past and present.

Black Georgetown Remembered is a compelling and inspiring journey through more than two hundred years of history. A one-of-a-kind book, it invites readers to share in the lives, dreams, aspirations, struggles, and triumphs of real people, to join them in their churches, at home, and on the street, and to consider how the unique heritage of this neighborhood intersects and contributes to broader themes in African American and Washington, DC, history and urban studies.

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Black New Jersey: 1664 to the Present Day
Graham Russell Gao Hodges
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Library of Congress E185.93.N54H64 2018 | Dewey Decimal 305.8960730749

Winner of the 2019 Richard P. McCormick Prize from the New Jersey Historical Commission

Black New Jersey tells the rich and complex story of the African American community’s remarkable accomplishments and the colossal obstacles they faced along the way. Drawing from rare archives, historian Graham Russell Gao Hodges brings to life the courageous black men and women who fought for their freedom and eventually built a sturdy and substantial middle class. He explores how the state’s unique mix of religious, artistic, and cultural traditions have helped to produce such world-renowned figures as Paul Robeson, Cory Booker, and Queen Latifah, as well as a host of lesser-known but equally influential New Jersey natives.

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Black Powder, White Lace: The du Pont Irish and Cultural Identity in Nineteenth-Century America
Margaret M. Mulrooney
University of Delaware Press, 2023
Library of Congress F172.B78M85 2023 | Dewey Decimal 305.89162074813

Twenty years ago, Margaret Mulrooney's history of the community of Irish immigrant workers at the du Pont powder yards, Black Powder, White Lace, was published to wide acclaim. Now, as much of the materials Mulrooney used in her research are now electronically available to the public, and as debates about immigration continue to rage, a new edition of the book is being published to remind readers of the rich materials available on the du Pont workers, and of Mulrooney's powerful conclusions about immigrant communities in America. Explosives work was dangerous, but the du Ponts provided a host of benefits to their workers. As a result, the Irish remained loyal to their employers, convinced by their everyday experiences that their interests and the du Ponts' were one and the same. Employing a wide array of sources, Mulrooney turns away from the worksite and toward the domestic sphere, revealing that powder mill families asserted their distinctive ethno-religious heritage at the same time as they embraced what U.S. capitalism had to offer.

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Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment
Michael Javen Fortner
Harvard University Press, 2015
Library of Congress HV9955.N7F67 2015 | Dewey Decimal 364.133650899607

Often seen as a political sop to the racial fears of white voters, aggressive policing and draconian sentencing for illegal drug possession and related crimes have led to the imprisonment of millions of African Americans—far in excess of their representation in the population as a whole. Michael Javen Fortner shows in this eye-opening account that these punitive policies also enjoyed the support of many working-class and middle-class blacks, who were angry about decline and disorder in their communities. Black Silent Majority uncovers the role African Americans played in creating today’s system of mass incarceration.

Current anti-drug policies are based on a set of controversial laws first adopted in New York in the early 1970s and championed by the state’s Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller. Fortner traces how many blacks in New York came to believe that the rehabilitation-focused liberal policies of the 1960s had failed. Faced with economic malaise and rising rates of addiction and crime, they blamed addicts and pushers. By 1973, the outcry from grassroots activists and civic leaders in Harlem calling for drastic measures presented Rockefeller with a welcome opportunity to crack down on crime and boost his political career. New York became the first state to mandate long prison sentences for selling or possessing narcotics.

Black Silent Majority lays bare the tangled roots of a pernicious system. America’s drug policies, while in part a manifestation of the conservative movement, are also a product of black America’s confrontation with crime and chaos in its own neighborhoods.

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The Black Student Protest Movement at Rutgers
Richard P. McCormick
Rutgers University Press, 1990
Library of Congress LD4756.M38 1990 | Dewey Decimal 378.1981

Richard P. McCormick has chronicled the black student protest movement at Rutgers University, from the 1960s to today. He examines the forces that produced the protest movement, the tactics that were employed, and the qualified gains that were achieved. He tells us about demonstrations, building occupations, committee hearings, and countless meetings, but he also paints portraits of the many student leaders who mobilized protest. This is the story of a lot of pain, some blunders, and some successes.

In the mid-sixties, the University established committees to recruit black students and to add more blacks to the faculty. These efforts produced only modest results. By 1968, there were still not enough black students on campus, but there were enough to create a political presence for the first time. They were committed to acting against the racism they perceived within the University. To respond to their protests, in March 1969 the Board of Governors passed a dramatically new and controversial policy to encourage disadvantaged students who lived in Camden, Newark, and New Brunswick to apply to Rutgers, where they would take college-preparatory classes as unmatriculated students, and then enter Rutgers as matriculated students. This program, never very successful, lasted only two years.

Unrest did not end with the sixties. During the seventies, black students sporadically voiced protests against what they perceived to be an unsupportive environment. During the eighties, black enrollment actually declined, as did the black graduation rate. In conclusion, McCormick points to the effort that has been made but even more to the effort that still needs to be made and the social cost of ignoring the problem.

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Boathouse Row: Waves of Change in the Birthplace of American Rowing
Dotty Brown
Temple University Press, 2016
Library of Congress GV796.B77 2016 | Dewey Decimal 797.1230974811

The history of Philadelphia’s Boathouse Row is both wide and deep.Dotty Brown, an avid rower and former editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, immersed herself in boathouse archives to provide a comprehensive history of rowing in Philadelphia. She takes readers behind the scenes to recount the era when rowing was the spectator sport of its time—and the subject of Thomas Eakins’ early artwork—through the heyday of the famed Kelly dynasty, and the fight for women to get the right to row. (Yes, it really was a fight, and it took generations to win.)

With more than 160 photographs, a third of them in full color, Boathouse Row chronicles the “waves of change” as various groups of different races, classes, and genders fought for access to water and the sport. Chapters also discuss the architectural one-upmanship that defined Boathouse Row after Frank Furness designed the stunning and eclectic Undine Barge Club, and the regattas that continue to take place today on the Schuylkill River, including the forgotten forces that propelled high school rowing.

Beautifully written and illustrated, Boathouse Row will be a keepsake for rowers and spectators alike.

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Bodies of Work: Civic Display and Labor in Industrial Pittsburgh
Edward Slavishak
Duke University Press, 2008
Library of Congress HD8085.P63S63 2008 | Dewey Decimal 305.562097488609

By the end of the nineteenth century, Pittsburgh emerged as a major manufacturing center in the United States. Its rise as a leading producer of steel, glass, and coal was fueled by machine technology and mass immigration, developments that fundamentally changed the industrial workplace. Because Pittsburgh’s major industries were almost exclusively male and renowned for their physical demands, the male working body came to symbolize multiple often contradictory narratives about strength and vulnerability, mastery and exploitation. In Bodies of Work, Edward Slavishak explores how Pittsburgh and the working body were symbolically linked in civic celebrations, the research of social scientists, the criticisms of labor reformers, advertisements, and workers’ self-representations. Combining labor and cultural history with visual culture studies, he chronicles a heated contest to define Pittsburgh’s essential character at the turn of the twentieth century, and he describes how that contest was conducted largely through the production of competing images.

Slavishak focuses on the workers whose bodies came to epitomize Pittsburgh, the men engaged in the arduous physical labor demanded by the city’s metals, glass, and coal industries. At the same time, he emphasizes how conceptions of Pittsburgh as quintessentially male limited representations of women in the industrial workplace. The threat of injury or violence loomed large for industrial workers at the turn of the twentieth century, and it recurs throughout Bodies of Work: in the marketing of artificial limbs, statistical assessments of the physical toll of industrial capitalism, clashes between labor and management, the introduction of workplace safety procedures, and the development of a statewide workmen’s compensation system.

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Bridges Over the Delaware River: A History of Crossings
Dale, Frank T.
Rutgers University Press, 2003
Library of Congress TG23.D35 2003 | Dewey Decimal 624.209749

When Washington made his famous crossing of the Delaware River, it is a shame he couldn't have invited local historian Frank T. Dale along for the ride. Dale could have suggested the easiest crossing points.

Fortunately for contemporary readers, Dale has written a fascinating book chronicling thirty-five of the most historic bridges crossing the Delaware, some of which have served the residents of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York for almost two centuries. Many of us take these bridges for granted as we speed across, impatient to reach our destination, but their histories are too interesting to ignore.

Dale brings us the stories behind each bridge, covering design, engineering, ownership, finances, and politics. He chronicles the life of each, from the original construction, through modifications, and, sometimes, through the bridges' multiple destructions and reconstructions. Along the way, Dale recounts the history of the area surrounding each bridge, including the demise of ferry services, reasons why each bridge was built, politics surrounding construction, debates over public versus privately owned bridges, and stories of the floods and fires that threatened not only the bridges, but the local residents. Dozens of rare photos give readers a captivating window back into the past.

These fine old structures have become integral parts of Delaware River life and have an exciting past of their own. Bridges over the Delaware River will ensure that their legacies endure.

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The Bronx: The Ultimate Guide to New York City's Beautiful Borough
Ultan, Lloyd
Rutgers University Press, 2015
Library of Congress F128.68.B8U578 2015 | Dewey Decimal 917.4727504

Often overlooked by most tourists and locals alike, the Bronx—one of five boroughs that comprise the city of New York—is rich in cultural and historical attractions. From the Bronx Zoo (the largest urban zoo in the United States) to the New York Botanical Garden (one of the most visited botanical gardens in the world), this borough has something for everyone. Visitors can explore historical locations (including where George Washington slept and where Edgar Allan Poe lived and worked), watch a game in one of the most famous baseball stadiums in the United States—Yankee Stadium—and sample delicious Italian food in New York’s real “Little Italy” on Arthur Avenue and New England style seafood at City Island along the edge of Long Island Sound. Author and foremost historian of the Bronx Lloyd Ultan and educator Shelley Olson have teamed up to create a handy guidebook with detailed maps that will provide all the information prospective visitors need for planning their adventures to famous and little-known sites, including the hours, admission fees, and directions to featured attractions.

The Bronx—which includes thirty-six color photographs—provides visitors with informative chapters on more than twelve of the borough’s extraordinary destinations as well as self-guided walking tours of some of the most ethnically, architecturally, and historically diverse neighborhoods. History buffs will find beautifully preserved eighteenth- and nineteenth-century homes, the Hall of Fame for Great Americans (which pays homage to many familiar faces in American history), and Woodlawn Cemetery (the final resting place for prominent Americans including Duke Ellington, Joseph Pulitzer, Gloria Vanderbilt Whitney, and Thomas Nast). In addition to the botanical garden, nature lovers can enjoy the beautiful Pelham Bay Park and Van Cortlandt Park. The Bronx also highlights the surprising number of art galleries, museums, and performance venues that visitors are sure to enjoy, further demonstrating the borough’s cultural prominence. .

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The Brooklyn Experience: The Ultimate Guide to Neighborhoods & Noshes, Culture & the Cutting Edge
Freudenheim, Ellen
Rutgers University Press, 2016
Library of Congress F129.B7F735 2016 | Dewey Decimal 917.472304

From Paris to Rio, everyone’s curious about hot, new Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Experience, Ellen Freudenheim’s fourth comprehensive Brooklyn guidebook, offers a true insider’s guide, complete with photographs, itineraries, and insights into one of the most creative, dynamic cities in the modern world.

Walk over the Brooklyn Bridge at dawn or sunset, discover thirty-eight unique Brooklyn neighborhoods, and experience the borough like a native. Find out where to go to the beach and to eat great pizza, what to do with the kids, how to enjoy free and cheap activities, and where to savor Brooklyn’s famous cuisines. Visit cool independent shops, greenmarkets, festivals, and delve into the vibrant new cultural scene at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Barclays Center, and the lively exploding neighborhoods of DUMBO, Williamsburg, and Bushwick.

Included in the book are essays and the pithy, sometimes funny comments of sixty cultural, literary, and culinary movers and shakers, culled from exclusive interviews with experts from the James Beard Foundation to the cofounder of the famous Brooklyn Book Festival, as well as MacArthur “genius” award winners, to young entrepreneurs, hipsters, and activists, all of whom have something to say about Brooklyn’s stunning renaissance. Neighborhood profiles are rich in user-friendly information and details, including movies, celebrities, and novels associated with each neighborhood. There are also 800 listings of great restaurants, bars, shops, parks, cultural institutions, and historical sites, complete with contact information.

Targeting the independent, curious traveler, The Brooklyn Experience includes a dozen “do-it-yourself” tours, including a visit to Woody Allen’s childhood neighborhood, and amazing Revolutionary and Civil War sites.

Freudenheim draws clear—and sometimes surprising—connections between old and new Brooklyn. Written by an author with an astounding knowledge of all Brooklyn has to offer, The Brooklyn Experience will guide both first-time and repeat visitors, and will be a fun resource for Brooklynites who enjoy exploring their own hometown.

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Building a Revolutionary State: The Legal Transformation of New York, 1776-1783
Howard Pashman
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Library of Congress F123.P43 2018 | Dewey Decimal 974.703

How does a popular uprising transform itself from the disorder of revolution into a legal system that carries out the daily administration required to govern? Americans faced this question during the Revolution as colonial legal structures collapsed under the period’s disorder. Yet by the end of the war, Americans managed to rebuild their courts and legislatures, imbuing such institutions with an authority that was widely respected. This remarkable transformation came about in unexpected ways. Howard Pashman here studies the surprising role played by property redistribution—seizing it from Loyalists and transferring it to supporters of independence—in the reconstruction of legal order during the Revolutionary War.

Building a Revolutionary State looks closely at one state, New York, to understand the broader question of how legal structures emerged from an insurgency. By examining law as New Yorkers experienced it in daily life during the war, Pashman reconstructs a world of revolutionary law that prevailed during America’s transition to independence. In doing so, Pashman explores a central paradox of the revolutionary era: aggressive enforcement of partisan property rules actually had stabilizing effects that allowed insurgents to build legal institutions that enjoyed popular support. Tracing the transformation from revolutionary disorder to legal order, Building a New Revolutionary State gives us a radically fresh way to understand the emergence of new states.

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Building Drexel: The University and Its City 1891-2016
Richardson Dilworth
Temple University Press, 2016
Library of Congress LD1725.D62B85 2016 | Dewey Decimal 378.74811

Published in conjunction with Drexel University’s 125th anniversary, Building Drexel chronicles the founding of the university by Anthony J. Drexel through to the present day. The editors and contributors create a prismatic discussion of the university and its evolution.

Richly illustrated chapters cover the architectural history of notable Drexel buildings; the role of Drexel in Philadelphia’s modern history; its Greek life; sports—particularly Drexel’s history in the Big 5; and each of the university’s schools and colleges. There is a history of the medical college and law school, plus the creation of new schools such as those of biomedical engineering, science and health systems.

Building Drexel also documents the civil rights history of Drexel and its urban planning history in relation to the racially diverse Powelton Village and Mantua neighborhoods it borders. This commemorative volume shows the development of the university both in the city and in the world.

Contributors include: Lloyd Ackert, Cordelia Frances Biddle, Paula Marantz Cohen, Donna Marie De Carolis, Roger Dennis, Gloria Donnelly, Kevin D. Egan, Alissa Falcone, David Fenske, John A. Fry, Stephen F. Gambescia, Marla J. Gold, Charles Haas, Kathy Harvatt, Daniel Johnson, Jeannine Keefer, Larry Keiser, Michael Kelley, Jason Ludwig, Jonson Miller, Julie Mostov, Danuta A. Nitecki, Anthony M. Noce, Steven J. Peitzman, David Raizman, Tiago Saraiva, Amy E. Slaton, Nathaniel Stanton, Virginia Theerman, Laura Valenti, James Wolfinger, Eric A. Zillmer, and the editors.

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By the Beautiful Sea: The Rise and High Times of That Great American Resort, Atlantic City
Funnell, Charles
Rutgers University Press, 1983
Library of Congress HN80.A83F85 1983 | Dewey Decimal 974.985

The Rise and High Times of That Great American Resort, Atlantic City

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By Wind and Iron: Naval Campaigns in the Champlain Valley, 1665–1815
Michael Laramie
Westholme Publishing, 2015

Contested for More than a Century, a Natural Invasion Route into the Heart of North America
For more than 150 years, the natural invasion route along the waterways of the Champlain and Richelieu valleys into northeastern North America was among the most fiercely contested in the history of the continent. Whether the French and their Indian allies attacking British forts and settlements during the Seven Years’ War, the American Continentals striking north into Canada during the American Revolution, or the British battling French and later American forces in these wars and the War of 1812, it was clear to policy makers in Quebec, London, Paris, Philadelphia, and Washington that whoever controlled this corridor and its lakes and rivers, controlled the heart of the continent. In By Wind and Iron: Naval Campaigns in the Champlain Valley, 1665–1815, Michael G. Laramie details the maritime history of this region from the first French fortifications along the Richelieu River in the late seventeenth century through the tremendous American victory over the British at the Battle of Plattsburgh on Lake Champlain in 1814. Using period letters, journals, and other primary source materials, the author examines the northeastern waterways and their tributaries within the framework of the soldiers and sailors who faced the perils of the campaigns, while at the same time clarifying the key role played by this region in the greater struggle for North America and American independence.
In support of the narrative, the book also contains appendices that include after action reports from various fleet commanders, tables of fleet strengths, additional battle maps, a glossary, and a dictionary of lake warships with notes on vessel types, typical armament, construction, deployment, and fates.

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