Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Pittsburgh (PA)
The nation was torn apart by disastrous riots in a hundred cities and towns, with lasting results.
What Rust Belt? Pittsburgh shows how a city can lose its industry but retain its soul.
Most cities have some activity that’s mandatory for out-of-towners. Every tourist in San Francisco has to ride a cable car; everyone who vacations in New York has to complain about the prices.
A lifelong baseball fan recalls his early days and explains the rewards of abject loyalty.
Two months after the Pittsburgh Pirates won the World Series of 1909, my mother presented them with one of their most faithful fans—me.
For the children and grandchildren of a poor boy from Pennsylvania, childhood was magic
BORN IN 1839 TO AN EMIGRANT COBBLER and his wife, Henry Phipps, Jr., grew up near Pittsburgh. Determined to escape the “despised” cobbler’s bench, he succeeded, eventually becoming a partner of his boyhood neighbor, Andrew Carnegie.
She played the war, learning to creep through the woods without leaving footprints or snapping twigs. She read and dreamed about the war, lying on her bed, limp with horror and delight. The history of the war was a drug and she was an addict.
The French and Indian War! This was a war of which I, reading stretched out in my bedroom, could not get enough. The names of the places were a litany: Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain, Fort Frontenac on the St. Lawrence, Vincennes on the Wabash.
MY MOTHER DIED in Pittsburgh on the evening of Thanksgiving Day, that is, on November 25, 1937. If she had lived three weeks longer, she would have been seventy-three.
“57 VARIETIES” WAS ONLY A SALES SLOGAN, BUT H. J. HEINZ UNDERSTOOD FROM THE START THAT THERE WAS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR HONEST PRODUCTS AND WELL-TREATED WORKERS
Pittsburgh, God knows, was no fourth-century Athens, but around 1900 it did have a remarkable group of industrial leaders.
The wrecker’s ball swings in every city in the land, and memorable edifices of all kinds are coming down at a steady clip.
There are places on this earth, in Europe particularly, where conservation is taken to mean the preservation of the notable works of man as well as nature.
The author recalls the early years of radio in the 1920s. He was one of the first people to sing on radio and later became an editor at KDKA, the first commercial radio station in the U.S.
Gladys King was the most beautiful woman on earth within tricycling distance of Callowhill Street. She was born in 1902 and was now fourteen years old, which would make it five years old for me.
How gullible Edwin L. Drake, an ailing ex-railroad conductor, brought about America’s first and gaudiest oil boom
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