Book Review: World War II in Their Own Words
Brian Lockman, World War II in Their Own Words. Stackpole Books, 2005. Photographs, timeline, maps, bibliography, index, 251 pages, paperback $19.95.
Brian Lockman, World War II in Their Own Words. Stackpole Books, 2005. Photographs, timeline, maps, bibliography, index, 251 pages, paperback $19.95.
Vincent P. Carocci, A Capitol Journey: Reflections on the Press, Politics and the making of Public Policy in Pennsylvania. Penn State University Press, 2005. Photographs, index, 298 pages, hardcover $39.95.
David Valuska and Christian B. Keller, Damn Dutch: Pennsylvania Germans at Gettysburg. Stackpole Books, 2004. photographs, endnotes, index, 236 pages, hardcover $26.95.
Clark DeLeon, Pennsylvania Curiosities: Quirky Characters, Roadside Oddities & Other Offbeat Stuff, Second Edition. The Globe Pequot Press, 2004. Photographs, index, 242 pages, paperback $13.95 (ISBN 1548- 2987; 0-7627-3039-0).
In April 1968, syndicated columnist James J. Kilpatrick delivered the Detroit Historical Society's annual Lewis Cass Lecture. The lectureship was then twenty years old, and Kilpatrick followed such distinguished historians as Bruce Carron and Sylvester K. Stevens. Unlike his predecessors, Kilpatrick was a journalist, and so he took his inspiration from Thomas Carlyle's belief that "Histories are a kind of distilled newspapers."
In the absence of systematically collected enumeration data (such as those collected for a census), researchers interested in reconstructing regional demographic histories are left with few choices. This is especially true for those wishing to examine demographic trends before the first federal census of 1790.
"The decisive measure of the man is how he acts in public." Snow was falling on the square at King and Railroad Streets, the center of Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, 20 February 1858. The economic focus of town had gradually moved four blocks west from King and Queen Streets since the railroad had brought passenger service in 1837.
Carlisle historian Ruth Hodge, representing the African-American community of Carlisle, was actively involved in the discussion about renaming Carlisle High School's West Building. She had several individuals in mind who qualified for the honor, but when requested to pick just one name, she had no difficulty in narrowing the selection to the late Emma Thompson McGowan, a teacher in the Carlisle school system for almost thirty years.
Robert James Coffey, a career newspaperman and prolific writer of verse, was born on 14 April 1839 in a place, he later remembered, "Where the landscape is wild and grand; / In that heaven-blessed state of William Penn, /In the Valley of Cumberland." More precisely, he was born in the village of Cleversburg, a little southeast of Shippensburg.
At an academic conference on Marianne Moore, I needled one of the editors of Moore's letters for writing assertively that in 1896 the Moore family moved from Pittsburgh to "nearby Carlisle." Even a century later, with a turnpike, the trip is four and a half hours by a fast car; at the end of the nineteenth century, it must have been akin to burning your bridges behind you. "Oh, that's all right," said this professor from Pomona College, "from California every place in Pennsylvania is nearby." If unguarded, perspective can trump historical reality every time.