As my hometown of Williamstown, Pennsylvania nears its 200th anniversary in 2026, a new article at PennLive looks at how coal built the town, shaped generations of workers, and left a lasting mark on the landscape. Read the full story.
2025 was a full, difficult, and meaningful year—spent writing, traveling, podcasting, and chasing stories from Pennsylvania’s Coal Region to Ireland’s northwest coast and beyond. This reflection looks back at the moments, places, and people that shaped the work. Read the full story.
My 2025 reading list leans hard into the big, difficult stuff - atomic fire over Japan, mass graves in Rwanda and Bosnia, the Molly Maguires, Irish soldiers in blue, and one unforgettable novel about a single patch of New England ground. These are the books that shaped his thinking this year about memory, violence, grief, and how we tell stories. Read the full story.
Merry Christmas! Enjoy an amusing poem from Luzerne County celebrating the beloved turkey dinner in December 1830. Read it here.
This holiday episode of the Public History podcast revisits It’s a Wonderful Life as more than a Christmas classic. We unpack the war trauma behind Jimmy Stewart’s performance, the clash between Bedford Falls and Potterville, and why Frank Capra’s critique of power still feels uncomfortably relevant today. Read the full story.
Less than three weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Christmas 1941 in Shenandoah, PA balanced solemn church services and charity drives with bustling shops and eager children. Families faced empty seats of those in the service or lost in the war's first actions, yet community spirit shone through. Read the full story.
In the winter of 1926, a Hazleton, PA reporter went looking for dry Coal Region towns - and found the opposite. Bootleg liquor flowed freely across Carbon, Luzerne, and Schuylkill counties, especially at Christmas. Prohibition barely touched coal country. This new video brings that story to life. Watch the latest video.
In the winter of 1874, as the nation slid into what became known as the Long Depression, Harper’s Weekly published a sketch titled Hard Coal for the Poor. It showed families huddled in the snow outside a coal dealer, forced to buy fuel by the bucket or quart because they couldn’t afford a stockpile. Coal prices soared each winter, leaving the poorest to pay the most for the barest survival—choosing between food and warmth. It’s a reminder of the harsh realities faced in America’s industrial cities during one of the country’s darkest economic downturns. Read the full story.
Snow, culm banks, and an abandoned headframe are all that remain at Maple Hill Colliery, once one of the largest anthracite operations above Shenandoah. This short piece pairs a stark winter photograph from 2000 with the story of a mine that shipped more than 27 million tons of coal before going silent in 1955. Read the full story.
Hughestown, PA native Joe Toye enlisted days after Pearl Harbor, jumped into Europe with Easy Company, 506th PIR, and was gravely wounded in the Battle of the Bulge. He came home to Pennsylvania, built a life at Bethlehem Steel, and later was portrayed by Kirk Acevedo in HBO’s Band of Brothers. Read the full story.