A photograph from the Library of Congress Civil War collection shows 28 men of Company B, 9th Pennsylvania Cavalry atop Lookout Mountain in Tennessee in 1864. This unit was recruited from the Lykens Valley in the summer of 1861 and shows these soldiers as they had become hardened veterans of the Civil War. Read more.
"You will imagine how painful it was to see our brave men lying dead around us, and to hear the groans of the wounded..." This letter from a Schuylkill County soldier on the front lines of the Mexican-American War in 1846 wrote this letter home to a friend in Pottsville. It was later published in the Miners' Journal newspaper. Read the full letter.
A man slipped into Camp Cameron in Harrisburg to lure a Minersville recruit away from his company. He left under four guards, two bayonets close behind, as Captain Horace Bennett's men lined up to watch. A soldier signing only "J.S.B." told the Miners' Journal everything. Read the Full Story.
"Cry of foreigner, foreigner..." In the weeks after the Lattimer Massacre, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) responded in print. They deplored the violence and their anti-immigrant rhetoric used to defend the Luzerne County sheriff for murdering 19 unarmed mineworkers. Read their response and their appeal to the nation's workers.
"Sherman was right when he said war was hell." Private Luke Higgins of Pottsville, PA wrote home to his sister from the front lines of France during World War I. In his letter, he described hellish scenes of dead bodies, artillery barrages, and mud everywhere as the American Expeditionary Force launched an offensive. Read the full story.
September 17, 1862 was the bloodiest day in American history. Pennsylvania's Coal Region was in the middle of it. Letters home from soldiers at the front, coffins arriving by train, and then the draft riots and labor unrest that Antietam's aftermath set loose across eastern Pennsylvania. Read all the stories here.
"Now commenced the really grand spectacle." In a letter to a friend in Wilkes-Barre, PA, Sgt. Louis Roth described the Battle of Hatteras Inlet on North Carolina's Outer Banks in August 1861. He described the fighting, the Union victory, and the terrible conditions as follows. Roth also writes a great passage about his regiment's consumption of lager beer, a favorite among the German regiments. Read the full letter.
On this 25th anniversary of 9/11, I went looking for how Coal Region residents remembered Pearl Harbor in 1966. I came across this remarkable article by Jack Lindermuth for the Shamokin News-Dispatch about two Pearl Harbor survivors from Shamokin, PA. He shared their stories with readers on December 7, 1966. Read the full story.
A 12-pound artillery shell left behind by New York troops had been lying around Anthony Burns's house near Pottsville, PA for a year as the Civil War drew to a close. Someone brought it inside and the results were horrifying. Read the story.
"Over here you don't see any baseball. Soccer is the game." Clarence Morgan of Port Carbon, PA wrote home to his mother and shared that he had tried playing soccer, but quickly learned he preferred American football to the "beautiful game." Read more.