In November 1940, a letter from a telephone operator in London found its way into the pages of the Shamokin News-Dispatch. Alice Watts described incendiary bombs lighting every garden in her neighborhood on fire, whole streets reduced to rubble - and sleeping in her top-floor bed anyway, because a bomb either had your name on it or it didn't. Read the story from the London Blitz.
When the Soviets sealed off West Berlin in June 1948, Lt. Joseph Elonis of Donaldson was already flying C-54s into the blockaded city around the clock. He wrote home to the West Schuylkill Press-Herald about what it looked like from the cockpit - and what was at stake. Read the story.
This Harper's Weekly illustration from 1869 shows crowds following the remains of an Avondale victim to his grave. One hundred and ten men and boys died in Pennsylvania's deadliest mine disaster — and the Coal Region came out in force to mourn every one of them, a scene common to the anthracite coal fields since the beginning mining.
“The frenzy and what came of it.” After the fires burned out and the strikes were crushed, this 1877 illustration captured what remained. A worker sits in the wreckage, a reminder of the violence and destruction following America’s first great labor uprising. Read the Full Story.
"What a terrible thing a battle is..." On July 21, 1861, the Civil War turned truly bloody at Bull Run. A soldier with ties to Pittston was there - among the first onto the field, and the last to leave - and wrote home to describe the retreat, the dead left behind, and the moment the war became something no one could take back. Read the full letter.
An abolitionist writes from the courthouse where John Brown was sentenced to die. Captain Alfred Dart of the 25th Pennsylvania, a committed abolitionist, sat down to write home from the very chair where Judge Richard Parker had condemned John Brown to the gallows less than two years earlier. He wrote about the US Army encamped where John Brown had been hanged after his attempt to overthrow slavery in the South in 1859. Read the full letter.
A Luzerne County soldier sat down in a just-vacated Confederate camp at Bunker Hill, Virginia and wrote home to a woman in Wilkes-Barre in July 1861. The rebels had left so fast they didn't take their food. The writer shares his unvarnished thoughts about his rebel foes. Read the letter.
The first Schuylkill County men to bomb Berlin - honored with war bonds | 1944 In August 1944, four Schuylkill County airmen gathered at the Pottsville Republican office to collect $50 war bonds for being the first county sons to fly over Berlin. One mother accepted on her son's behalf. Read more.
Boys as young as 8, working dawn to dusk... This photograph shows the breaker boys of the Williamstown Colliery — children who sorted coal from rock with their bare hands amid deafening machinery and clouds of dust. Some were barely old enough for school. Read the story.
In the spring of 1933, Rabbi Louis Levitsky of Wilkes-Barre stood before a women’s club and said what much of the world wasn’t ready to hear. Across the Coal Region, Jewish communities were already organizing, writing, and raising money — while the rest of the world looked away. Read my latest for RealClear Pennsylvania.