American Workman by Maxwell King and Louise Lippincott

American Workman The Life and Art of John Kane by Maxwell King and Louise Lippincott University of Pittsburgh Press, 288 pp., hardcover $40 American Workman: The Life and Art of John Kane reconsiders the legacy of a prominent, self-taught Pittsburgh artist. Kane was a pugnacious, heavy-drinking Scottish immigrant who toiled for 40 years in mines, steel mills and railyards before achieving...
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Pippin

Artistic reputations are – much like the stock market – hard to assess, and harder yet to predict. Such is the case with the career of Horace Pippin (1888-1946), a self-taught African American painter who lived in West Chester in southeastern Pennsylvania. An artist of national standing by the early 1940s, Pippin had made a meteoric rise from the local renown of his Chester County...
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“In Immortal Splendor”: Wilkes-Barre’s Fugitive Slave Case of 1853

On Saturday morning, September 3, 1853, U.S. Federal Marshal George Wynkoop of Philadelphia and two deputies, John Jenkins and James Crossen, sat down to breakfast in the dining room of the Phoenix Hotel on River Street in the Luzerne County seat of Wilkes-Barre. At the far end of the room was a handsome, powerfully built mulatto named Bill (or, according to various newspaper accounts, known as...
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