Smoketown by Mark Whitaker

Posted by on Dec 11, 2019 in | Comments Off on Smoketown by Mark Whitaker Smoketown The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance by Mark Whitaker Simon & Schuster, 432 pp., cloth $30 Smoketown tells a story at once inspiring and tragic: the tale of how Pittsburgh became home to one of the nation’s most dynamic black communities before urban redevelopment and civil unrest gutted its vibrant cultural center, the Hill District. The Hill, once dubbed the...
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Daisy Lampkin: A Life of Love and Service

Posted by on Nov 30, 2013 in | Comments Off on Daisy Lampkin: A Life of Love and Service The March 11, 1965 front-page, banner headline of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, oldest newspaper in the United States west of the Allegheny Mountains, de­clared: “Alabama Race Tensions Mount … Marchers Defy Ban by Wallace.” The editorial page posed the ques­tion: “What Peace in Selma?” Just one day earlier, March 10, Pittsburgh’s Daisy Lampkin, whose life of...
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Currents

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Currents Wholly Warhol! Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was as well known for his commentary about contem­porary society (“In the future, everyone will be world famous for fifteen min­utes.”) as for his illustrations, art, writing, films, design, and publishing. Few, how­ever, realized the extent of his insatiable appetite for collecting until the auction house of Sotheby’s in New York...
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In King’s Shadow: Bayard Rustin and the 1963 March on Washington

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on In King’s Shadow: Bayard Rustin and the 1963 March on Washington On Wednesday, August 28, 1963, a quarter-million African American and white civil rights activists walked the one-mile length of the National Mall from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial to rally for better jobs and freedom for the nation s blacks. The signature event of the March on Washington occurred in the late afternoon when the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his...
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Bookshelf

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bookshelf Mrs. Goodfellow: The Story of America’s First Cooking School by Becky Libourel Diamond published by Westholme Publishing, 2012; 288 pages, cloth, $26.00 Married and widowed three times, Elizabeth Baker Pearson Coane Goodfellow (1768–1851) owned a popular bakery and sweet shop in Philadelphia during the first decades of the nineteenth century. In addition to catering to the city’s wealthy...
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