From the Executive Director

Posted by on Jul 24, 2023 in | Comments Off on From the Executive Director Everyone has family stories. I recall sitting at the dinner table as a child, listening to my parents talk about their grandparents and great-grandparents — where they had lived and the things they had done. One story I heard was about a woman, Ellen Webster Palmer, who founded the Boys Industrial Association in Wilkes-Barre to educate and entertain “breaker boys,” the child laborers at coal...
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The All-Too-Youthful Proletarians: Breaker Boys of the Anthracite Coal Region in the Early 1900s

Posted by on Nov 30, 2013 in | Comments Off on The All-Too-Youthful Proletarians: Breaker Boys of the Anthracite Coal Region in the Early 1900s   Many Pennsylvanians have long forgotten one of the state’s major claims to national prominence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – the anthra­cite coal industry. In those years, clean-burning anthracite heated more homes in the northeastern United States than any other fuel, and a 1,700 square-mile area in northeast Pennsyl­vania produced almost all of the...
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The Molly Maguires: Fighting for Justice

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on The Molly Maguires: Fighting for Justice Early on the morning of Wednesday, Septem­ber 1, 1875, a young English-born mine foreman started from his Schuylkill County residence to the Shenandoah coal colliery where he was employed. A gunshot pierced the air. Scrambling for cover behind a neighbor’s house, he was met by another assassin who drew his revolver and fired. Struck in the groin, the young man staggered blindly and fell to...
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Ethnic History: Of the Children, by the Children, for the Children

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Ethnic History: Of the Children, by the Children, for the Children Interest in the study of history is drifting in conflicting directions. The teaching of Pennsylvania history in schools is steadily declining and enrollment in history classes at all levels including college has slipped. The growing idolization of exact sciences such as physics and chemistry and quantif­ication has discredited the sometimes subjective perceptions of historical studies. On the...
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The Pottsville Maroons, Cheated Again and Again

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on The Pottsville Maroons, Cheated Again and Again Pottsville, like many communities in the Roaring Twenties, was a rugged, hard-living, hard-working city. The small Schuylkill County seat in northeastern Pennsylvania was best known for the booming anthracite industry and D. G. Yuengling and Son, established in 1829 and touted as America’s oldest family-owned brewery. Coal mining had been good to Pottsville, crowned the Queen City of the...
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