Keystone State Research Articles

Factors associated with colon cancer fragmentation in the Keystone state.

120 Background: Fragmentation of cancer care delivery across multiple providers can impact care quality and patient outcomes. Management of non-metastatic colon cancer often involves adjuvant chemotherapy, which increases the risk of potentially deleterious care dispersion. This study assesses the extent of care fragmentation across different inpatient facilities and examines patient characteristics associated with inpatient care fragmentation. Methods: We adapt the modified Herfindahl-Hirschman market concentration index to construct a Fragmentation Index (FI) capturing the distribution of a patient’s care across inpatient facilities. For patients who underwent oncologic surgery for colon cancer from 2010-2016, we calculate FI for the 15 months post-diagnosis if at least 2 admissions occur during the study period. We use Pennsylvania Cancer Registry data linked to all-payer statewide facility discharge records to estimate the relationship between FI and patient demographics, rurality, area deprivation index (ADI), and payer status using adjusted multivariable linear regression models. Results: For the operative cohort (28.6% Stage I, 34.7% Stage II, 36.7% Stage III, n = 7803), 86% of patients lived in urban areas, 9.5% in large towns and 5% in rural areas. 60% had Medicare, 6.1% Medicaid and 7.1% were uninsured or had unknown payer status. 52% of patients were female and 87% were non-Hispanic White. The overall mean FI was 0.192; 60% (n = 4693) had an FI of 0, indicating all admissions were at the same hospital, and among those with FI> 0 (n = 3110), mean FI was 0.483. The mean FI for patients potentially eligible for adjuvant chemotherapy (Stage II, III) was 0.188: 61% of patients had an FI of 0 and among those with FI > 0 (n = 2173), mean FI was 0.482. Stratification by stage reveals similar proportions of FI > 0.5 (stage I: 24.6%, stage II: 22.3%, stage III: 21.3%). Increased care dispersion was observed in patients from large towns (ΔFI 0.04, CI 0.03—0.06) or rural areas (ΔFI 0.04, CI 0.02—0.08) relative to urban areas, as well as for patients with relatively higher number of hospitalizations (ΔFI 0.04, CI 0.03—0.04). Less care dispersion was seen in patients with stage III disease (relative to stage I ΔFI -0.02, CI -0.03 — -0.01), uninsured status (relative to private insurance ΔFI -0.03, CI -0.05 – -0.01) or residence in the most disadvantaged ADI quartile (relative to Q1 ADI ΔFI -0.02, CI -0.04 — 0.00). Conclusions: Among patients with operatively managed colon cancer, slightly more than half did not experience inpatient care fragmentation. As expected, a higher number of total admissions and non-urban residence were associated with increased inpatient care dispersion. However, our findings of more concentrated care among patients with stage III disease, higher levels of relative economic disadvantage, and uninsured status suggest potentially complex and divergent forces driving hospital selection, to be explored in future work.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s 1915 Pennsylvania Suffrage Speaking Tour Scrapbook

ABSTRACT In 1915 woman’s suffrage was on the ballot in Pennsylvania. State suffrage organizations mounted a vibrant campaign using a variety of strategies in support of enfranchising the women of the Keystone State. Speakers played a central role in this campaign, including a four-month lecture tour by African American author and educator, Alice Dunbar-Nelson. She kept a scrapbook of her tour that reveals her recognition of its historical significance. Her scrapbook also highlights the role of African American women who worked toward the goal of voting rights for all in Pennsylvania. Finally, it illuminates the strategies used by Pennsylvania suffrage leaders. While the men of the state voted down the suffrage referendum in 1915, the hard work of suffragists, including Dunbar-Nelson and other African Americans, paid off four years later when Pennsylvania became the seventh state to ratify the nineteenth amendment to the US Constitution on June 24, 1919.

Catholicism in the History of the Keystone State and its Borderlands

ABSTRACT The story of Catholicism in Pennsylvania and its borderlands is as complex as it is varied. While no single issue of Pennsylvania History could hope to be comprehensive, it is our intention to highlight the variety of the Catholic experience in the Keystone State.

Frederick Watts and the Founding of Penn State

Frederick Watts and the Founding of Penn State

Frank C. Musser, the Coalition Party, and the Fight to End Machine Party Politics in Post–Progressive Era Lancaster, Pennsylvania

The politics of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, between 1921 and 1930 serve as a case study for national developments. Between the failure of the 1912 "Bull Moose" Party campaign for the White House and the rise of Franklin Roosevelt and the 1933 New Deal coalition, advocates for urban liberalization and social welfare progressivism built a political bridge in the Keystone state. Led in part by businessman Frank C. Musser, this new movement married some of the specific principles of the new alliance while also working to break the hold of the traditionalist Republican Party machine that had held Lancaster County in its grip since the 1860s. In this new era of Lancaster City and County politics, Musser and his allies discovered the efficacy, albeit limited, of employing new campaign tactics and engaging new voting blocs in the process of city and county politics while fashioning a legacy of municipal reform.

Battlefield Pennsylvania: A Guide to The Keystone State’s Most Sacred Ground

Brady Crytzer, an award-winning professor at Robert Morris University, presents his overview of thirty Pennsylvania battlefields based upon the first three seasons of his Pennsylvania Cable Network television show, Battlefield Pennsylvania. The book is organized into five sections with thirty concise chapters based upon battlefields as he defines them. Each has four component parts: background, the battle, legacy, and what to see in the present. The text is supported by eighteen enumerated maps, including transposed modern highway routes. Also included are a select bibliography, index, and nearly ninety illustrations, both contemporary and modern, although, for a work of this nature it is strangely sans footnotes or endnotes.Crytzer convincingly argues that Pennsylvania is a battlefield, with each individual site a scar on the landscape, which bears witness to a troubled past. Efforts to preserve these hallowed sites is not just about memories, but also serves as a mirror reflecting human nature in adversity. Depicting its chronology of conflict as a competition of worldviews and precious resources that those who came before us believed were worth fighting and dying for, Pennsylvania now is a living monument to the past. Perhaps the most important point Crytzer makes is no matter how much one studies original sources, there is no substitute for walking and observing the actual sites for a deeper understanding.A particular strength of his book is the “What to See” section that ends each chapter, which offers timely touring advice from the author. However, his view of today’s Paoli is a bit too rosy as the “neatly kept and well-placed signage” (104) is now faded and difficult to read. Additionally, the relatively new visitor center complex at Fort Necessity may be visually and technologically impressive, but Crytzer (and no doubt others) overlook the lost charm of the previous visitor center that was a familiar school field trip site for those growing up in western Pennsylvania (26). These are admittedly minor quibbles. Crytzer’s efforts to promote continued tourism of these treasured but often obscure historic sites is commendable.The aforementioned five sections, focus on the Seven Years’ (French and Indian) War, the American Revolution, the Early Republic, the Civil War, and the Modern Era. They contain thirty events identified by Crytzer, which depict Pennsylvania’s evolution from a pacifistic Quaker colony (or “Peaceable Kingdom”) of the eighteenth century, through the tumult of the Revolution, Civil War, and industrial era strife, into the twenty-first century era of global terrorism. The selected events include many famous incidents, such as young George Washington’s defeat by the French at Fort Necessity in 1754, Washington’s presence during Braddock’s epic defeat at the Monongahela in 1755, the Civil War’s cataclysmic Battle of Gettysburg (“the most studied battle in human history” [225]) in 1863, the controversial labor battle at Homestead in 1892, and the crash of Flight 93 near Somerset during the 9/11 terror attack in 2001.Crytzer presents a compelling catalog of events, but one must question his list of both included and excluded events. His definition of a battle is open-ended at best, especially for minor affrays with little or no loss of life—for example, George Washington’s courier mission from the Governor of Virginia to the French forts in western Pennsylvania in 1753, or the shenanigans of the “Black Boys” in harassing the British at Fort Loudon in 1765 in the Conococheague Valley. There are also inconsistencies by including the shameful massacre of twenty peaceful Christian Susquehannock (Conestoga) by the infamous Paxton Boys in 1763, but not including the Lattimer Massacre of 1897 where nineteen striking immigrant coal miners were ruthlessly gunned down by a sheriff’s posse. The notorious 1892 labor Battle of Homestead between Pinkerton agents and striking steel workers is covered, yet the numerous bloody confrontations across the state from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia during the Great Railroad Strike of 1873 are completely overlooked. Being simply a horrific accident, the deadly 1862 explosion of the Alleghany Arsenal is not a battle and has no place in this book.Additionally, chapters 8, 9, and 10, covering events of the Conestoga Massacre, Battle of Bushy Run, and the Black Boys Rebellion, 1763–1765, are inexplicably placed in the section on the American Revolution, 1775–83, rather than the correct Seven Years’ War era, 1753–65. Finally, it would have been more useful if casualty statistics would have been applied consistently for each event as they are often absent. It should be noted however, the criticism expressed in this review should not substantially detract from the overall quality of this book as an invaluable reference tool for anyone interested in Pennsylvania’s unique battlefield history and preservation. A revised and corrected second edition is encouraged and would be most welcome.

The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War by Van Gosse

Reviewed by: The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War by Van Gosse Millington Bergeson-Lockwood (bio) The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War. By Van Gosse. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 760. $39.95 cloth; $29.99 ebook) For Van Gosse, politics are "deeply conflictual." It is "a practice in which one engages so as to succeed, conquer, or triumph, but even more so as not to lose, be vanquished, and obliterated" (p. 549). This struggle is at the center of The First Reconstruction. While many historians have explored the fight for freedom in the first half of the nineteenth century, Gosse highlights the electoral sphere as a major site of political combat. He argues that struggles over voting, partisanship, and citizenship in the decades between the nation's founding and the Civil War presaged the better-known reconstruction of the post-war years. Rather than marginal, Black men were constant participants in elections and the avenues of party politics. This recentering of electoral and partisan politics in the history of Black activism and the struggle for American democracy is the most significant contribution of Gosse's study. He seeks to draw historians' gaze to an "old-style" political history of elections and political parties and show how these areas were just as significant in political development as those of the social or cultural spheres. [End Page 326] Gosse offers four state or regional histories, each with its own contours and trajectory. He includes well-trodden historical trails like those of Philadelphia and New York City, while also drawing attention to areas that have traditionally garnered less attention like upper New England and Ohio. Gosse makes a significant contribution in this expansion of antebellum Black political geography. In part one, Gosse examines the Black politics of Pennsylvania. He describes the "shadow politics" of Philadelphia, but also the lesser-known story of Black politics in the rest of the state. Gosse argues for historians to look beyond anti-slavery as the core mobilizer of Black politics. Instead, he draws attention to a political world organized around electoral participation in "the ordinary politics of partisan organizing" (p. 58). From the Keystone State, Gosse then travels to New England, a hotbed of Black electoral politics. While other states disenfranchised Black voters during the antebellum era, the New England states maintained non-racial suffrage and African Americans actively engaged in party politics. He highlights how not only were the number of Black voters higher than assumed in earlier studies, but that the urban Black electorate in the New England states was influential despite its small statewide population percentage. Leaving New England, Gosse takes the reader south to New York where he charts the persistence of a tradition of Black electoral activism even after "freehold laws" disenfranchised most Black voters in 1821. He argues that fights for suffrage strengthened the resolve and organizational strength of Black New Yorkers on the eve of the Civil War. In part four, Gosse explores Black politics in Ohio, a location not typically examined in a historiography dominated by the Northeast. Ohio became a powerhouse of Black electoral activism with Black voting strength having greater weight than anywhere in the nation. Gosse provides an in-depth and comprehensive study of Black electoral politics in the first half of the nineteenth century and his work raises questions for additional study. Future scholars must now [End Page 327] ask how this "First Reconstruction" directly connected to the reconstruction following the Civil War. How did the politics of the communities Gosse highlights change with the coming of emancipation and greater suffrage for all African Americans? How did these post-war activists draw upon the legacy of antebellum voting and how did this shape their vision of citizenship and place in the American body politic moving forward? Additionally, how did the "formal" politics of the electoral sphere intertwine with the "informal" politics of the social and cultural sphere? That Gosse's book raises difficult questions is a testament to its significance in the study of nineteenth-century Black politics and it would be a welcome contribution...

Women, Gender, and Rights: Past and Present

Women, Gender, and Rights: Past and Present

The Local Is Global: Philadelphia's Weatherwomen Bring the War Home to Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT Local and state histories need not be parochial. This article examines the intersection of Pennsylvania with swirling global revolutionary winds in the 1960s and 1970s, especially the Weathermen (later called the Weather Underground). It further studies how Philadelphia produced a radical pacifist, direct action, prefigurative political impulse within the New Left. Led in the Keystone State by Philadelphia-educated women, or Weatherwomen, the movement intersected with global revolutionary actions. The Weathermen, a splinter group of the Students for a Democratic Society, were the products of a relatively sophisticated and systematic set of transnational revolutionary ideas. Philosophically led by the young French radical Regis Debray and Latin American revolutionaries Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, these globally minded radicals built and promoted a revolutionary program aimed to topple Western liberal capitalism.

IA: The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archaeology, Theme Issue: The Archaeology, by Frederic L. Quivik, ed.

IA: The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archaeology, Theme Issue: The Archaeology, by Frederic L. Quivik, ed.

Pennsylvania: The Foundation of American Cuisine

Pennsylvania: The Foundation of American Cuisine William Woys Weaver (bio) The third-largest agricultural state in the country, Pennsylvania includes at least five distinct culinary regions: Philadelphia and its surrounding counties; the Northeast coal region; the Pennsylvania Dutch heartland, comprising some twenty-five counties; the Allegheny Highlands centering on Pittsburgh; and the Lakeshore region bordering Lake Erie. Within this unique cultural heritage lie pockets of foods and foodways that await more intensive scholarly exploration. Fieldwork based on recorded interviews is one valid approach that should be given top priority because "food memories" do not last forever. But Pennsylvania's situation is more complex than that. The commonwealth's historical timelines are different and more challenging than those of many other states, mainly because a diversity of European cultures settled side by side in the Delaware Valley. This cultural diversity characterized the development of Pennsylvania's food history; in essence, Pennsylvania is where cultural fusionism first began. It is also where, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, culinary leaders including pastry cook Elizabeth Goodfellow (1768–1851) and confectioner James Wood Parkinson (1818–95) consciously advocated a new American cuisine. Parkinson even published a manifesto outlining where he thought American cuisine should be headed. But there are many other individuals whose careers are equally as important, such as Italianborn Nunzio Finelli (1834–86), who in the late 1870s created the iconic Philadelphia blue-plate salad composed of fried oysters and chicken. The historian's task is to document and increase understanding of this vast heritage and then to build upon its creative vitality to keep this regional identity alive. Food studies as a science is still very new and embraces many different points of approach: culinary history (until recently, largely a study of old cookbooks); anthropology (the connections between food and behavior, the social history of food, customs and foodways); culinary arts (the hands-on practice of cookery); food ethnography (the cultural [End Page 237] dimension of food and its role within certain social groups); and food as material culture, an object that, if more ephemeral than art—when consumed, it is destroyed—is every bit as complex and meaningful. Yet is it really destroyed? Philosophically, emotionally, and psychologically, food is art that becomes part of us. This is one of several underlying challenges in studying food and what constitutes its "authenticity"—a much-discussed and somewhat slippery concept endemic to the postindustrial age. In short, food derives its dimension of authenticity from associations with family, with locality or region, or even from religious ritual. Authenticity is personal and subjective, differing from person to person, like the restaurant critic who is looking for that crystallizing moment when things come together at the table. A similar ongoing search for culinary truths is driving much of food scholarship today, and happily there are many paths to achieve this. The essays in this collection point to those places beyond individual epiphanies, where scholars may start to decode empirical narratives and make more orderly sense of this new science called food studies. The list of starting points for research is huge and growing: archival collections (even old wills and inventories); hidden gems of data buried in out-of-the-way libraries; cookbook collections, including the one Philadelphia chef Fritz Blank bequeathed to the University of Pennsylvania after his 2014 death; rare agricultural journals in the state library; or my own collection of culinary ephemera, now at New York University. Ideally, a volume like this would spread the food stories evenly across the state's five culinary regions; in reality, some regions have a more developed sense of local identity than others. All the same, the surprising finds of this issue's authors should encourage anyone who wants to explore the culinary history of the Keystone State. With luck, this pioneering publication will lead to a much larger and more sustained effort to understand Pennsylvania's extraordinary and unique culinary riches. [End Page 238] William Woys Weaver Devon, Pennsylvania William Woys Weaver William Woys Weaver is a retired professor of food studies living in Devon, Pennsylvania. He is the author of seventeen books and received his PhD in food ethnography from...

The Great War and Modern Amnesia: Studying Pennsylvania's Great War, Part 2

ABSTRACT This is an introduction to Pennsylvania History's second special edition on Pennsylvania in World War I. While it is uncertain how much residents of the Keystone State remember about the Great War, these volumes hope to remind them of this seminal moment in world history and Pennsylvania's place in it. This second edition highlights important historical issues in this period, including military history, medical history, and women's history. In addition to introducing the following fine articles, this introduction highlights ways we might commemorate the service, suffering, and sacrifices of Pennsylvanians, including use of digital archives in the classroom.

The Great War and Modern Amnesia: Studying Pennsylvania's Great War, Part 1

ABSTRACT This article is an introduction to this journal's special two-part edition on Pennsylvania in World War I. At the centennial of the Great War in Pennsylvania it is uncertain how much residents of the Keystone State remember about World War I. World War II, fought by the greatest generation, overshadowed their fathers' war. In order to remind Pennsylvanians about this critical period in the state's history, this edition, Part 1 of a two-part series, highlights important historical issues, including religious history, military history, and the history of criminology. The goal of these editions is to commemorate the service, suffering, and sacrifices of Pennsylvanians—men and women, black and white, at home and overseas—at the centennial of the war that was supposed to end all wars.

Wind Development in Pennsylvania: A Reflection on State Policy

While other states have continued to add wind turbines in recent years, there has been no new wind development in Pennsylvania since 2012. This article considers how state energy policy as well as local land-­use policies related to wind energy compare with other states as a way to understand how these policies may be impacting wind development in the Keystone State, especially in light of the geographical characteristics of the state’s highest quality winds.

Bringing Politics Back in . . . to Abolition

Bringing Politics Back in . . . to Abolition Richard Newman (bio) Corey M. Brooks. Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. 336 pp. Notes and index. $45.00. Padraig Riley. Slavery and the Democratic Conscience: Political Life in Jeffersonian America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 328 pp, Notes and index. $45.00. With some critics worrying about the future of political history—which lags behind social and cultural history—it is rather ironic that the best recent work in antebellum politics comes from scholars studying slavery and freedom. Building on terrific (and variegated) studies by Eric Foner, James Oakes, John Stauffer, Sean Wilentz, and others, many historians now view antislavery struggles as a powerful vehicle for understanding the possibilities and limits of pre–Civil War politics. New books by Padraig Riley and Corey Brooks continue the trend, offering perceptive readings of both the politics of abolition and abolitionist politics in the early republic. These are exemplary books: well written, thoroughly researched, and historiographically ramifying. They are also timely, illuminating antislavery battles in high politics at a time when a new round of contemporary critics (notably Andrew Delbanco) question abolitionists’ aims and accomplishments. Just what did abolitionists really do? Riley shows the formidable hurdles antislavery advocates faced in the Jeffersonian political arena; Brooks studies how political abolitionists overcame such daunting obstacles in antebellum society. Together, they show that it is more critical than ever to reintegrate politics into our understanding of social reform, lest we forget how political power may be mobilized for good as well as ill. Read in tandem, Riley and Brooks chart the creation, and then destruction, of the nineteenth-century political consensus that enshrined slaveholders’ political power. The Constitution may have established certain proslavery provisions, but not until the 1800s would a discernible slave power take hold in federal politics. As Paul Finkelman constantly reminds us, historians should never underestimate slaveholders’ constitutional power. The three-fifths clause alone [End Page 57] gave masters and their allies enough extra voting strength to secure slavery’s expansion into Missouri, Texas, and the Kansas-Nebraska Territories, as well as to pass a stronger Fugitive Slave Law in 1850. Yet as Riley’s book expertly shows, slaveholders’ power came not merely as a result of a hellish constitutional compromise. Rather it flowed from a longstanding cross-sectional alliance of Democratic Republicans that privileged white democracy over antislavery. As Riley sees it, Jefferson’s election was truly a “victory for slaveholders” (pp. 8–9). Before 1800, Federalists mitigated masters’ reach; after 1800, a Jeffersonian coalition “promoted democracy in the North but also protected the prerogatives of slaveholders in the South” (p. 9). This coalition created, in effect, a second grand bargain on bondage. Though building on studies by Matt Mason, David Waldstreicher, Craig Hammond, and others who have traced slavery’s contested role in the early Republic, Riley explains the muscular development of the Jeffersonian coalition perhaps better than anyone else. He demonstrates that the origins of the Jeffersonian coalition were diverse, with both Northerners and Southerners defining its key ideological as well as political dimensions. In New England, Republicans like Elbridge Gerry and Abraham Bishop backed the Jeffersonian cause because it “championed political freedom for ordinary white men” (p. 16). Indeed, hoping to form a national alliance that would vanquish aristocratic Federalists, they and other Northern politicians agreed to “provide American slaveholders with what they needed most: tacit majority consent” (p. 49). Slave power consensus wasn’t a machine that would go of itself; it needed constant lubrication from Northerners. This became clear in Pennsylvania, the nation’s keystone state, for its consistent support of the Jeffersonian cause. Yet it was also gradual abolition’s organizational base. Riley points out that Republican political supporters like William Duane and Thomas Branagan explained away any seeming contradictions by labeling Jefferson both a champion of white liberty and an “antislavery stalwart” (p. 90). Given time, Jefferson’s America would shed its slaveholding skin, providing an emancipatory pathway to “the benumbed minds of the enslaved, the wretched, the degraded sons of Europe, Asia, and Africa” (p. 90). For Virginians and other Southern Republicans who became increasingly...

Keystone State in Crisis: The Civil War in Pennsylvania

Keystone State in Crisis: The Civil War in Pennsylvania

Keystone State in Crisis: The Civil War in Pennsylvania

Keystone State in Crisis: The Civil War in Pennsylvania

Book Review: Dirty Words & Filthy Pictures: Film and the First Amendment by Jeremy Geltzer

Dirty Words & Filthy Pictures: Film and the First Amendment. Jeremy Geltzer. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2015. 384 pp. $29.95 pbk.In March 2016, Michael Eakin joined Seamus McCaffery as the second Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice to quit the Keystone State's high court within an 18-month span, following scandal over alleged pornographic, racist, and sexually offensive emails. Readers of Jeremy Geltzer's new book, Dirty Words and Filthy Pictures, may find this fitting karmic payback.That is because, as Geltzer reveals in what he calls film-legal history, Pennsylvania in 1911 was the first state to adopt statewide motion picture censorship law (Chicago, he tells us, was the first city to embrace such measure in 1907). The Pennsylvania statute tasked censorship board with reviewing and disapproving of movies featuring sacrilegious, obscene, indecent, or immoral content. Furthermore, as Geltzer describes it, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court from which Eakin and McCaffery recently resigned was once famously the workplace of Judge Michael Angelo Musmanno. In the 1950s, Musmanno was a zealous supporter of film censorship, known for writing fierce and fiery indictments against uncensored cinema. Make that, then, double dose of karma for Eakin and McCaffery, with Musmanno surely rolling over in his grave in Arlington National Cemetery at the alleged actions of his brethren.These are just several examples of the many filmic factoids Geltzer sprinkles into his chronological, comprehensive survey of the history and legal battles surrounding movie censorship (including self-censorship, not just the government variety) and controversies in the United States. Geltzer is well qualified to address the push and pull between the forces of government regulation and freedom of expression that frequently finds cinematic works caught in the middle. A California-based intellectual property attorney who worked as in-house counsel for several major Hollywood studios, Geltzer also teaches, including course taught in Spring 2016 for UCLA Extension called Cinema, Law & Censorship.The vast territory covered in this mile-wide, foot-deep (definitely more than an inch in some places, but not all) tome stretches from stirs in the 1890s caused by movies such as The Kiss and The Dolorita Passion Dance through the 2013 sentencing in Los Angeles of Ira Isaacs to 48 months in prison for distributing obscene videos featuring bestiality and scatology. In between, Geltzer covers, in often alliterative fashion, everything from the Supreme Court's initial rejection and later recognition of films as form of expression safeguarded by the First Amendment to the high court's shifting definitions of obscenity. The author touches on all genres of films that have faced the wrath of both moral custodians and prosecutors over the years. Prizefighting pictures were an early target (Maine banned them in 1897), for instance, as were sacrilegious films, war movies, and those with drug-based themes, such as provocateur Otto Preminger's The Man With the Golden Arm, starring Frank Sinatra. …

Defining Citizenship in the Keystone State

Defining Citizenship in the Keystone State

Keystone State in Crisis: The Civil War in Pennsylvania (review)

Keystone State in Crisis: The Civil War in Pennsylvania (review)