Johnstown, Pennsylvania
Author: Whittle Randy
Publisher: History Press Library Editions
Published: 2007-02
Total Pages: 258
ISBN-13: 9781540203779
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Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob
Author: Russell Shorto
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2021-02-02
Total Pages: 272
ISBN-13: 0393245594
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 Family secrets emerge as a best-selling author dives into the history of the mob in small-town America. Best-selling author Russell Shorto, praised for his incisive works of narrative history, never thought to write about his own past. He grew up knowing his grandfather and namesake was a small-town mob boss but maintained an unspoken family vow of silence. Then an elderly relative prodded: You’re a writer—what are you gonna do about the story? Smalltime is a mob story straight out of central casting—but with a difference, for the small-town mob, which stretched from Schenectady to Fresno, is a mostly unknown world. The location is the brawny postwar factory town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The setting is City Cigar, a storefront next to City Hall, behind which Russ and his brother-in-law, “Little Joe,” operate a gambling empire and effectively run the town. Smalltime is a riveting American immigrant story that travels back to Risorgimento Sicily, to the ancient, dusty, hill-town home of Antonino Sciotto, the author’s great-grandfather, who leaves his wife and children in grinding poverty for a new life—and wife—in a Pennsylvania mining town. It’s a tale of Italian Americans living in squalor and prejudice, and of the rise of Russ, who, like thousands of other young men, created a copy of the American establishment that excluded him. Smalltime draws an intimate portrait of a mobster and his wife, sudden riches, and the toll a lawless life takes on one family. But Smalltime is something more. The author enlists his ailing father—Tony, the mobster’s son—as his partner in the search for their troubled patriarch. As secrets are revealed and Tony’s health deteriorates, the book become an urgent and intimate exploration of three generations of the American immigrant experience. Moving, wryly funny, and richly detailed, Smalltime is an irresistible memoir by a masterful writer of historical narrative.
Johnstown, Pennsylvania: A History, Part Two: 1937-1980
Author: Randy Whittle
Publisher: History Press Library Editions
Published: 2007-02
Total Pages: 258
ISBN-13: 9781540217448
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe history of the city of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, is a testament to the strength of the people that call it home. Following World War II, the community struggled to rise above adversity in the economy and to establish civil rights for all. In the second volume of history for this stalwart Pennsylvania city, Randy Whittle shows how Johnstown pulled together, even after the devastation of a flood in 1936 that wrought massive damage throughout the community. Johnstown is a true American city, as strong as the steel that is forged in its famous mills. From Johnstown's enormous contribution in steel and coal to the war effort to its recovery after the monumental flood of 1977, Whittle's book shows how the people of Johnstown made it the modern city it is today.
Children of the Mirna Valley
Author: Frank Bevc
Publisher: Lulu.com
Published: 2019-07-31
Total Pages: 424
ISBN-13: 0359822479
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the quiet farmland of southeastern Slovenia the people of the Mirna Valley endured rule by German lords and the Habsburg Empire for over a thousand years. In the early 1600�s, the Bevc Family worked the land in the small village of _entrupert. Three generations and over a hundred years later, their descendants moved to the Debenec hills overlooking the Mirna Valley. The family acquired more land and spread to the nearby towns of Mokronog and Mirna. One Bevc generation, a family of eleven children, found different futures in America or Slovenia. Most traded the green hills and hard work of farming for the harsh life of mining coal in a smoky, industrial town. Each withstood hardships so that their children would have a better life. Many of those children fought in World War II. In Slovenia that meant occupation and partisan resistance; in America, sons went off to war in Europe and the Pacific.
Familie Allwein
Author: Duane F. Alwin
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Published: 2019-04-18
Total Pages: 694
ISBN-13: 1984559621
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book—Familie Allwein: Volume III: Western Migrations—is volume three of a series of books about the history of the Allwein family in America, a family descended from an eighteenth-century German immigrant Johannes (Hans) Jacob Allwein and his wife, Catharina. Familie Allwein: Volume III: Western Migrations builds upon earlier volumes of Familie Allwein, which dealt with the Allwein family’s emigration from Germany to America and their settlement in colonial Pennsylvania. The first volume, Familie Allwein—An Early History, set the stage for later volumes. The second volume, Familie Allwein—Journeys in Time and Place, covered Allwein descendants living east of the Allegheny Mountains over the seventy-year period from about 1870 through 1940. Part 1 of Journeys in Time and Place focuses on those families that settled in southeastern Pennsylvania, particularly in Lebanon, Philadelphia, and the Berks Counties. Part 2 of Journeys in Time and Place focuses on those families living in Dauphin, Lancaster, Adams, York, and Blair Counties in south central Pennsylvania. This third volume of Familie Allwein—Western Migrations—covers families who moved to western Pennsylvania and those who migrated farther west. Not only is the present volume an update on the families covered in earlier volumes of Familie Allwein but it also extends the coverage of Allwein families by tracing their paths west—not only to the western counties of Pennsylvania but also to Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, and places farther west, including California. As in earlier volumes of this series, the author’s careful documentation of all sources and attention to detail make it possible to reproduce his findings and re-examine his conclusions.
The Steelworkers' Retirement Security System
Author: Glenn Beamer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2016-05-12
Total Pages: 161
ISBN-13: 1611461898
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Steelworkers' Retirement Security System: A Worker-based Model for Community Investment articulates a new model for economic security based upon steelworkers’ pension provisions and labor politics after World War II. Labor’s collective bargaining agreements created interdependent commitments that sustained jobs and stabilized communities. The evidence in The Steelworkers' Retirement Security System includes an empirical analysis of United States steel towns and case studies of Weirton, West Virginia, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and Johnstown, Pennsylvania. By understanding the politics that bound firms and workers together and adapting these commitments to the post-industrial economy, The Steelworkers' Retirement Security System offers a new means by which communities can provide workers security and economic growth. This new model, the Guaranteed Pension and Community Investment plan, provide workers with lifetime retirement annuities and communities with reliable investment capital.
Johnstown, Pennsylvania: 1895-1936
Author: Randy Whittle
Publisher: Definitive History
Published: 2005
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781596290518
DOWNLOAD EBOOKGo beyond the historic Johnstown flood and explore the in-depth history of this quintessential Pennsylvania community that has endured and prospered through generations. The flood of 1889 has often taken center stage in the history of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, but the history of this community is greater than this tragedy. In this first installment of a two-volume set, local author Randy Whittle chronicles this town's past. Beginning with the aftermath of the 1889 flood, Whittle describes the key events and issues that the community's institutions and many of its leading personalities have wrestled with from the mid-1890s. The result is an accessible and entertaining narrative that not only recounts the community history, but also the topical histories of many civic organizations, the local government and leading businesses.
Road to Rust
Author: Dale Richard Perelman
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2018-03-26
Total Pages: 187
ISBN-13: 143966417X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe author of Steel tells the story of strikes and violent unrest amid the mines and mills of twentieth-century Pennsylvania and Ohio—includes photos. As the twentieth century dawned on western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, the region’s steel industry faced a struggle for unionism. The industry was plagued by disasters that killed and maimed countless workers, many of them impoverished immigrants from Ireland, Hungary, and other nations—in 1906 alone, more than four hundred workers died in steel plant accidents. In response, unionists like Philip Murray, John L. Lewis, Samuel Gompers, and Gus Hall began to battle for fair wages, hours, and working conditions. Managers like Judge Elbert Gary and Tom Girdler opposed their every move. Tensions from issues of immigration, class, skill, and race erupted throughout the industry. The tribulations led to widespread steel strikes directed by the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers and the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, and a war that killed scores and injured thousands. In this book, industrial relations expert Dale Richard Perelman charts the struggle and decline of the nation’s most prominent regional steel industry.
Johnstown
Author: Lyndee Jobe Henderson
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 122
ISBN-13: 9780738534930
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this photographic history of Johnstown, readers will enjoy more than two hundred rare images, many published here for the first time, from the collections of historical organizations and private individuals. After enduring three devastating floods, residents have adopted the phrase "This town won't die" as a testament to their gritty determination to survive and to be seen as more than flood victims. Johnstown records the true American Dream: the faces of immigrants building their lives in a new country; the expansive golden age of American industrial growth in the steel, mining, and railroad industries; a community's iron will in the face of destruction; and a snapshot of human bonds through love for family and nation, as well as an inherent faith.
