You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The story begins in 1848, when the Moravian Brethren sold 274 acres of farmland to investors who resold them as building lots. By 1855, Asa Packer had laid the tracks of his Lehigh Valley Railroad along the Lehigh River, bringing coal from Carbon County to markets in New York and Philadelphia. Industries rapidly grew, with the Pennsylvania and Lehigh Zinc Company in 1853 and the Saucona Iron Company in 1857. By 1865, South Bethlehem became a borough. Charles M. Schwab headed the former Iron Company in 1906, renaming it the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, and was instrumental in uniting the Bethlehems as one city in 1918. Countless immigrants shaped the tone of this region. Today the Sands Casino occupies part of the former Bethlehem Steel site. It is the future home of art and music venues that will contribute to a city already known for its historic and cultural heritage.
When immigrants from Central Europe arrived in America in the late 1800s and early 1900s, they often came to cities like Bethlehem, Pennsylvania – cities bursting with the new energies and opportunities of industrialization, and with the challenges of assimilating dozens of cultures into what had been pastoral communities only a few decades before. For most immigrants, industrial working conditions were harsh and brutal, and living conditions were not much better. But the immigrants – Windish, Hungarians, Slovaks, and others – stayed and made lives for themselves … lives that reached from nineteenth-century famine in Europe and the horrors of World War I to man’s landing on the moon and the dawn of the computer age. It is in the stories of individual lives that this immigrant journey can be glimpsed – in everyday stories, universally human stories – stories told around a table covered in oilcloth. oilclothstories.com
Due in part to the Lehigh Canal and the Lehigh Valley Railroad, Bethlehem evolved from a tranquil town to a modern industrial city. Built in 1829, the Lehigh Canal passed by the center of Bethlehem. With it brought a steady stream of outsiders who shaped and changed the community. The Lehigh Valley Railroad was established in South Bethlehem in the 1850s, turning the city into a manufacturing center with such new industries as Lehigh Zinc and Bethlehem Steel as well as silk mills. Bethlehem Revisited captures a city in transition, at a time when its streets could barely accommodate the influx of horses, trolleys, automobiles, and pedestrians. Bursting at its seams with people, businesses, and residences, Bethlehem comes alive through this collection of extraordinary postcards.
Nicky Venditti, a U.S. Army helicopter pilot with a love of fast cars and practical jokes, went to Vietnam in 1969 and was dead in 11 days, killed by an Americal Division grenade training explosion at Chu Lai. The full story of the incident did not come out until the author, David Venditta (a different spelling), Venditti's cousin, made a chance discovery that began a decades-long effort to find out exactly what happened, what the Army did about it and who was held responsible. This book documents the Army's mishandling of the incident and the effects on the families and friends of Venditti and of the two other young soldiers who died with him.
None