There are a number of major collections, and what follows is only meant to give some introductory sites, some jumping off points.

Materials on western Pennsylvania history are collected here. Some nice visuals can be found here.

Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.

The Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh.

Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

The Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania.

The site of the Pennsylvania Historical Association will lead you to a searchable database called PA-online.

Materials in the libraries of Penn State University.

The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography.

Pennsylvania History

Resources collected in the new state History published by Penn State Press.

A good way to find out what new books are being published on Pennsylvania history is to follow the catalogues of the major presses working in this field. The major ones include:

Penn State Press                                                            Temple University Press

University of Pennsylvania Press                              University of Pittsburgh Press

Camino Books


Pennsylvania legal materials can be found here.

For current Pennsylvania politics, see politicsPA or the useful materials collected by PCN television. Materials on state government and contemporary legislative affairs can also be found here and here.

The Pennsylvania Manual is a great all-round resource.

There are also lots of local county and city historical societies and resources that I am not going to list in full here, but Westmoreland County gives a good model of what is available. See also this site on Bethlehem.

Many sites commemorate the heroes of United Flight 93, lost at Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on September 11, 2001.

I have published two books on themes in Pennsylvania history. These are:

Hoods and Shirts: The Extreme Right in Pennsylvania 1925-1950.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

The Cold War at Home: The Red Scare in Pennsylvania 1945-1960.
University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Also: this is my chapter from the new state History on the post-industrial age, 1950-2000.

This is a proposal for one historical project which I am currently developing, about occult and fringe movements in the Philadelphia area in the early twentieth century.


These are some articles that I have published on Pennsylvania history in the past few years:

This is a conference paper I wrote on Disease and Racial Frontiers in Charles Brockden Brown's Philadelphia.

An unpublished paper on the Molly Maguires, and how they came to be commemorated in Pennsylvania's heritage tourism industry.

 This is on the investigation of spies and subversives in Pennsylvania during the first world war.

And another on prostitution in Lancaster during the Progressive era.

Keystone Defenders is a paper about the politics of civil defense in Pennsylvania c.1940-1960.