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Jinxed: the state and the presidency

Pennsylvania, one of the largest, most populous states in the Union, had produced one president, and by all accounts, that one president was woeful. He was James Buchanan. He was president in the lead-up to the Civil War. The knock against Buchanan, who hailed from Lancaster (where his home, ...

Dems need to show up and show off

President Biden, campaigning in Pittsburgh last Wednesday, promised cheering steelworkers to keep U.S. Steel in American hands, despite a $14.9 billion deal on the table to sell the iconic and one-time industrial behemoth to a Japanese firm. The president's stop came on the heels of the visit ...

A springtime of tragic foreboding

There are some travelers I'd like you to meet. They are from an antique land: America in the spring of 1861. It was April, normal in many ways for the residents of Uniontown. Merchants, such as Calvin Springer, proprietor of the McClellan House hotel on Main Street, and C.S. Seaton and George ...

The war within the Kennedy family

The "real" Bobby Kennedy was 26-years old the day he took over management of his brother Jack's campaign for a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1952. "Tanned and wiry with a mop of unruly hair," according to JFK biographer Frederik Logevall, the new campaign manager was not especially interested in ...

Teenage secrets revealed, recovered

"They are everywhere - almost 18 million young Americans crowding into classrooms, spilling into the streets, filing cars and stores and beaches. They have been probed and prodded and psychoanalyzed. And yet, as behavioral scientists point out, “... the years between childhood and adulthood ...

Aides know Trump is badly flawed

It's normal for members of a president's inner circle to stick up for the man who was their boss. Most became great admirers. Typical is Harry Hopkins, who described his boss, Franklin Roosevelt, this way: "When great issues were at stake Roosevelt never faltered." And then there's Donald ...