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What Happened to Residents’ Health Long After the Donora Death Fog?
“Our scientists tell us that the Donora episode was a rare phenomenon. We hope and pray it will never recur. This study by the Public Health Service into the Donora episode, the most exhaustive ever made on a problem in air pollution, is a step toward positive assurance that such a thing will not happen…
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From Boom to Bust: What Happened to Little Webster?
Cuddled along a bend in the Monongahela River in southwestern Pennsylvania, across from the industrial town of Donora, Webster once boasted a population of about two thousand. Anyone traveling up the Mon around the turn of the twentieth century would have seen a charming village at the base of
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Incident at the Marshall House
He was either a traitorous villain or a martyr for the cause, depending on which side of the Mason-Dixon line your ancestors lived. It was 1860, and a man named James W. Jackson, a rabid secessionist, was managing the Marshall House, a hotel that once stood on the corner of King and Pitt Streets in…
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Lucky Man
I’m a lucky man. A lucky, lucky man. I discovered history before it was too late. When I was younger — much, much younger — I hated history. Hated it. Thought that history was just a bunch of old guys who didn’t know any better and that we people of the now are just so much more…
