"Explore the shocking history of the Kelayres massacre in Pennsylvania"--

Politics in Kelayres turned deadly on November 5, 1934. When Republican boss "Big Joe" Bruno sensed his grip on Pennsylvania's anthracite coal region slipping away with the night's election, he and a few family members opened fire on a peaceful Democratic parade passing Bruno's home. The carnage was shocking--five men gunned down and nearly two dozen other victims wounded but alive. Convicted and sentenced to the Schuylkill County Prison, Bruno quickly escaped, allegedly with help from the guard. It took authorities eight months to put him back behind bars. Author Stephanie Hoover delves into this true story of politics, murder and deceit.

The history of capitalist development in the United States is long, uneven, and overwhelmingly focused on the North. Macroeconomic studies of the South have primarily emphasized the role of the cotton economy in global trading networks. Until now, few in-depth scholarly works have attempted to explain how capitalism in the South took root and functioned in all of its diverse—and duplicitous—forms. Southern Scoundrels explores the lesser-known aspects of the emergence of capitalism in the region: the shady and unscrupulous peddlers, preachers, slave traders, war profiteers, thieves, and marginal men who seized available opportunities to get ahead and, in doing so, left their mark on the southern economy. Eschewing conventional economic theory, this volume features narrative storytelling as engaging and seductive as the cast of shifty characters under examination. Contributors cover the chronological sweep of the nineteenth-century South, from the antebellum era through the tumultuous and chaotic Civil War years, and into Reconstruction and beyond. The geographic scope is equally broad, with essays encompassing the Chesapeake, South Carolina, the Lower Mississippi Valley, Texas, Missouri, and Appalachia. These essays offer a series of social histories on the nineteenth-century southern economy and the changes wrought by capitalist transformation. Tracing that story through the kinds of oily individuals who made it happen, Southern Scoundrels provides fascinating insights into the region’s hucksters and its history. Contents Introduction, Jeff Forret and Bruce E. Baker “Preachers and Peddlers: Credit and Belief in the Flush Times,” John Lindbeck “A Gentleman and a Scoundrel? Alexander McDonald, Financial Reputation, and Slavery’s Capitalism,” Alexandra J. Finley “‘How Deeply They Weed into the Pockets’: Slave Traders, Bank Speculators, and the Anatomy of a Chesapeake Wildcat, 1840–1843,” Jeff Forret “Bernard Kendig: Orchestrating Fraud in the Market and the Courtroom,” Maria R. Montalvo “William A. Britton v. Benjamin F. Butler: Occupied New Orleans, Confiscation, and the Disruption of the Cotton Trade in Wartime Natchez,” Jeff Strickland “Devils at the Doorstep: Confederate Judges, Masters of Sequestration,” Rodney J. Steward “‘Irresistibly Impelled toward Illegal Appropriation’: The Civil War Schemes of William G. Cheeney,” Jimmy L. Bryan, Jr. “Das Kapital on Tchoupitoulas Street: The Marketing of Stolen Goods and the Reserve Army of Labor in Reconstruction-Era New Orleans,” Bruce E. Baker “The Violent Lives of William Faucett,” Elaine S. Frantz “Eureka! Law and Order for Sale in Gilded Age Appalachia,” T. R. C. Hutton

In late November of 1859, in the Borough of Port Carbon, Pennsylvania, the battered body of a man was found in the sluice of an abandoned slack water channel of the Schuylkill Canal. It was determined by local authorities to have been a murder. But the victim, thought to be a local resident, went unidentified for almost six months. Port Carbon was one of the many boom towns in the six-county coal region of upstate eastern Pennsylvania. It was the northern terminal point of the 108-mile-long Schuylkill Navigation, the brilliantly engineered canal system along the Schuylkill River between Philadelphia and Schuylkill County. With the discovery of vast resources of anthracite coal at the turn of the century, in the short span of fifty years, what had once been a verdant wilderness had now become a mecca of American industrialization. The unyielding demand for anthracite to fuel the growing America in the northeast by the mid-nineteenth century had grown to magnanimous proportions. Immigrants from all over Europe and beyond poured into the coal region to work the mining and canal operations to supply coal via barge and later the railroads downriver to the tidewater port in Port Richmond near Philadelphia. As in every frontier expansion in American history, there also comes the darker side of human interactions. Men murder other men. The mysterious affair and the unusual facts surrounding the murder of one Amos Schroeder, a local mine boss from a German immigrant family, was published in a series of four newspaper articles spanning from December, 1859 to May, 1860. His story appeared in the Miners' Journal, and Pottsville General Advertiser, the historical regional weekly newspaper of publishing magnate Benjamin Bannan of Pottsville. Bannan was a political economist and journalist, one of the most prominent newspaper men of his time. Bannan's whole life was focused on the expansion of the coal region, and he chronicled everything within his purview. Details of Bannan's investigation into the murder, however, are not known. We only know what appeared in the series of these four articles. The case was apparently solved, but never fully closed. The murderers, who had been identified through the efforts of Bannan, fled Schuylkill County before they could be brought to justice despite the reward offered by the County Commissioners. Bannan, for whatever unknown reason, had opted not to publish the murderers' names, as they remained at large. No historical record has been found to indicate that they may have been apprehended, nor ever publicly named. It was not until over a hundred and fifty years later when members of the family, while researching their coal region ancestry, stumbled upon the case of Amos Schroeder, who was discovered to be the brother of the author's Great-Great Grandfather. The identities of the murderers, however, remain lost to history. This book is a fictional account of how the facts and the mysterious circumstances surrounding his murder may have arrived on the pages of the Miners' Journal. It is also a novel that takes a historical journey to the anthracite coal region of eastern Pennsylvania during the mid-nineteenth century when coal was king. It is a story of the hardships endured by the thousands of immigrant families who worked the mines and waterways of the Schuylkill Canal. It is a story of the heritage both famously and infamously created by the coal barons, industrialists, and railroad magnates who fueled the industrialization of a young America.

In late November of 1859, in the Borough of Port Carbon, Pennsylvania, the battered body of a man was found in the sluice of an abandoned slack water channel of the Schuylkill Canal. It was determined by local authorities to have been a murder. But the victim, thought to be a local resident, went unidentified for almost six months. Port Carbon was one of the many boom towns in the six-county coal region of upstate eastern Pennsylvania. It was the northern terminal point of the 108-mile-long Schuylkill Navigation, the brilliantly engineered canal system along the Schuylkill River between Philadelphia and Schuylkill County. With the discovery of vast resources of anthracite coal at the turn of the century, in the short span of fifty years, what had once been a verdant wilderness had now become a mecca of American industrialization. The unyielding demand for anthracite to fuel the growing America in the northeast by the mid-nineteenth century had grown to magnanimous proportions. Immigrants from all over Europe and beyond poured into the coal region to work the mining and canal operations to supply coal via barge and later the railroads downriver to the tidewater port in Port Richmond near Philadelphia. As in every frontier expansion in American history, there also comes the darker side of human interactions. Men murder other men. The mysterious affair and the unusual facts surrounding the murder of one Amos Schroeder, a local mine boss from a German immigrant family, was published in a series of four newspaper articles spanning from December, 1859 to May, 1860. His story appeared in the Miners’ Journal, and Pottsville General Advertiser, the historical regional weekly newspaper of publishing magnate Benjamin Bannan of Pottsville. Bannan was a political economist and journalist, one of the most prominent newspaper men of his time. Bannan’s whole life was focused on the expansion of the coal region, and he chronicled everything within his purview. Details of Bannan’s investigation into the murder, however, are not known. We only know what appeared in the series of these four articles. The case was apparently solved, but never fully closed. The murderers, who had been identified through the efforts of Bannan, fled Schuylkill County before they could be brought to justice despite the reward offered by the County Commissioners. Bannan, for whatever unknown reason, had opted not to publish the murderers’ names, as they remained at large. No historical record has been found to indicate that they may have been apprehended, nor ever publicly named. It was not until over a hundred and fifty years later when members of the family, while researching their coal region ancestry, stumbled upon the case of Amos Schroeder, who was discovered to be the brother of the author’s Great-Great Grandfather. The identities of the murderers, however, remain lost to history. This book is a fictional account of how the facts and the mysterious circumstances surrounding his murder may have arrived on the pages of the Miners’ Journal. It is also a novel that takes a historical journey to the anthracite coal region of eastern Pennsylvania during the mid-nineteenth century when coal was king. It is a story of the hardships endured by the thousands of immigrant families who worked the mines and waterways of the Schuylkill Canal. It is a story of the heritage both famously and infamously created by the coal barons, industrialists, and railroad magnates who fueled the industrialization of a young America.

On September 10, 1897, a group of 400 striking coal miners--workers of Polish, Slovak, and Lithuanian descent or origin--marched on Lattimer, Pennsylvania. There, law enforcement officers fired without warning into the protesters, killing nineteen miners and wounding thirty-eight others. The bloody day quickly faded into history. Paul A. Shackel confronts the legacies and lessons of the Lattimer event. Beginning with a dramatic retelling of the incident, Shackel traces how the violence, and the acquittal of the deputies who perpetrated it, spurred membership in the United Mine Workers. By blending archival and archaeological research with interviews, he weighs how the people living in the region remember--and forget--what happened. Now in positions of power, the descendants of the slain miners have themselves become rabidly anti-union and anti-immigrant as Dominicans and other Latinos change the community. Shackel shows how the social, economic, and political circumstances surrounding historic Lattimer connect in profound ways to the riven communities of today. Compelling and timely, Remembering Lattimer restores an American tragedy to our public memory.

A fascinating account of the 1885 murder of Pennsylvania Quaker John Sharpless and the subsequent trial and conviction of Samuel Johnson, a local African American man who was believed innocent by the widow of Sharpless.