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195 books match the query 'Pennsylvania' and 6 start with f

cover of Falling Back: Incarceration and Transitions to Adulthood among Urban Youth

Falling Back

Incarceration and Transitions to Adulthood among Urban Youth

Fader, Jamie J

Rutgers University Press, 2013

Winner of the 2016 Michael J. Hindelang Award from the American Society of Criminology (ASC)

Winner of the 2016 Outstanding Book for the Academy of Criminal Justice Science (ACJS)

2014 Scholarly Contribution Award from the Children and Youth Section of the American Sociological Association

Received an Honorable Mention for the American Sociological Association Race, Gender and Class Section's 2014 Distinguished Book Award

Named a 2013 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Jamie J. Fader documents the transition to adulthood for a particularly vulnerable population: young inner-city men of color who have, by the age of eighteen, already been imprisoned. How, she asks, do such precariously situated youth become adult men? What are the sources of change in their lives?

Falling Back is based on over three years of ethnographic research with black and Latino males on the cusp of adulthood and incarcerated at a rural reform school designed to address “criminal thinking errors” among juvenile drug offenders. Fader observed these young men as they transitioned back to their urban Philadelphia neighborhoods, resuming their daily lives and struggling to adopt adult masculine roles. This in-depth ethnographic approach allowed her to portray the complexities of human decision-making as these men strove to “fall back,” or avoid reoffending, and become productive adults. Her work makes a unique contribution to sociological understandings of the transitions to adulthood, urban social inequality, prisoner reentry, and desistance from offending.
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cover of Family-Friendly Biking: in New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania

Family-Friendly Biking

in New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania

Goodspeed, Diane

Rutgers University Press, 2005

Do you love bike riding with your kids, but are tired of rides that take you in circles around the neighborhood block? Looking for something more exciting, yet still safe and manageable?

Through years of research and a lot of trial and error with her own two children, Diane Goodspeed gives us the first biking book for this region geared specifically toward families with young kids. Packed with photos and easy-to-follow maps, Goodspeed shows us where to find nearly twenty-five kid-friendly trails—trails that are not too steep or too long, do not encounter many roads, and provide ample access to food and restroom facilities.

You will find detailed information on popular New Jersey routes, including the Columbia Trail, Delaware & Raritan Canal Trail, Sussex Branch Trail, and Paulinskill Valley Trail, as well as undemanding rides through Duke Island Park, Hartshorne Woods, and Sandy Hook National Recreation Area. In eastern Pennsylvania, kids of all ages can peddle along the Lehigh Canal and the Delaware Canal and explore the many rambling paths of Tyler State Park.

These and many more rides are rated according to a child’s biking skills and each one is accompanied by detailed descriptions of the area. And because kids are always full of questions, Goodspeed includes a short history and interesting "did you know?" facts for each region. Tips on equipment options, bike safety, and the nearest bathrooms, playgrounds, and ice cream shops make this book the definitive source for kid-tested, parent-approved biking fun. It is an essential guide for planning the most enjoyable and rewarding family bike excursions.

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cover of Finished Business: My Fifty Years of Headlines, Heroes, and Heartaches

Finished Business

My Fifty Years of Headlines, Heroes, and Heartaches

Ray Didinger

Temple University Press, 2021

Ray Didinger opens his lively memoir Finished Business with the Philadelphia Eagles’ upset win in Super Bowl LII. When the Eagles finally hoist the Lombardi Trophy, Didinger does his best to straddle the emotions of a working reporter and a long-suffering Philly fan. His ability to do that is why he has built up such a loyal following.

Didinger began following the Eagles as a kid, hanging out in his grandfather’s bar in Southwest Philadelphia. He spent his summers at the team's training camp in Hershey. It was there he met his idol, flanker Tommy McDonald. He would later write a play, Tommy and Me, about their friendship and his efforts to see McDonald enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Didinger has been covering the Eagles as a newspaper columnist or TV analyst since 1970. Over the years, he wrote sports for the Philadelphia Bulletin and the Philadelphia Daily News. He later produced Emmy Award–winning documentaries for NFL Films before transitioning to sports talk radio and TV analysis.

In five decades, across multiple media platforms, he has interviewed everyone from Hank Aaron, Wayne Gretzky, Muhammad Ali, Julius Erving, Jack Nicklaus, to Mike Schmidt, as well as writing film scripts for Hollywood stars such as Bruce Willis and Alec Baldwin. He went to the White House with the U.S. Olympic team and even explored the bizarre world of professional wrestling.

His stories, told in his familiar, breezy style, capture his enthusiasm for sports and his affection for the fans who still mourn the pennant that eluded the Phillies in 1964. Didinger has become synonymous with Philadelphia sports, and his memoir is as passionate as an autumn Sunday at Lincoln Financial Field.

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cover of From Home Guards to Heroes: The 87th Pennsylvania and Its Civil War Community

From Home Guards to Heroes

The 87th Pennsylvania and Its Civil War Community

Dennis W. Brandt

University of Missouri Press, 2007

The soldiers of the 87th Pennsylvania Infantry fought in the Overland campaign under Grant and in the Shenandoah valley under Sheridan, notably at the Battle of Monocacy. But as Dennis Brandt reveals in From Home Guards to Heroes, their real story takes place beyond the battlefield. The 87th drew its men from the Scotch-Irish and German populations of York and Adams counties in south-central Pennsylvania—a region with closer ties to Baltimore than to Philadelphia—where some citizens shared Marylanders’ southern views on race while others aided the Underground Railroad.
Brandt’s unique regimental history investigates why these “boys from York” enlisted and why some deserted, the ways in which soldiers reflected their home communities, and the area’s attitudes toward the war both before and after hostilities broke out. Brandt takes a humanistic approach to the Civil War, revealing the more personal aspects of the struggle in a book that focuses on the soldiers themselves.
Using their own words to describe action both on and off the battlefield, he sheds light on the lives of ordinary men: the comparative values of farm and city boys, their motives and concerns, the effect of battle on soldiers and their families, and the suffering that veterans took to the grave. Brandt also looks at soldiers’ racial views, illuminating their deepest worries about the war, and at community politics and problems of discipline surrounding this ideologically divided unit.
Grounded in more than a decade of research into nearly two thousand military records, this is one of the few regimental histories based on more than one thousand pension records for the entire regiment, plus nearly eight hundred additional record sets for other area soldiers. Brandt tapped regional newspapers and a cache of unpublished letters and diaries—some from private collections not previously known—to provide an invaluable account of Civil War sensibilities in a northern area bordering a slave state.
From Home Guards to Heroes is a book about war in which humanity rather than troop movement takes center stage. Engagingly written for a wide audience and meticulously researched, it offers a distinctive image of a community and the intimate lives of the men it sent off to fight—and a story that will intrigue any Civil War aficionado.
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cover of From Puerto Rico To Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies

From Puerto Rico To Philadelphia

Puerto Rican Workers and Postwar Economies

Carmen Whalen

Temple University Press, 2001

"We were poor but we had everything we needed," reminisces Dona Epifania. Nonetheless, when a man she knew told her about a job in Philadelphia, she grasped the opportunity to leave Coamas. "He went to Puerto Rico and told me there were beans to cook. I came here and cooked for fourteen workers." In San Lorenzo, Dona Carmen and her husband made the same decision: "We didn't want to, nobody wanted to leave....There wasn't any alternative." Don Florencio recalls that in Salinas work had gotten scarce, "especially for the youth, the young men....The farmworker that was used to cutting cane, already the sugar cane was disappearing," and government licensing regulations made fishing "more difficult for the poor."

Puerto Rican migration to the mainland following World War II took place for a range of reasons -- globalization of the economy, the colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, state policies, changes in regional and  local economies, social networks, and, not least, the decisions made by individual immigrants. In this wide-ranging book, Carmen Whalen weaves them all into a tapestry of Puerto Rican immigration to Philadelphia.

Like African Americans and Mexicans, Puerto Ricans were recruited for low-wage jobs, only to confront racial discrimination as well as economic restructuring. As Whalen shows, they were part of that wave of newcomers who came from areas in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia characterized by  a heavy U.S. military and economic presence, especially export processing zones looking for a new life in depressed urban environments already populated by earlier labor migrants. But Puerto Rican in-migration was also unique, especially in its regional and gender dimensions. Many migrants came as part of contract labor programs shaped by competing agendas.

By the 1990s, economic conditions, government policies, and racial ideologies had transformed Puerto Rican labor migrants into what has been called "the other underclass." The author analyzes this continuation of "culture and poverty" interpretations and contrasts it with the efforts of Philadelphia's Puerto Ricans to recreate their communities and deal with the impact of  economic restructuring and residential segregation in the City of Brotherly Love.
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cover of From Workshop to Waste Magnet: Environmental Inequality in the Philadelphia Region

From Workshop to Waste Magnet

Environmental Inequality in the Philadelphia Region

Sicotte, Diane

Rutgers University Press, 2016

Like many industrialized regions, the Philadelphia metro area contains pockets of environmental degradation: neighborhoods littered with abandoned waste sites, polluting factories, and smoke-belching incinerators. However, other neighborhoods within and around the city are relatively pristine. This eye-opening book reveals that such environmental inequalities did not occur by chance, but were instead the result of specific policy decisions that served to exacerbate endemic classism and racism. 
 
From Workshop to Waste Magnet presents Philadelphia’s environmental history as a bracing case study in mismanagement and injustice. Sociologist Diane Sicotte digs deep into the city’s past as a titan of American manufacturing to trace how only a few communities came to host nearly all of the area’s polluting and waste disposal land uses. By examining the complex interactions among economic decline, federal regulations, local politics, and shifting ethnic demographics, she not only dissects what went wrong in Philadelphia but also identifies lessons for environmental justice activism today. 
 
Sicotte’s research tallies both the environmental and social costs of industrial pollution, exposing the devastation that occurs when mass quantities of society’s wastes mix with toxic levels of systemic racism and economic inequality. From Workshop to Waste Magnet is a compelling read for anyone concerned with the health of America’s cities and the people who live in them. 
 
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