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Fifty-seven Irish immigrant laborers arrived in the port of Philadelphia in June 1832 to work on Pennsylvania's Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad. They all perished within six weeks.

Contractor Philip Duffy hired them to work a stretch of track in rural Chester County known as Duffy's Cut. For more than 180 years, the railroad maintained that cholera was to blame and kept the historical record under lock and key. In a harrowing modern-day excavation of their mass grave, a group of academics and volunteers found evidence some of the laborers were murdered. Authors and research leaders Dr. William E. Watson and Dr. J. Francis Watson reveal the tragedy, mystery and discovery of what really happened at Duffy's Cut.

In early twentieth-century New York, few could have imagined a train terminal as grandiose as Pennsylvania Station.

Sandhogs would battle the fiercest of nature to build tunnels linking Manhattan to New Jersey and Long Island. For decades, Penn Station was a center of elegance and pride. But the ensuing rise of the airplane and automobile began to diminish train travel. By the mid-1960s, the station was tragically destroyed. The loss inspired the birth of preservation laws in the city and the nation that would save other landmarks like Grand Central. Author Paul Kaplan recounts the trials and triumphs of New York's Penn Station.

Beyond the grand facades and trappings of the Main Line cream-and-crystal crowd are hidden tales and scintillating stories.

Author Mark Dixon's collection of articles from Main Line Today explores the region's offbeat and oft-forgotten history. With a keen eye and a touch of humor, Dixon delves into the Welsh origins of nearly unpronounceable towns and the journey of the Sound of Music's Trapp family to Merion. From anecdotes of the socialite who divorced her husband when he had the gall to survive the sinking of the Titanic to the Wayne native who turned from the convent to a career as an internationally renowned opera star, Dixon brings to light the lost pages of Main Line history.

New York's railroads were born of the cutthroat conflict of rate wars, bloody strikes and even federal graft. The railroad wars began as soon as the first line was chartered between Albany and Schenectady when supporters of the Erie Canal tried to block the new technology that would render their waterway obsolete. After the first primitive railroads overcame that hurdle, they began battling with one another in a series of rate wars to gain market share. Attracted by the success of the rails, the most powerful and cunning capitalists in the country--Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, Daniel Drew and other robber barons--joined the fray. Timothy Starr's account of New York's railroad wars steams through the nineteenth century with stories of rate pools, labor strikes, stock corners, legislative bribery and treasury plundering the likes of which the world had never seen.

For slaves escaping on the Underground Railroad, names like Springtown and Snow Hill promised sanctuary and salvation. Under the pressures of racial prejudice, free blacks, runaway slaves and even many Native Americans formed island communities on the periphery of South Jersey towns. While Lawnside and others continue to thrive today, "fringe communities"? like Marshalltown and Timbuctoo now exist only in memory. In this discussion of these primarily African American communities, Dennis Rizzo validates their role in the preservation of tradition, definition of extended family and creation of a social bond between diverse peoples; together they formed parallel communities based on, but independent of, the larger towns and villages familiar to us all.

It has been the intention of the writer to present a brief history of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad from its inception in 1826 until its completion to Wheeling in January, 1853. The monograph has been designed as a study in the economics of transportation, and stress has been laid upon the influence of the railroad in the development of the industryand commerce of the city of Baltimore, and of the agricultural, mineral and manufacturing resources of the state of Maryland. The Baltimore and Ohio having been the first great through-route railroad projected in America, has naturally an important place in the regard of the student of transportation. The beginnings of some of the present difficult railroad problems appear in the history of this road, and these have not only been treated incidentally as they appeared in connection with the legislative, financial and mechanical history of the railroad, but have been summarized in the final chapter.

You remember that at Paris but three of the buildings were open in the evening. Here every one of the great halls is open and aglow with light. In all but the Fine Arts, the Administration, and the Woman's Building arc lights are employed. In Machinery Hall there are six hundred; in Agricultural Hall, six hundred; in the Electric Building, four hundred; in the Mines and Mining Building, four hundred; in the Transportation Building, four hundred and fifty; in Horticultural Hall, four hundred; in the Forestry Building, one hundred and fifty; and in the Great Palace of the Liberal Arts, two thousand. Twelve thousand incandescent lamps light the Fine Arts Building; ten thousand more are ablaze in the Administration Building; and in the Woman's Building there are one hundred and eighty arc lights and twenty-seven hundred incandescent lamps. When at length you approach the Grand Avenue the scene becomes more and more beautiful. Every window and archway of the great edifices here are sending out broad columns of light, illuminated fountains are throwing aloft their brilliant-hued waters, groups of white statuary stand out in bold and striking outline against the black shadows, and the golden ornaments of the entrances to the several mammoth piles facing the Grand Canal flash and glitter in the flood of dazzling effulgence.

Washington's first streetcars trundled down Pennsylvania Avenue during the Civil War. By the end of the century, streetcar lines crisscrossed the city, expanding it into the suburbs and defining where Washingtonians lived, worked and played. One of the most beloved routes was the scenic Cabin John line to the amusement park in Glen Echo, Maryland. From the quaint early days of small horse-drawn cars to the modern "streamliners" of the twentieth century, the stories are all here. Join author John DeFerrari on a joyride through the fascinating history of streetcars in the nation's capital.