"Penn's Woods and Wouldn'ts"

All right, I reorganized my own list into (1) places, (2) events and (3) people. There's always overlap, of course, between the categories.

I. Places

a. Steel towns generally. Pittsburgh, but also Homestead and Monongahela and the Braddock/Rankin corridor. The towns' strange prosperity and ethnic vibrance dating from the late nineteenth century through the middle 1970s.
b. Punxsutawney and their inexplicable groundhog. Also an event.
c. Three Mile Island. Also an event. This will surely displace Midnight Oil's haggard "Harrisburg" as the best song written about TMI.
d. The Monongahela + Allegheny = Ohio confluence. Yeah, homer here, but it's still a neat thing to see, at least in part because of how it's just there.
e. Philadelphia's Independence Hall, Liberty Bell, various statues of Ben Franklin.

II. Events

f. The 1892 Homestead Strike. It reportedly helped in large part to hand the presidential election to Grover Cleveland later that year.
g. MOVE.
h. Dwyer's press conference.
i. The attempted assassination of H.C. Frick. The way I've heard it, as he's bleeding on the floor and people are wrestling the assassin down, Frick is dictating a telegram to Carnegie to tell him he's going to live.
j. Gettysburg.
k. Mrs. Soffel breaking Mel Gibson out of the Allegheny County jail.
l. General Braddock falling at Fort Duquesne in the French and Indian War. Man, this list is too western Pennsylvania-heavy.

III. People

m. Boxers, fake and real: Rocky Balboa and Smokin' Joe Frazier.
n. Satchel Paige and the Pittsburgh Crawfords.
o. Fred Rogers.