Most tellings of Nellie Bly in Pittsburgh stop at a letter and a pen name. This one follows the disputed details of her Dispatch years, her note on a desk in 1887, and the 3 a.m. depot stop on her way home from the world trip.

In November 1794 federal militia rounded up about 150 men across western Pennsylvania in the dark. What Lee’s orders said, why the date is disputed, what happened to the prisoners in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, and how the pardons actually worked.

For a few decades one narrow strip of Fayette and Westmoreland counties made much of the coke that American furnaces burned. How beehive ovens worked, how Frick built his empire, what happened at Morewood in 1891, and where the ovens still stand.

Allegheny County’s Civil War veterans asked a court for a monument and were told to ask for a hall instead. How Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall was funded, fought over and built, what its bronze plaques list, and how it widened to every war.

Maxo Vanka painted the walls of a Millvale church in 1937 and 1941 with Croatian peasants, millworkers, grieving mothers and soldiers. How a priest found him, what is on the walls, the ghost legend, the 1970 repaint, and how to visit.

A state marker in Latrobe says the first documented banana split was made there in 1904. The earliest printed use of the name is a 1905 trade-journal line about Boston. What the evidence supports, and what it does not.