Lehigh County: The Land and Its People

Lehigh County encompasses the western half of the Lehigh Valley in eastern Pennsylvania. Bounded on the east by the Lehigh River, the main geographical feature of the larger valley, and on the north by the Blue Mountain range, the land is a mosaic of lime­stone plain, sinks and rolling hills. While the southern region of the county lies astride the so-called South Moun­tain and the hills of the...
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Currents

The Gift A spectacular collection of nearly three hundred and fifty colorful feathered objects is featured in an unusual exhibi­tion at The University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropol­ogy, Philadelphia. Designed to invite the museum visitor “to be an anthropologist” and explore culture as it is experi­enced by diverse South American natives, “The Gift of Birds: Featherwork...
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Currents

Hat’s Off! The Philadelphia Museum of Art will celebrate the art and craft of twentieth century millinery in the first major survey of its kind ever to be mounted in the United States. “Ahead of Fashion: Hats of the Twentieth Century” will open on Saturday, August 21 [1993], and continue through Sunday, November 28 [1993]. The exhibition will showcase one hundred of the...
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Shorts

Nearly one hundred watercolors and drawings of fruits, flowers, ani­mals, and saints by artists working in the cities of Jaipur and Bikaner, India, will remain on view at the Carnegie Mellon University’s Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation through Friday, February 24, 1995. The exhibition of natural history works of art features pieces created in Rajasthan, the desert state of...
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Wyoming Monument

Northeastern Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley was a focus of British military strategy during the American Revolution because its three thousand residents constituted the largest population center on the Susquehanna River. The British believed that by eliminating this stronghold of American patriotism they could dominate the frontier. Major John Butler organized a force of two hundred and...
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Out and About

Michener Centennial On Saturday, February 3, James A. Michener (1907–1997), America’s beloved writer and one of Pennsylvania’s most famous sons, would have celebrated his one hundredth birthday. Although he wrote that he did not know who his parents were or exactly when and where he was born, he was raised a Quaker by an adoptive mother, Mabel Michener, in Doylestown, Bucks County. He graduated...
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All Creatures Great and Small: The Western Pennsylvania Humane Society’s Revolution of Kindness Reformed Society and Improved Lives

On a cold February morning in 1965, Donora Mayor Albert P. Delsandro took his daily stroll in the Washington County community’s Palmer Park and made a shocking discovery. Thirteen dead dogs, each with amputated ears, lay in the tall, yellowed grass. A little-known Pennsylvania stray dog law authorized a $2 bounty for every pair of grisly trophies sent to Harrisburg. Countless citizens expressed...
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Lost and Found

Lost American religious leader Joseph Smith Jr. (1805–1844), best known as the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, and his wife Emma Hale Smith, lived in Harmony, now Oakland Township, on the Susquehanna River in northeastern Pennsylvania from late 1827 to 1830. While in Susquehanna County most of the Book of Mormon was translated between April 7 and early June 1829. According to church...
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