Letters to the Editor

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Letters to the Editor Ecstatic with Esherick Wow! Your magazine is really on the ball. With the growing popularity of the crafts movement, you’re right on target with your feature story on Esherick [see Sharon Hernes Silverman’s “A Passion for Wood: The Life and Legacy of Wharton Esherick” in the Fall 1997 issue]. I’m ecstatic with your timely coverage. Thanks. Mimi Hake-Tripp...
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Currents

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Currents Amish Arts A comprehensive-and colorful-sur­vey of the distinctive decorative arts cre­ated by and for the Amish of Lancaster County is on view at the Heritage Center Museum of Lancaster County. About two hundred objects made during a period of two hundred years, from 1790 to 1990, are showcased in “Amish Arts of Lancaster County,” on view through Saturday, Janu­ary 2, 1999. Included...
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Shorts

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Shorts “Pennsylvania Regionalism: The Turn of the Century,” on view at the Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, through Saturday, October 30 [1999], presents a survey of impressionism and realism spanning the period from 1870 to the 1930s. The exhibit features landscapes, still lifes, and portraits by twenty-four Pennsylvania artists, among them Edward W. Redfield, Daniel Garber,...
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Bookshelf

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bookshelf Pitts­burgh’s Bridges: Architecture and Engineering By Walter C. Kidney Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, 1999 (235 pages, cloth, $49.95) For many, it’s surprising to learn that Pittsburgh and surrounding Allegheny County are linked together by a vast network of sixteen hundred bridges. These spans make places accessible that would otherwise remain inaccessible and result,...
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Bookshelf

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bookshelf Pennsylvania Architecture: The Historic American Buildings Survey, 1933-1990 By Deborah Stephens Bums and Richard J. Web­ster, with Candace Reed Stem Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 2000 (629 pages; cloth, $85.00; paper, $65.00) This hefty volume befits its subject: it is a landmark book devoted to landmark buildings. Copiously illustrated, Pennsylvania Architecture: The Historic...
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Shorts

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Shorts The Internet Unplugged: The World-Wide Moravian Network, 1732-1858, an exhibit chronicling Moravian Church communi­cation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has been recently unveiled by the Moravian Historical Society in Nazareth. The exhibit, which runs through Sunday, October 21 [2001], surveys the ways in which Moravians kept abreast of developments, as well as exchanged ideas and...
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Currents

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Currents Pennsylvania Germans Historians trace the origins of Pennsylvania German settlement to late seventeenth-century Philadelphia and the arrival of the earliest immigrants. These arrivals came from many regions in what are now the countries of Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, and the Alsace region of France. Lutheran, Reformed, Moravian, Catholic, Jewish, and Anabaptist (including...
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Genealogy Records at Ephrata Cloister

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Genealogy Records at Ephrata Cloister The types of source documents that help family historians most often depend upon such factors as ethnicity, ge­ography, and time period. Even within an ethnic group, there can be great variety. Pennsylvania Germans constitute one such group. The large immigration to Pennsylvania of German­-speaking people in the late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century was composed...
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Ancestry of the Pennsylvania Germans

Posted by on Nov 24, 2013 in | Comments Off on Ancestry of the Pennsylvania Germans The ancestry of the Pennsylvania Germans has been an extraordinarily rich genealogical mine from which researchers have extracted informa­tion since at least the time of Israel Daniel Rupp (1803-1878), a self-taught historian who collated primary source records along with family histories in the 1840s. Since the mid-nineteenth century, a princi­pal genealogical challenge of these families has...
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“B” from ABC Book at Ephrata Cloister

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on “B” from ABC Book at Ephrata Cloister The arts — particularly hand-drawn illustrations and music manuscripts — played an important part in the daily lives of the members of Ephrata Cloister, founded in 1732 by Conrad Beissel (1691–1768) in Lancaster County. The religious community created its own distinctive fraktur, ornate illuminations for manuscripts, wall charts, and bookplates. The highest form and best-known example of Ephrata...
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