Pennsylvania Architectural Heritage: The Preservation Movement in the Keystone State, 1800-1950

The primary focus of this series of four articles is the architectural heritage of Pennsylvania through the past three centuries. However, in the context of history, architecture is neither an isolated creation nor an assured cultural resource for the future. As buildings ore the products of the interaction of many facets of a society, so. too, the preservation of architecture is the result of...
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“Prepare Thyself … to Meet the Lord Thy God!”: Religion in Pennsylvania During the Revolution

Religion in the colony of Pennsylvania was distinctive. In contrast to most areas of the western world, this province practiced freedom of religion. It never had an established church. Friends who controlled the first legislative assembly, meeting in Upland, now Chester, in 1682, specified that no one was “at any time [to] be com­pelled to frequent or Maintain anie religious worship, place...
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Bookshelf

The WPA His­tory of the Negro in Pittsburgh Edited by Lawrence A. Glasco University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004 (cloth, 422 pages, $39.95) The story of Pitts­burgh’s African Americans is deeply in­tertwined with that of other ethnic groups, yet in many ways it is unique. Before the Civil War, Pittsburgh’s rivers and proximity to the Mason­-Dixon Line made it a critical junction on the...
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Meet Don Yoder: Dean of Folklife Scholars

In 1710, Hans Joder, originally from Canton Bern in Switzerland, arrived in Pennsylvania and made a home in the fertile Oley Valley of southeastern Pennsylvania. Twenty-eight years later, Johannes Cronister of Franconia in northern Bavaria, whose grandfather had been a Protestant fugitive from Lower Austria, came to the province and settled in the region that would later become Adams County....
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Stewards of the Land

Penn’s Woods possesses a rich agrarian heritage and its inhabitants have long borne an abiding stewardship for the land, a time-honored conviction that remains deeply embedded in the more than sixty-three thousand farming families that call Pennsylvania home. From the fertile landscape sprouts a $57 billion economic endeavor that supports one in seven jobs, making agriculture the...
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