Bookshelf

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bookshelf Illustrating an Anthracite Era: The Photographic Legacy of John Horgan Jr. by Gwendoline E. Percival and Chester J. Kulesa Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and Anthracite Heritage Museum and Iron Furnaces Associates, 1995 (73 pages, paper, $9.95) Exemplifying the breadth and depth of more than twenty thousand images made by a single photographer of the anthracite region, the...
read more

Shorts

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Shorts “From Ft. Wagner to Verdun: African Americans in the U.S. Military, 1863-1918,” is on view at the Civil War Library and Museum in Philadelphia. The exhibition, continuing through August 30, 1998, showcases artifacts, objects, and documents chronicling the experience of African Americans in mili­tary service from the Civil War through World War I. The Civil War Library and Museum is...
read more

Currents

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Currents Setting Sail One of Pennsylvania’s most exciting museums-and certainly its newest-will open its doors during the Memorial Day weekend (see “Executive Director’s Message” in the spring 1998 edition). The Erie Maritime Museum, with the U.S. Brig Niagara as its centerpiece, will join more than two dozen historic sites and museums along the well-traveled Pennsylvania Trail of...
read more

Current and Coming

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Current and Coming Steel Poetry Inspired by the various aspects of the steel industry in Bethlehem, Mildred T. Johnstone (1900-1988) created unusual canvas embroideries in the late 1940s and early 1950s. As the wife of Bethlehem Steel Corporation executive William H. Johnstone, she had the singular honor of being the first woman to tour the compa­ny’s steel mills. Although the mills have grown silent,...
read more

Roberto Clemente (1934-1972)

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Roberto Clemente (1934-1972) On New Year’s Day, 1973, Vera Clemente stood vigil on Piñones Beach, east of Puerto Rico’s San Juan Airport. When it became known that her husband, Roberto Clemente, died in an air­plane crash during a humanitarian mission, the memory of “The Great One” would touch people from the Keystone State to South America. Clemente gave Pittsburgh and baseball eighteen years and...
read more

The Pennsylvania Dugout Canoe Project

Posted by on Nov 24, 2013 in | Comments Off on The Pennsylvania Dugout Canoe Project Then: Imagine the sight of individuals clad only in loincloths, furiously chipping at a large felled log, slivers of wood flying high above them, and smoke curling upward from sections of the burning tree as they carve out a dugout canoe. Now: In painstakingly precise recreations, archaeologists of the Bureau for Historic Preservation (BHP) of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission...
read more

Letters

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Letters Cover Stories The covers of Pennsylvania Heritage are among the best I have ever seen, but the cover of the Fall 2006 issue was sheer genius! The moment I saw this issue, I just had to pick it up. Also, I couldn’t put it down, neglecting my routine chores and tasks. Thank you for the way you “cover” our history and heritage. Your magazine makes me feel as if I’m part of...
read more

Mr. Peanut’s Hometown: Wilkes-Barre and the Founding of Planters Peanuts

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Mr. Peanut’s Hometown: Wilkes-Barre and the Founding of Planters Peanuts Few may realize it, but for nearly a half-century, the Luzerne County seat of Wilkes-Barre, in northeastern Pennsylvania, was the peanut capital of the world. Founded in 1906, the Planters Peanut Company operated its national headquarters at 632 South Main Street in an impressive two-story Federal-style building. A handsome balustrade encircled the roof of the elegant concrete edifice and was...
read more

This Is a Beautiful, Bountiful Earth: Joseph Trimble Rothrock and the Preservation of Penn’s Woods

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on This Is a Beautiful, Bountiful Earth: Joseph Trimble Rothrock and the Preservation of Penn’s Woods The lush, verdant woodlands characteristic of Pennsylvania’s landscape are almost entirely second-growth forests, in existence roughly for less than a century. Had it not been for the groundbreaking work of many conservationists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Keystone State’s present terrain would be dramatically different. One of the most important of those...
read more

Peter Kalm in Pennsylvania

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Peter Kalm in Pennsylvania The territory now recognized as Pennsylvania was once part of a Swedish colony stretching from Delaware to New York. Swedish farmers settled in small villages along the Delaware River, in southern New Jersey, and in the Hudson Valley. Established by the New Sweden Company in March 1638, it was administered from Fort Christina (Wilmington) in what is now Delaware. In 1655, a band of Dutch...
read more