Celebrating Fifty Years of State Historical Markers

On a September day in 1946, three men stood alongside U.S. Route 22, fourteen miles east of Harrisburg, inspecting a distinctive blue and gold sign that had just been erected. They were James H. Duff, chairman of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (who in four months would be inaugurated the Commonwealth’s thirty­-fourth governor), and Commission members Charles G. Webb and...
read more

History and Community: Pennsylvania’s First Lady Makes The Connection, An Interview with Michele M. Ridge

When flood waters threatened the Governor’s Residence in Harrisburg in January 1996, Michele M. Ridge quickly transformed herself from First Lady to First Curator of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Within hours, she assembled a team of National Guardsmen, weekend staff at the resi­dence, and specialists of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission to move endangered works of art,...
read more

Bookshelf

Charles Sheeler in Doylestown: American Modernism and the Pennsylvania Tradition by Karen Lucic Allentown Art Museum, 1997 (120 pages, paper, $30.00) This remarkable book traces the development of artist Charles Sheeler’s modernist treatment of a highly familiar theme, the Bucks County barn. Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) was born in Philadelphia and as a young man lived in the Bucks County...
read more

The Pennsylvania Civil War Muster Rolls Project

Imagine, nearly a century and a half ago, an entire company of soldiers mustering out at the end of their service. A hundred or more war-wearied men line up and, one-by-one, give a personal accounting to field clerks as they leave the army to return home. Company officers sitting at a makeshift table huddle over a huge sheet of heavy ruled paper and list each soldier and record what happened to...
read more

Pennsylvania Heritage Recommends

The Civil War in Pennsylvania: A Photographic History Written by a trio of savvy and inveterate collectors of photographs, artifacts, objects, and ephemera documenting the American Civil War and its associations with the Keystone State and its soldiers and citizens, The Civil War in Pennsylvania: A Photographic History (Senator John Heinz History Center for Pennsylvania Civil War 150, 2012,...
read more