From the Executive Director

Posted by on Dec 17, 2019 in | Comments Off on From the Executive Director One of the things I love best about being executive director of the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission is sharing our commonwealth’s history with other Pennsylvanians. Although this letter is appearing in the winter issue of Pennsylvania Heritage, I am writing it on one of the hottest days of 2018. Earlier today, I had just come out of a series of meetings related to agency work...
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Curating a New Home for History: A Conversation with W. Fred Kinsey and Irwin Richman

Posted by on Jun 19, 2015 in | Comments Off on Curating a New Home for History: A Conversation with W. Fred Kinsey and Irwin Richman Established institutions rarely get the opportunity to hit the reset button. But that’s what happened with The State Museum of Pennsylvania in the early 1960s, after the long-anticipated William Penn Memorial Museum and Archives Building cleared its last bureaucratic hurdle. Ground was broken north of the State Capitol in Harrisburg, Dauphin County, in January 1962, and by summer Pennsylvania’s...
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A Centennial, A Celebration, A Cache of Treasures

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on A Centennial, A Celebration, A Cache of Treasures While Philadelphians in 1905 observed the centennial of the nation’s first art museum and school, the venerable Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Pittsburghers flocked to Harry Davis’s Nickelodeon, the first motion picture theater opened in the United States. In Harrisburg that year, on Tuesday, March 28, Governor Samuel W. Penny­packer (1843-1916) signed legislation creating...
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Built by the New Deal

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Built by the New Deal With the nation mired in the grim depths of the Great Depression, industrial Pennsylvania was far from being immune to the financial instability with the closing of 5,000 manufacturing firms and the loss of 270,000 factory jobs by 1933. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched his New Deal, a series of innovative programs targeted to giving work to the unemployed, stabilizing a downward...
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