Ike’s Sanctuary: The Eisenhower Farm in Gettysburg, An Oasis from the Pressures of the Presidency

Posted by on May 8, 2015 in | Comments Off on Ike’s Sanctuary: The Eisenhower Farm in Gettysburg, An Oasis from the Pressures of the Presidency In the spring of 1915 Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower (1890-1969), a cadet at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, visited the Gettysburg battlefield along with the rest of his class. The cadets had come to study Union and Confederate troop movements in an engagement that represented the farthest penetration of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army onto northern soil before the Army of the Potomac repelled...
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Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958)

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958) Despite being the busy wife of a physician, mother of three sons, and victim of fragile health, Pennsylvania native Mary Roberts Rinehart became one of the most popular and highest-paid writers in America. Between 1908 and 1953, she churned out fifty-four books, mostly “whodunit” novels, which enthralled readers worldwide. In her 1980 biography, Improbable Fiction: The Life of Mary...
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Survival of an American Boom Town

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Survival of an American Boom Town No stirring debates reverberate through the chambers of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall; white-hot molten steel no longer pours out of the fiery cauldrons in the sprawling mills of Pittsburgh and Bethlehem; and little coal ripped from the earth by giant steam shovels in Carbon, Schuylkill, Luzerne, and Lackawanna Counties in the Keystone State’s anthracite region. As surprising as...
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The Barrymores of Philadelphia: America’s Royal Family of the Theatre

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on The Barrymores of Philadelphia: America’s Royal Family of the Theatre America’s fabled royal family of the theatre, the Barrymores — a name recognized throughout the world by generations of audiences — began its meteoric rise in mid-nineteenth- century Philadelphia. The twentieth-century scions of entertainment — Lionel, Ethel, and John Barrymore — were born in Philadelphia, children of the rapscallion English charmer, Maurice Barrymore (1847–1905) and his equally...
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