Features Archives - Page 3 of 86 - Pennsylvania Heritage Magazine

Captured: Axis Prisoners of War in Pennsylvania

Posted by Richard Holl on Feb 24, 2025 in | Comments Off During World War II, the United States government built the largest, most complex prisoner of war program in American history. By 1944 more than 425,000 Axis prisoners of war (POWs) lived in hundreds of camps across the U.S. The Office of the Provost Marshal General (OPMG), the War Department agency in charge of the prisoner of war program, authorized the use of German, Italian and Japanese POWs...
read more

Three Days in Hell: The 28th Infantry Division and the Battle of the Bulge

Posted by Jennifer Barndt on Feb 24, 2025 in | Comments Off The 28th Infantry Division is the oldest continually serving division in the United States Army. It traces its roots to the Associators, a collection of volunteer militia groups first organized throughout Colonial America beginning in 1747. These units served Pennsylvania and the nation through the Revolutionary War, the early National period conflicts, and the Civil War. In 1879 Pennsylvania...
read more

End of the Road: Relocating and Preserving the Appalachian Trail in the Cumberland Valley

Posted by Joe Baker on Oct 21, 2024 in | Comments Off Craig Dunn and Karen Lutz are two of my oldest friends. We go back to the late 1970s, decades before we had gray hair, artificial joints or any of the other hard-won infirmities the years have bestowed on us. We are sitting together in a restaurant, contemplating our lunch menus and catching up. Karen is a ball of energy and action, even now in her 70s — passionate, fiercely loyal, mischievous...
read more

Fellow Travelers: The Fight to Desegregate Philadelphia’s Streecars After the Civil War

Posted by Terry Crowley on Oct 21, 2024 in | Comments Off “When a nation suffers as ours does, from the misfortune of having two races . . . one long civilized, the other emerging from the shades of barbarism . . . there is much in the relations between them that must be left to the lessons of experience and the tribunal of public opinion.” And so, Judge John Hare of the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas ruled that a Black man was not entitled to...
read more

The Appleseed of a Nation

Posted by Don Sarvey on Oct 21, 2024 in | Comments Off In an article in The Atlantic magazine in 1862, Henry David Thoreau observed that it’s “remarkable how closely the history of the apple-tree is connected with that of man.” He wrote, “The cultivated apple-tree was first introduced into this country by the earliest settlers, and it is thought to do as well or better here than anywhere.” He presented to his readers the image of a westward-bound...
read more

Carved in Stone, Revealed in New Light: Early Gravestone Carvers and Funerary Folk Culture of the Pennsylvania Dutch

Posted by Patrick Donmoyer on Aug 9, 2024 in | Comments Off In the winter of 1747, tragedy struck in the Tulpehocken Valley. Leonard Rieth (1691–1747) — among the first German-speaking settlers to journey into the valley from Schoharie, New York, in 1723 — was crushed by two cogs in his gristmill along the Mill Creek. Rieth’s untimely death also coincided with a schism that divided the Lutheran congregation that bore his family name: Rieth’s (later...
read more

The Artist and the President: Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Painting Impulse and the Andrew Wyeth Connection

Posted by Michael Birkner on Aug 9, 2024 in | Comments Off After the popular Pennsylvania artist Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) died at age 91 at his home in Chadds Ford, the New York Times obituary summed up his career, emphasizing key themes in his corpus and noting that he had both admirers and detractors. The former included British statesman Winston Churchill, himself an amateur painter of ability. To this list one could add President Dwight D....
read more

Outstanding Perseverance and Courage: Pennsylvania’s Thomas Mosley and the Montford Point Marines in World War II

Posted by Robert Hill on Aug 9, 2024 in | Comments Off In November 1943, a young Black man sat in a military recruiting office in Philadelphia. At first, joining the Marines seemed like a good idea, but with the paperwork completed, he thought of a relative who had been in the Navy and decided he might like that service better. “Sir, I would like to be exchanged into the Navy instead of the Marines.” It was a simple statement, said in a respectful...
read more

Nellie Bly: A Career Shaped by Misfortune

Posted by Bob Fulton on Aug 9, 2024 in | Comments Off When Nellie Bly completed her famed around-the-world journey in 1890, the New York World hailed the intrepid journalist as “the best-known and most widely talked-of young woman on earth today.” But had she not dropped out of college a decade before, no one would have ever heard of her. In fact, Nellie Bly would never have existed. The woman born Elizabeth Jane Cochran, who pioneered the concept...
read more

“I Would Have a Brew House”

Posted by Clare Cavicchi on May 6, 2024 in | Comments Off Virtually from its founding, settlers and visitors to the Philadelphia area perceived possibilities for a thriving brewing industry there. Thomas Budd, in 1685, wrote, “I do not question but that we might make good strong sound Beer, Ale and Rum, that would keep well to Barbadoes . . . I question not but if it be well brewed in a seasonable time of the Year, and put up in good Casks, but...
read more