Currents

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Currents To Be Modern In 1921, Philadelphia’s venerable Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts mounted the first comprehensive display of American modernist works in an American museum with the ground­breaking “Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings Showing the Later Tendencies in Art.” The exhibition’s selection com­mittee, composed of such “moderns” as Thomas Hart...
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The Saturday Evening Post

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on The Saturday Evening Post Few twentieth-century illustrators have garnered the fame – or adulation – ­that artist Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), who endeared himself to an international audience with his nostalgic glimpses of American life, enjoyed. Many may think of Rockwell as the quintessential New Englander, but his association with Pennsylvania runs deep. He created hundreds of cover illustra­tions for The...
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Documenting Everyday Life in Pennsylvania During the Great Depression and World War II

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Documenting Everyday Life in Pennsylvania During the Great Depression and World War II The documentary photography project initiated by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1935 was an unprecedented experiment in the history of photography, and it remains a monument to a collective effort that will never be equaled-the recording of an entire nation, from the city and town to the farm, from the home to the factory, from work to leisure, from school to church, from the baseball...
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The State Museum of Pennsylvania

Posted by on Nov 24, 2013 in | Comments Off on The State Museum of Pennsylvania Vertebrate paleontologist and The State Museum of Pennsylvania senior curator Robert M. Sullivan, along with world renowned dinosaur paleontologist Rob­ert T. Bakker and three other colleagues, have named a new dragon-like, spiked-headed dinosaur from South Dakota. The prehistoric reptile is a bizarre, flat-headed pachy­cephalosaurid dinosaur whose skull is covered with knobs and spikes and...
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William C. Kashatus: Bringing History to Life

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on William C. Kashatus: Bringing History to Life A Man for All Centuries “Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa hath expelled her. O, receive the fugitive and prepare it for all mankind!” exclaims William C. (Bill) Kashatus with fists stabbing the air. In this instance, Bill is passionately portraying Thomas Paine (1737–1809), the bellicose British radical who advocated the American Revolution. Much of Bill’s passion...
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Rising from the Muck: The Marshalls Creek Mastodon

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Rising from the Muck: The Marshalls Creek Mastodon For as long as I can remember, I have known of the little village of Marshalls Creek, near East Stroudsburg, in northeastern Pennsylvania’s Monroe County. My maternal grandparents, Bertha and Arthur Pflieger, rented a cottage each summer in the Poconos at the Cottage Colony, part of the Mountain Lake House, a popular resort for many New Yorkers and city dwellers during the 1940s and the...
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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...
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