Valley Forge by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin

Valley Forge by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin Simon & Schuster, 432 pp., hardcover $30 In Valley Forge, Bob Drury and Tom Clavin explore the harsh realities of Gen. George Washington’s most trying winter in impressive and vivid detail. Utilizing the writings of an impressive who’s who of the American Revolution, the authors weave a narrative that accurately and dramatically recreates the...
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Preserving Pieces of Pennsylvania’s Past: An Inside Look at the Building of the Commonwealth’s Collections

Associations between butterflies and buttons, Conestoga wagons and cannon, sculpture and arrowheads, or fossils and founder William Penn’s original Charter may seem tenuous, even obscure and, perhaps, nonsensical. But a relationship does exist: they are among the one and a half million objects and thirty thousand cubic feet of manuscripts, records, maps and photographs in the custody and...
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The Revolutionary War in Pennsylvania

With some conspicuous exceptions, Pennsylvania was largely on the outskirts of the scenes of Revolutionary War military operations. True, in December, 1776, Gen. George Washington brought the remnants of his retreating army from New Jersey into Pennsylvania, using the area in the vicinity of McKonkey’s Ferry as the jumping-off point for the Christmas-night crossing of the Delaware and the...
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Chester County Welcomes Thee

The history of Chester County constitutes a significant part of the history of Pennsylvania, both province and commonwealth, and of the history of the United States of America. At the beginning of our nation’s Bicentennial and on the threshold of our state’s and our county’s tricentennial celebrations, Chester County looks proudly upon its past accomplishments and with...
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Currents

The Gift A spectacular collection of nearly three hundred and fifty colorful feathered objects is featured in an unusual exhibi­tion at The University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropol­ogy, Philadelphia. Designed to invite the museum visitor “to be an anthropologist” and explore culture as it is experi­enced by diverse South American natives, “The Gift of Birds: Featherwork...
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A Commonwealth Treasure: Brandywine Battlefield Park

Brandywine Battlefield now lies quiet and peaceful, offering no grim hint of the heartbreak it once witnessed and bloodshed that stained its tall meadow grasses. Two hundred and twenty years ago this autumn its tranquility was shattered by the cacophony of cannon and its fields trampled by soldiers – twenty-six thousand of them – determined to do battle. Today, this scenic region of...
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