“The Power of Many Giants” at the 1876 Centennial Exposition

Posted by on Jan 14, 2026 in | Comments Off on “The Power of Many Giants” at the 1876 Centennial Exposition Amid the pageantry and grandeur of the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition’s opening ceremony, one event towered above all others. On May 10, 1876, thousands of visitors crowded into Machinery Hall to watch President Ulysses S. Grant and Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil climb atop a gigantic Corliss steam engine. On a platform on top of the 45-foot-tall machine, the two heads of state pulled two...
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Revolutionary Things: Objects from the Collection

Posted by on Jan 14, 2026 in | Comments Off on Revolutionary Things: Objects from the Collection Massachusetts has the Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill and the Shot Heard Round the World; Virginia can lay claim to Mount Vernon, Monticello and Yorktown; and New Jersey and New York bore the brunt of the fighting in the conflict. But few if any of the original 13 colonies can compete with Pennsylvania in terms of the sheer concentration of people, places and things associated with the nation’s...
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Getting Pennsylvania on Speaking Terms

Posted by on Sep 8, 2025 in | Comments Off on Getting Pennsylvania on Speaking Terms Following Alexander Graham Bell’s famous exhibition of the telephone at the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia, a sprawling telephone network would soon connect people in every corner of the United States. The telephone quickly became a popular communication tool among merchants and business owners who valued its instantaneous nature, such as John Wanamaker, who first installed...
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The Plastic Club: Advancing Women Artists for 125 Years

Posted by on Dec 15, 2022 in | Comments Off on The Plastic Club: Advancing Women Artists for 125 Years In 1898 The History of the Woman’s Club Movement in America noted an unusual development in Pennsylvania. “There are in America many clubs for the furtherance of art interests — painters’ clubs, sculptors’ clubs, illustrators’ clubs — from which women are excluded. Philadelphia possesses an art club that excludes men. The Plastic Club, formed in the spring of 1897, has on its list of one hundred...
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Linton Park, Pennsylvania Folk Artist

Posted by on Jun 4, 2021 in | Comments Off on Linton Park, Pennsylvania Folk Artist   Linton Park (1826-1906) is recognized today as a significant artist in the primitive or folk tradition; however, his work was unknown during his lifetime. At his death, in fact, he had less than $100 to his name. He never married or had children, and his relatives and neighbors considered him an eccentric hermit. Evidence indicates that he was a self-taught painter, only beginning in the...
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Charles E. Hires and the Drink That Wowed a Nation by Bill Double

Posted by on Jan 13, 2020 in | Comments Off on Charles E. Hires and the Drink That Wowed a Nation by Bill Double Charles E. Hires and the Drink That Wowed a Nation The Life and Times of a Philadelphia Entrepreneur by Bill Double Temple University Press, 228 pp, paper $24.95 Long before there was Coke, Pepsi or Dr. Pepper, there was root beer. American Indians flavored water with various roots, including those of sassafras trees. European Americans liked sassafras-flavored concoctions, and homebrewers added...
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From the Anonymous Lady to the Peales and the Sullys: Philadelphia’s Professional Women Artists of the Early Republic

Posted by on Dec 1, 2019 in | Comments Off on From the Anonymous Lady to the Peales and the Sullys: Philadelphia’s Professional Women Artists of the Early Republic The Colonial and Revolutionary periods in Philadelphia saw little art production by women outside the home. Not only did the religious and social culture of Philadelphia demand that women make the home and children their primary focus, but also there were no formal schools for instruction in either the fine or applied arts. Apprenticeships with painters, printmakers or sculptors were usually...
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City in a Park by James McClelland and Lynn Miller

Posted by on Sep 1, 2016 in | Comments Off on City in a Park by James McClelland and Lynn Miller City in a Park: A History of Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park System by James McClelland and Lynn Miller Temple University Press, 392 pp., cloth $39.50 A substantial, richly illustrated book highlighting the significance of Fairmount Park and its place in the larger urban parks movement has been long overdue. City in a Park has finally arrived to fill that void. Augmented with 150...
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Free-Thinking, 19th-Century Style

Posted by on Dec 2, 2013 in | Comments Off on Free-Thinking, 19th-Century Style Francis Ellingwood Abbot (1836–1903) was nothing if not determined. In 1872, as editor of The Index, the nation’s leading free-thought magazine, he began to muster the full force of his small army of subscribers against what was being called “the God-in-the-Constitution amendment.” A philosopher and theologian, he sought to reconstruct theology in accordance with scientific methodology. From the...
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Wilson Eyre: The Philadelphia Domestic Ideal

Posted by on Nov 30, 2013 in | Comments Off on Wilson Eyre: The Philadelphia Domestic Ideal At the turn of the twentieth century, Wilson Eyre was at the height of his architectural powers. For sixteen years he had had a successful practice in Philadelphia, one of America’s major architectural centers. The United States bad become a world power, with money to give con­crete evidence of this in the buildings of her great cities, and Philadelphia’s blend of conservative...
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