Finding Truth in the Frame: Leah Frances’ Discovery of Pennsylvania’s Historic Places

Posted by on Oct 15, 2020 in | Comments Off on Finding Truth in the Frame: Leah Frances’ Discovery of Pennsylvania’s Historic Places The National Park Service describes historic preservation as “a conversation with our past about our future.” Historic places are vital to this conversation, revealing the stories about the events, people and developments of a community’s past and representing its identity. In 1935 Verne E. Chatelain, a pioneer of public history and the first National Park Service historian, wrote the paper...
read more

Irish Presbyterians and the Shaping of Western Pennsylvania by Peter E. Gilmore

Posted by on Apr 14, 2020 in | Comments Off on Irish Presbyterians and the Shaping of Western Pennsylvania by Peter E. Gilmore Irish Presbyterians and the Shaping of Western Pennsylvania, 1770–1830 by Peter E. Gilmore University of Pittsburgh Press, 248 pp., hardcover $27.95 The Scots-Irish have always captured the imaginations of historians. Images of hardscrabble frontiersmen, ferocious both in their devotion to Presbyterianism and their hostility toward the Indians they hoped to displace from their new Canaan, have...
read more

A Culture of Sharing: Family and Community in Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Region, 1900-1940

Posted by on Nov 30, 2013 in | Comments Off on A Culture of Sharing: Family and Community in Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Region, 1900-1940 Prior to the establishment of widespread governmental assis­tance programs such as social se­curity and various other forms of social services, the working people of industri­al America devised their own means of survival and support. Drawing on the resources of family members and neigh­bors, ordinary individuals created tight­ly-knit communities in which limited in­comes, food and emotions were...
read more

Back to the Land! Pennsylvania’s New Deal Era Communities

Posted by on Nov 30, 2013 in | Comments Off on Back to the Land! Pennsylvania’s New Deal Era Communities The economic collapse of 1929 ushered in a decade fraught with deep, often tremu­lous, questioning of the na­tion’s development and future. Many were the cries to re­turn to the land. As a result, two all-new rural communities founded in Pennsylvania in the mid-1930s – Norvelt, in Westmoreland County, and Penn-Craft, in adjacent Fayette County – remain today as testimony to...
read more

Harmony in the Wilderness: A Walk through Old Economy Village

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Harmony in the Wilderness: A Walk through Old Economy Village Imagine a band of religious zealots creating a community, furnishing households, and planting flowers on western Pennsylvania’s frontier with the absolute certainty that the second coming was imminent and that Jesus Christ would walk the garden paths and be made welcome in their homes. That’s what George Rapp (1757-1847) and his harmonist followers believed. Such was his confidence...
read more

Concrete City, Garden Village of the Anthracite Region

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Concrete City, Garden Village of the Anthracite Region The dilapidated buildings stand empty and forlorn at the end of a rutted, overgrown dirt road, isolated from their nearest neighbors. Several bear signs of former use: Registration! Ladders! Extinguishers! Others scream with epithets and slogans – some angry, some sophomoric-of faded causes and bygone radical movements. A swastika affronts visitors. Obscenities abound. There is little...
read more