Pennsylvania’s Nostrum Kings

During the early 19th century in Pennsylvania,  a new wave of  entrepreneurship was breaking with the past. In small hamlets and villages, those who had been feeling under the weather typically relied on home remedies they purchased from neighbors or friends, but now a new breed was coming to center stage. These men held larger dreams than the local peddlers, with plans to market their healing...
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The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts: An Ideal and a Symbol

By 1805, the year the Pennsylvania Acad­emy of the Fine Arts was founded, Phila­delphia had achieved a large measure of political, social and economic stability. It had been the nation’s capital and contin­ued to thrive as a center of banking and commerce. The largest city in the United States at the opening of the nineteenth century, it was arguably the center of culture, with Boston its...
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A Salute to the Bicentennial of the Keystone State

The current Bicentennial celebration commemorates not the birth of the United States, but the proclama­tion of thirteen British-American colonies that were “free and independent states” as of July 4, 17.76. When they formed a loose compact in 1761, their articles of confederation declared that “each state retains its sover­eignty, freedom and independence.” The...
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