With a Camera in the Sky: Samuel W. Kuhnert, Aerial Photographer

Sixteen years after Orville and Wilbur Wright mastered the age-old dream of flight, a World War I army surplus biplane buzzed high above the City of Harrisburg. City residents paused in their labors, gawked at the airborne marvel, this rare phenomenon, the airplane. They could not know that, high above them, a man holding a bulky wooden camera hung precariously out of the open cockpit, taking...
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Mailbox

The work of photographer José B. Alemany of Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, and Provincetown, Massachusetts, is cur­rently the subject of research. Alemany not only photographed landscapes and industrial scenes, but created modern and sen­sual images distinctive for the use of light and dramatic shadow, as well as for the fluidity of forms. He showed at the Gulf Gal­leries and the Kingsley House...
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Bookshelf

Crossroads of Commerce: The Pennsylvania Railroad Calendar Art of Grif Teller by Dan CupperGreat Eastern Publishing, 1992 (184 pages, cloth, $69.95) From its infancy as a mere sixty-one mile track running through central Pennsylvania’s deep forests and river valleys, the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) eventually emerged as a giant of the railroading industry, known throughout the world for...
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Survival of an American Boom Town

No stirring debates reverberate through the chambers of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall; white-hot molten steel no longer pours out of the fiery cauldrons in the sprawling mills of Pittsburgh and Bethlehem; and little coal ripped from the earth by giant steam shovels in Carbon, Schuylkill, Luzerne, and Lackawanna Counties in the Keystone State’s anthracite region. As surprising as...
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J. Horace McFarland Autochrome Plate

An autochrome plate depicting an arrangement of Satsuma oranges is contained in MG 453, J. Horace McFarland Company Records, 1880–1912, held by the Pennsylvania State Archives. In 1878 nineteen-year-old John Horace McFarland (1859–1948) became the owner of a printing press in Harrisburg, incorporated in 1891 as the J. Horace McFarland Company. The firm published a number of national magazines on...
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