From the Executive Director

Posted by on Feb 3, 2020 in | Comments Off on From the Executive Director Spring is field trip season here at the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission. Each year, we welcome approximately 90,000 schoolchildren to our museums and historic sites, with most of them visiting between March and June, when classroom schedules have a little more flexibility and teachers are anxious to help students burn off a little of their spring fever. Many of the students who...
read more

Daisy Lampkin: A Life of Love and Service

Posted by on Nov 30, 2013 in | Comments Off on Daisy Lampkin: A Life of Love and Service The March 11, 1965 front-page, banner headline of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, oldest newspaper in the United States west of the Allegheny Mountains, de­clared: “Alabama Race Tensions Mount … Marchers Defy Ban by Wallace.” The editorial page posed the ques­tion: “What Peace in Selma?” Just one day earlier, March 10, Pittsburgh’s Daisy Lampkin, whose life of...
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

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

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on 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...
read more

Julius Bloch: The Time Has Come

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Julius Bloch: The Time Has Come Early in his career, artist Julius Bloch (1888-1966) painted serene landscapes, but the force of his compassion for the human struggle soon over­powered his heart and his canvas. He felt compelled to portray instead the blacks, the working poor, the unemployed that made up the fabric of American life during the Great Depression. In 1932, he won­dered in his journal why such somber subjects...
read more

Currents

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Currents Beaux’s Art Pennsylvania native Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942) was one of the most important and successful portrait painters of her time (see “Artistic Ambitions: Cecilia Beaux in Philadelphia” by Tara Leigh Tappert in the winter 1996 edition). Among the significant commissions she completed in the early twentieth century was a portrait of President Theodore Roosevelt’s...
read more

Crystal Bird Fauset Raises Her Voice for Human Rights

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Crystal Bird Fauset Raises Her Voice for Human Rights Power surrounds the woman. It dwells within her, emanates from her, and yet, is very subtly hidden. Anyone who comes near Mrs. Fauset feels her greatness – in the sweep of her very alert glance, in the charm of her ready smile, in the warm sincerity of her hand clasp, and in her voice – like crisp staccato music, mellowed.” Attracted by her magnetism, a writer for the Chicago...
read more

The Lady in Red: Cornelia Bryce Pinchot, Feminist for Social Justice

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on The Lady in Red: Cornelia Bryce Pinchot, Feminist for Social Justice Vigorous, rebellious, and perceived by many to be unfashionably independent for a woman of her time and social standing, Cornelia Bryce Pinchot (1881-1960) was irrefutably the Keystone State’s most flamboyant first lady. But she was more than modern, much more than a stylish trendsetter. Pursuing an active public life that she described as “never stale or dull,” she prided...
read more

Unity House, A Workers’ Shangri-La

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Unity House, A Workers’ Shangri-La I can imagine the hundreds of people who were here on any summer evening,” recalls Nelson Whittaker, veteran custodian of twenty-five years. “They’d be walking around, talking, going to a theater performance, dancing in the ballroom, listening to a lecture, enjoying a fantastic meal. Now, it’s all gone.” For most of the twentieth century, garment workers –...
read more

Norvelt

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Norvelt The Wall Street Crash of 1929 drained Americans of their life savings and the resulting Great Depression hit rural southwestern Pennsylvania particularly hard. Industries collapsed and high unemployment struck the region’s bituminous coal workers. In 1934, the federal government and the AmericanFriends Service Committee, a Quaker social service organization founded in 1917 in Philadelphia,...
read more