Nellie Bly: A Career Shaped by Misfortune

Posted by on Aug 9, 2024 in | Comments Off on Nellie Bly: A Career Shaped by Misfortune When Nellie Bly completed her famed around-the-world journey in 1890, the New York World hailed the intrepid journalist as “the best-known and most widely talked-of young woman on earth today.” But had she not dropped out of college a decade before, no one would have ever heard of her. In fact, Nellie Bly would never have existed. The woman born Elizabeth Jane Cochran, who pioneered the concept...
read more

Editor’s Letter

Posted by on Aug 9, 2024 in | Comments Off on Editor’s Letter This issue of Pennsylvania Heritage, our 200th, is dedicated to Michael J. O’Malley III, who passed away on January 26, 2024. As many longtime readers know, Michael was the editor of this magazine for 30 years, and in that time, he played a crucial role in its development. He began working at the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission as a public information officer in 1978 and joined...
read more

The ‘State’ of Allegheny

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on The ‘State’ of Allegheny One of the first centers of the organization of the Re­publican party and scene of its first national conven­tion in February, 1856, Allegheny County was strongly for Lincoln in the presidential election of 1860. As the vote count proceeded, one of the leaders kept sending telegrams to Lincoln’s home in Illinois, keeping him up on the news that “Allegheny gives a majority of …...
read more

Pittsburgh’s Designing Women

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Pittsburgh’s Designing Women A man does not marry an artist, but a housekeeper …. I put away my brushes; resolutely crucified my divine gift, and while it hung writhing on the cross, spent my best years and powers cooking cabbage.” So wrote Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815-1884) of Wilkinsburg, Allegheny County. Swisshelm’s bittersweet memoirs recall the painful sacrifice that she made to the Victorian code of...
read more

Nellie Bly (1864-1922)

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Nellie Bly (1864-1922) When Nellie Bly died January 27, 1922, at the age of fifty-eight, New York’s Evening Journal eulogized her as “the best reporter in America.” A rebellious child of Michael Cochran and his second wife, widow Mary Jane Kennedy Cummings, she channeled her noncon­formjty and fire into becoming one of the most notable journalists of all time. At a time when most female reporters...
read more

Letters to the Editor

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Letters to the Editor Profile: Nellie Bly The biography of Nellie Bly appearing in Profiles in the Winter 2003 edition states that Elizabeth Jane Cochran adopted the pseudonym from a song written by Stephen Foster in 1870. Just to set the record straight, Foster died in 1864. According to Ken Emerson, author of Doo-Dah: Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture, Foster wrote Nellie Bly in 1850. One of...
read more