Keystone Flagship: USS Pennsylvania Leading the Navy through Two World Wars

“Air raid on Pearl Harbor. This is not drill.” The message went out from the headquarters of the United States Pacific Fleet in Hawaii on December 7, 1941. Its brevity belied the gravity of the event it reported. The White House released the information shortly before 2:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, and many people learned the news throughout the afternoon as radio programs were...
read more

Ship’s Silver Shines in State Museum

The custom whereby a state presented a silver service to the U.S. Navy battleship bearing its name is commemorated by a major exhibit, “The U.S.S. Pennsylvania and Her Silver,” which opened at the William Penn Memorial Museum in Harrisburg on September 26, 1981 and will remain in place through July 11, 1982 (see “Silver Service Set for William Penn Memorial Museum...
read more

Preserving Pieces of Pennsylvania’s Past: An Inside Look at the Building of the Commonwealth’s Collections

Associations between butterflies and buttons, Conestoga wagons and cannon, sculpture and arrowheads, or fossils and founder William Penn’s original Charter may seem tenuous, even obscure and, perhaps, nonsensical. But a relationship does exist: they are among the one and a half million objects and thirty thousand cubic feet of manuscripts, records, maps and photographs in the custody and...
read more

Electric Candelabrum by Gorham and Company

For the first time in ninety years, silver table items belonging to the family of industrialist Asa Packer (1805-1879) have been shown to the public. Stored since 1912 in vaults in the family’s mansion in the Carbon County seat of Jim Thorpe, the silver collection, totaling three hundred and thirty-six pieces made or retailed by leading firms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth...
read more

Lloyd Mifflin: Artist of the Susquehanna

While many artists have painted the majestic Susquehanna River, none were as devoted to studying, rhapsodizing about its beauty and, ultimately, painting it in its many moods as was Pennsylvania native Lloyd Mifflin (1846–1921). In many ways, Mifflin typified the romantic, if often improbable, late nineteenth-century image of the artist as an attractive, highly sensitive, elitist dandy who...
read more