Shorts

The seventeenth annual Conference on Black History will be conducted by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission on Friday and Saturday, May 13-14, 1994, in Erie. The theme of this year’s event is “African Americans at Work in Pennsyl­vania.” For additional information, write: 1994 Conference on Black History, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, P. O. Box...
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Garden Temple at Old Economy Village

One of the earliest gardens in the United States, the garden at Old Economy Village in Ambridge, Beaver County, symbolized the Garden of Eden for the Harmony Society, which occupied the complex from 1824 until it was dissolved in 1905. The nineteenth-century Christian community, best known for its piety and industrial prosperity, was founded by George Rapp (1757-1847) who believed that the...
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Minersville V. Gobitis

People all over the world consider America to be a great country, partly because of the many free­doms and rights it offers to its citizens. With these rights, as with any rights, come responsibilities. Some, such as obedience to laws and payment of taxes, are very clear, but oth­ers are more complicated and sometimes even controversial. Such responsibilities include those involving patriotism...
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Cultivating Piety: The Religious World of Joseph Price

Joseph Price (1752-1828) was a carpenter, coffin-maker, sawmill operator, innkeeper, turnpike supervisor, and farmer who lived in Lower Merion Township, Montgomery County. His daily activities were governed, like most ordinary men living in the early American republic, by the relentless regularity of the agricultural calendar and the market economy. Price’s economic activities, recorded...
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Lost and Found

Lost American religious leader Joseph Smith Jr. (1805–1844), best known as the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, and his wife Emma Hale Smith, lived in Harmony, now Oakland Township, on the Susquehanna River in northeastern Pennsylvania from late 1827 to 1830. While in Susquehanna County most of the Book of Mormon was translated between April 7 and early June 1829. According to church...
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Benjamin Franklin and His Religious Beliefs

Ezra Stiles (1727-1795), the Calvinist president of Yale College, was curious about Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) and his faith. In 1790, he asked the nation’s senior statesman if he would commit his religious beliefs to paper. Franklin agreed. He was nearing the end of his life – he died six weeks later – and possibly believed this was as good a time as any to summarize the...
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