Getting Pennsylvania on Speaking Terms

Posted by on Sep 8, 2025 in | Comments Off on Getting Pennsylvania on Speaking Terms Following Alexander Graham Bell’s famous exhibition of the telephone at the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia, a sprawling telephone network would soon connect people in every corner of the United States. The telephone quickly became a popular communication tool among merchants and business owners who valued its instantaneous nature, such as John Wanamaker, who first installed...
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Mother’s Day

Posted by on Mar 17, 2023 in | Comments Off on Mother’s Day On the second Sunday of May every year, mothers in the United States are celebrated. It’s a day of love and appreciation, but its history is complex. First designated a national holiday by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914, the modern American Mother’s Day became a reality thanks to Philadelphian Anna Jarvis (1864–1948) whose persistent efforts would give motherhood the recognition she believed...
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Ben Austrian: The Chick Painter of Reading

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Ben Austrian: The Chick Painter of Reading His name isn’t exactly a household word. But chances are his century old creation – a plump little chick sporting a fancy French name – has been seen by countless homemakers in Pennsylvania, as well as throughout the world. Revered in Reading, Berks County, and throughout southeastern Pennsylvania as “the chick painter,” Ben Aus­trian depicted a chick for Bon Ami...
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Original and Genuine: Unadulterated and Guaranteed!

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Original and Genuine: Unadulterated and Guaranteed! John Wanamaker felt ill. He didn’t have time for an autumn cold. There was so much work to do, espe­cially now as his great department store readied itself for the coming Christmas season. Anticipating a busier day tomorrow, he made an heroic effort to stem the cas­cade of papers across his desk into orderly piles before taking a parting glance around his office. Banks of filing cabinets,...
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The Search by Blacks For Employment and Opportunity: Industrial Education in Philadelphia

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on The Search by Blacks For Employment and Opportunity: Industrial Education in Philadelphia I Historian Sol Cohen describes the industrial­-education movement at the end of the nineteenth century as an effort to relegate the new immigrant to the lower levels of society. Placing emphasis on the “status rivalry” between the middle-class progressives and the new immigrant, Cohen views industrial education as the means used by the progressives to keep the immi­grant in his...
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Bookshelf

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bookshelf Forging A New Deal: Johnstown and the Great Depression, 1929-1941 by Curtis Miner Johnstown Area Heritage Association, 1993 (81 pages, paper, $7.95) Published to accompany a major museum installation by the same title (see “Currents,” spring 1994), Forging A New Deal: Johnstown and the Great Depression, 1929-1941, is a richly written and copiously illustrated exhibition catalogue...
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Growing Bigger and Better Year by Year

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Growing Bigger and Better Year by Year At noon on Saturday, November 24, 1827, fifty-three prominent Philadelphians gathered at the old Franklin Institute, then located on Seventh Street, in response to a newspaper advertisement calling for the formation of an organization devoted to the “highly instructive and interesting science” of horticulture. Since that inaugural meeting – nearly one hundred and seventy-five...
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Eyedazzlers: The Two-Century Romance of Navajo Weavers and Germantown Yarn

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Eyedazzlers: The Two-Century Romance of Navajo Weavers and Germantown Yarn The cavernous nineteenth-­century factory buildings of Philadelphia’s John Wilde & Brother, the oldest independent rug yarn mill in the United States, seem out of place against the trendy restaurants and galleries of Manayunk, a showplace of modern urban renewal in the city’s greater Germantown neighborhood. A mural on the wall of the smallest mill building depicts images...
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Fairmount Park’s Memorial Hall

Posted by on Nov 24, 2013 in | Comments Off on Fairmount Park’s Memorial Hall To celebrate its thirtieth birthday this year, the Please Touch Museum is giving young Philadelphia residents and visitors a very special gift: the launching of an intensive rehabilitation of Fairmount Park’s opulent Memorial Hall to serve as its new facility. Built as an architectural showpiece for the 1876 Centennial International Exhibition that celebrated the one hundredth anniversary...
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Dr. Henry C. Mercer’s Fonthill

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Dr. Henry C. Mercer’s Fonthill Henry Chapman Mercer (1856–1930), scion of a wealthy Doylestown, Bucks County, family was known for many characteristics and traits: well-bred, handsome, inquisitive, erudite, and — to townspeople — decidedly eccentric. He was known for his contributions as a master ceramicist, local historian, writer, archaeologist, ethnologist, museum curator, amateur architect, collector, horticulturist,...
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