Stability and Change: Culture During Three Periods

Posted by on Nov 30, 2013 in | Comments Off on Stability and Change: Culture During Three Periods “Religion, … the best bond of human society, provided man did not err in the meaning of that excellent word.” – William Penn   Culture, broadly de­fined, is the way of life of a group of people; it includes all their behavioral patterns, beliefs and ar­tistic expressions. Culture is not static; it varies over time and place. Culture does not arise in a vacuum; it...
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Pennsylvania’s Architectural Heritage: The Preservation Movement in the Keystone State, 1950-1981

Posted by on Nov 30, 2013 in | Comments Off on Pennsylvania’s Architectural Heritage: The Preservation Movement in the Keystone State, 1950-1981 As the last in a four-part series about Pennsylvania s architecture, this conclusion focuses on the develop­ments which have occurred in the field of preservation over the past thirty years. Although this temporal division may seem disproportionate when com­pared with the one hundred fifty years covered in rite preceding article. it has been dictated by both the incentives and challenges to...
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Carbon County: Stone Coal in the Switzerland of America

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Carbon County: Stone Coal in the Switzerland of America Carbon, the primary component of an­thracite coal, is also a county in eastern Pennsylvania – for the same reason. The value of anthracite to the burgeoning industrial revolution of the mid­-nineteenth century created in 1843 a new county from the northern fringes of the once­-immense Northampton County. Beginning in the nine­teenth century, an entire county of coal was carved and moved to...
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Lehigh County: The Land and Its People

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Lehigh County: The Land and Its People Lehigh County encompasses the western half of the Lehigh Valley in eastern Pennsylvania. Bounded on the east by the Lehigh River, the main geographical feature of the larger valley, and on the north by the Blue Mountain range, the land is a mosaic of lime­stone plain, sinks and rolling hills. While the southern region of the county lies astride the so-called South Moun­tain and the hills of the...
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Bookshelf

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bookshelf Harrisburg Industrializes by Gerald G. Eggert The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993 (412 pages, cloth, $35.00) In 1850, Harrisburg-state capital and county seat-was a community not unlike many others in the United States, employing most of its citizens in trade and commerce. Unlike its larger neighbors, Pittsburgh to the west and Philadelphia in the east, Harrisburg had not yet...
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Artistic Ambitions: Cecilia Beaux in Philadelphia

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Artistic Ambitions: Cecilia Beaux in Philadelphia In 1885, when young Philadelphia artist Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942) sent Les derniers jours d’enfance (1883) to the fifty-sixth annual exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, her goal to become one of the finest and most successful portrait painters in America was only a glimmering ambi­tion. Painted under the tutelage of artist William Sartain, Les derniers jours...
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Concrete City, Garden Village of the Anthracite Region

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Concrete City, Garden Village of the Anthracite Region The dilapidated buildings stand empty and forlorn at the end of a rutted, overgrown dirt road, isolated from their nearest neighbors. Several bear signs of former use: Registration! Ladders! Extinguishers! Others scream with epithets and slogans – some angry, some sophomoric-of faded causes and bygone radical movements. A swastika affronts visitors. Obscenities abound. There is little...
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Letters to the Editor

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Letters to the Editor A Joyous Occasion The article “Soft Coal’s Soft-Spoken Diplomat” [by Barry P. Michrina, Spring 1997] covered the subject well, but with one exception-the now nonexistent town of Peale. My husband, William C. Lovell, was born there in 1899, as were his three younger sisters. Author Kyle Crichton was also born in Peale, and in his book Total Recoil, published by Doubleday and...
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Life on the Lehigh Canal: An Interview with Richard Arner

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Life on the Lehigh Canal: An Interview with Richard Arner Sitting astride his horse, Josiah White peered intently into the Lehigh River, hoping to foresee the future in its swirling, icy waters. It was the winter of 1817. White, a Philadelphia merchant and iron worker with a genius for invention, with his partner Erskine Hazard, had recently solved the riddle of how to successfully burn anthracite in an iron furnace. Although their answer – which...
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Bookshelf

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bookshelf Historic Houses of Philadelphia by Roger W. Moss University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998 (256 pages, cloth,$34.95) Sumptuous, a word frequently used by restaurant reviewers and critics of haute cuisine, aptly describes Historic Houses of Philadelphia, the latest fare by Roger W. Moss, known widely for his books on Victorian era architecture and ornamentation. Fifty historic houses, mansions, and...
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