A Place for All: Three Stories of Integration in Pennsylvania

Posted by on Sep 12, 2022 in | Comments Off on A Place for All: Three Stories of Integration in Pennsylvania The American Civil Rights Movement focused public attention on segregation in the South and the laws and practices that kept Southern Blacks disenfranchised. By the late 1950s places such as Montgomery, Alabama; Little Rock, Arkansas; and Greensboro, North Carolina, had become household names in the battle to dismantle the racial caste system of “Jim Crow.” But discrimination based on race, much...
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From the Executive Director

Posted by on Mar 9, 2022 in | Comments Off on From the Executive Director Civil rights, voting rights and race relations. These are all topics of conversation today, as they have been for more than a century and a half across the United States, including here in Pennsylvania. But without a shared knowledge about the history of these topics, it becomes harder to have meaningful and productive conversations. This summer we are opening a new exhibit at The State Museum...
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Bucks County

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bucks County As one of the three original counties of Pennsylvania created shortly after William Penn arrived in his nascent colony in 1682, Bucks County has a heritage that reaches back to the very beginnings of the Commonwealth. Long before Penn’s arrival, the intrepid settlers of the Dutch and Swedish colonies farther down the Delaware River had ex­plored the wooded banks of the river as far as the...
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Breaking Down Barriers

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Breaking Down Barriers In the summer of 1957, William and Daisy Myers and their three children moved from their house near Philadelphia to the post-World War II development of Levittown, some twenty miles northeast of the city. Like millions of American families in the 1950s, they were seeking the highly touted amenities of suburban living (see “Picture Window Par­adise: Welcome to Levittown!” by Curtis...
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Currents

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Currents Over the Line Beginning in the early nineteenth cen­tury, a clandestine movement known as the Underground Railroad helped African American slaves escape bondage in the South to freedom in the North. Adopting the vocabulary of the railroad, this secret passage to freedom consisted of a loosely organized network of abolitionists who lived in the southern border states and in the North and assisted...
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Picture Window Paradise – Welcome to Levittown

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Picture Window Paradise – Welcome to Levittown “To the outsider, Levittown, Pennsylvania, seems like a vast mirage, a city of 4,000 spanking new ranch homes where a short year ago were acres of corn and wheat … ” Ladies Home Journal, March 1953   On Monday, June 23, 1952, John and Philomena Dougherty packed up their belongings, and with their two daughters in tow, drove from a government housing project in northeast...
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Executive Director’s Message

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Executive Director’s Message The Most Perfectly Planned Community in America. So proclaimed a 1951 promotional brochure for Levittown in Bucks County, designed and built by developer William J. Levitt. With.in a few months, Levitt’s company had sold three thousand Levit­towner models for $9,900 each and began producing homes at a rate of forty a day using innovative assembly line techniques. By 1958, the development...
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The Value of Pennsylvania History

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on The Value of Pennsylvania History George W. Bush won the presidential election of 2000 because the fifty states cast more electoral votes for him, even though more people actually voted for his opponent, Albert A. Gore Jr. The election reminded Americans about a curious institution called the Electoral College, and an equally peculiar system known as federalism in which each state conducts elections according to distinct laws...
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