Bookshelf

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bookshelf Crossroads of Commerce: The Pennsylvania Railroad Calendar Art of Grif Teller by Dan CupperGreat Eastern Publishing, 1992 (184 pages, cloth, $69.95) From its infancy as a mere sixty-one mile track running through central Pennsylvania’s deep forests and river valleys, the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) eventually emerged as a giant of the railroading industry, known throughout the world for...
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Lost and Found

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Lost and Found Lost Strained by the weight of nearly a half-million pounds of snow during what has become known as the Winter of 1994, the century-old Mount Gretna Playhouse collapsed in February. The historic open-air theater was built in the Lebanon County summer resort in 1892 by carpenter John Cilley, a self­-taught engineer. Measuring one hundred feet in diameter and shaped like an umbrella, the...
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Shorts

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Shorts An exhibition of prints, pastels, drawings, and oil paintings by J. Howard Iams (1897-1964) to commemorate the bicentennial of the Whiskey Rebellion (see “The Whiskey Boys Versus the Watermelon Army” by Jerry Clouse in the spring 1991 issue, and “The Tax Collector of Bower Hill” by Chadwick Allen Harp in the fall 1992 edition) is on view at the Westmoreland Museum of Art...
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A Jewel in the Crown of Old King Coal: Eckley Miners’ Village

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on A Jewel in the Crown of Old King Coal: Eckley Miners’ Village It survives – somewhat miraculously – as a vestige of Pennsylvania’s coal mining heritage, a link in what was once a chain of little coal communities, or patch towns, that dotted the anthracite region. “Eckley is part of the puzzle, but not a unique part. There were numerous, almost identical, mining patch towns like Eckley,” explains Vance Packard, site...
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Bookshelf

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bookshelf Illustrating an Anthracite Era: The Photographic Legacy of John Horgan Jr. by Gwendoline E. Percival and Chester J. Kulesa Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and Anthracite Heritage Museum and Iron Furnaces Associates, 1995 (73 pages, paper, $9.95) Exemplifying the breadth and depth of more than twenty thousand images made by a single photographer of the anthracite region, the...
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Bookshelf

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bookshelf The Pennsylvania Game Commission, 1895-1995 by Joe Kosack Pennsylvania Game Commission, 1995 (233 pages, cloth, $12.95) Subtitled 100 Years of Wildlife Conservation, this book opens by placing the reader on Commonwealth soil with the arrival, about 1610, of the first white settlers – long before the Pennsylvania Game Commission existed. As the earliest settlers scrabbled to make a life in...
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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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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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Bookshelf

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bookshelf The King of the Movies: Film Pioneer Siegmund Lubin by Joseph P. Eckhardt Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998. (286 pages, cloth, $55.00) That immigrant Jews exerted a profound impact on the growth of American cinema is well known and has been the subject of considerable scholarship. However, the country’s first Jewish movie mogul, Siegmund “Pop” Lubin (1851-1923) of...
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Bookshelf

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bookshelf Pennsylvania Architecture: The Historic American Buildings Survey, 1933-1990 By Deborah Stephens Bums and Richard J. Web­ster, with Candace Reed Stem Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 2000 (629 pages; cloth, $85.00; paper, $65.00) This hefty volume befits its subject: it is a landmark book devoted to landmark buildings. Copiously illustrated, Pennsylvania Architecture: The Historic...
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