Current and Coming

Mammoth Scale Sometime about 1808, renowned Philadelphia physician Caspar Wistar (1761-1818) – for whom the city’s Wistar Institute is named – asked sculptor William Rush (1756-1833) to create a series of large-scale anatomical models. Rush, known chiefly as a maker of civic statuary and ships’ figureheads, responded with the strangest works of his career: a massive inner...
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Bookshelf

The Life of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 1: Journalist, 1706-1730 By J. A. Leo Lemay University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006 (549 pages, cloth, $39.95.) The first of seven volumes in honor of the three hundredth birthday of the famous founder,The Life of Benjamin Franklin, Volume I: Journals, 1706-1730, is a highly anticipated work by the dean of Franklin scholars that brings together the major...
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Built by the New Deal

With the nation mired in the grim depths of the Great Depression, industrial Pennsylvania was far from being immune to the financial instability with the closing of 5,000 manufacturing firms and the loss of 270,000 factory jobs by 1933. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched his New Deal, a series of innovative programs targeted to giving work to the unemployed, stabilizing a downward...
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