A King Crowns the World’s Greatest Athlete

On a sun-drenched July afternoon in 1912, thirty thousand spectators thronged the closing ceremonies of the fifth Olympiad held that year in Sweden’s capital of Stockholm. The event was quite a spectacle, punctuated by pomp and circumstance befitting a royal pageant. The stadium, especially constructed for the games, was electric with excitement. As a chorus of four thousand voices filled...
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Keystone Born, Hollywood Bred: “Movie Buff” David Mallery Reviews the Acting Careers of James Stewart and Grace Kelly

There is magic in the movies. They draw viewers away – even if but for a few hours – from mere ordinary, everyday life to see their own experience and the experience of others in a detached but powerful way. Some induce laughter, others bring tears. But audiences seem grateful for the opportunity to know the richness, the complex­ity, and the irony of events without their having to...
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Banned In Pennsylvania!

During the nearly half century of its powerful reign, no one exemplified the Keystone State’s film censorship board more dramatically than Philadelphian Edna Rothwell Carroll (1894-1981), its chairman from 1939 to 1955. Determined, self-possessed, and intensely devoted to her mission – to protect the public from movies deemed immoral – she had been active in Republican Party...
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A Treasure Trove of Historical Records: The Pennsylvania State Archives

The challenges of keeping up with life’s paperwork are overwhelming. There are so many documents: receipts, tax forms, deeds, wills, insurance policies and claims, pay stubs, check registers, warranties…a neverending stream of information that has to be handled. And for each slip of paper, there’s a set of questions that must be answered. What to keep? How to file? Where to...
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Martin Ritt Takes on The Molly Maguires

Far from the glitter and glamour of Hollywood, in a remote mountain range of Pennsylvania, the film industry’s best and brightest gathered in the late 1960s to make a film that has been described as a dismal financial failure and, ironically, an extraordinary critical suc­cess. Before cameras whirred in and around the communities of Hazleton, Luzerne County, Jim Thorpe, Carbon County,...
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