Getting Pennsylvania on Speaking Terms

Posted by on Sep 8, 2025 in | Comments Off on Getting Pennsylvania on Speaking Terms Following Alexander Graham Bell’s famous exhibition of the telephone at the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia, a sprawling telephone network would soon connect people in every corner of the United States. The telephone quickly became a popular communication tool among merchants and business owners who valued its instantaneous nature, such as John Wanamaker, who first installed...
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Raising Philadelphia by Justin McHenry

Posted by on Sep 8, 2025 in | Comments Off on Raising Philadelphia by Justin McHenry Raising Philadelphia The Making of America’s First Great City, 1750–1775 by Justin McHenry Brookline Books, 224 pages, hardcover $32.95 McHenry’s appetite for research and his passion for storytelling combine here to illuminate threads of history and biography into readable stories for a broad audience. Focusing on Philadelphia’s transformation into a cultural and political epicenter...
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“An Office I had some kind of Right to”: Benjamin Franklin and the Origins of the U.S. Postal Service

Posted by on Sep 8, 2025 in | Comments Off on “An Office I had some kind of Right to”: Benjamin Franklin and the Origins of the U.S. Postal Service In 1788, near the end of his life, Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) summed up a lengthy and significant association with the postal system in America in a letter to his old friend Charles Thomson, then secretary of the Continental Congress. Franklin wrote, “On my Return from England the Congress bestow’d on me the Office of Postmaster General, for which I was very thankful. It was indeed an Office I...
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The Continental Building

Posted by on Aug 29, 2025 in | Comments Off on The Continental Building As Pennsylvania prepares for the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, much attention will be given to Independence Hall and the surrounding mall in Philadelphia. But it’s not only these colonial buildings that deserve our attention. In the adjacent blocks stand several significant modernist structures worth noting, too. One such example, the Continental Building, was listed in the...
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Caroline Burnham Kilgore, Legal Crusader

Posted by on Aug 29, 2025 in | Comments Off on Caroline Burnham Kilgore, Legal Crusader Caroline “Carrie” Burnham Kilgore (1838–1909) was a trailblazer in the fight for women’s rights in the legal profession, but she was not alone. Many women in Pennsylvania faced the same barriers she did, struggling for decades against systemic exclusion from law schools and the bar. Kilgore’s success in 1885, when she became the first woman admitted to the bar in Pennsylvania, was part of a...
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Douglas L. Allison, Civil War Veteran and Professional Baseball’s First Modern Catcher

Posted by on Aug 25, 2025 in | Comments Off on Douglas L. Allison, Civil War Veteran and Professional Baseball’s First Modern Catcher The Pennsylvania State Archives holds the American Civil War muster rolls for Pennsylvania-raised troops in its collection. Entries in these rolls include essential information about the soldiers who served in the conflict, and they are used by historians, genealogists, students and other patrons to trace the lives of individuals who fought in the war and went on to other pursuits. One of the...
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Philadelphia: A Narrative History by Paul Kahan

Posted by on Jun 11, 2025 in | Comments Off on Philadelphia: A Narrative History by Paul Kahan Philadelphia A Narrative History by Paul Kahan University of Pennsylvania Press, 424 pp., hardcover $39.95 Ambitious in scope, Philadelphia: A Narrative History delivers a deft and accessible narrative of one of America’s oldest cities, and one that, according to Paul Kahan, “does a terrible job remembering most of its own history.” De-centering the traditional narrative that focuses on colonial...
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A Beacon of Liberty for the Enslaved: 250 Years of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society

Posted by on Jun 11, 2025 in | Comments Off on A Beacon of Liberty for the Enslaved: 250 Years of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society   By the early 1700s, French Protestants — largely Calvinists known as Huguenots — suffered in their country from severe religious persecution, among them a boy, Antoine Bénézet (1720–72), and his parents. When their property was seized unless they renounced their faith, they departed their country, making their way to London, where they joined a welcoming group that stood for tolerance,...
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Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, Famed Orator of the Civil War Era

Posted by on Jun 11, 2025 in | Comments Off on Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, Famed Orator of the Civil War Era In the annals of 19th-century America, few figures burned as brightly — and as briefly — as Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (1842–1932). She was born into a Quaker family in Philadelphia, a background that shaped her deep commitment to abolitionism and women’s rights. Raised in a household that mingled with leading abolitionists, Dickinson became an activist at an early age. When she was just 13, she...
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The Arrest of Philip Skene

Posted by on Jun 11, 2025 in | Comments Off on The Arrest of Philip Skene The British ship Sally entered the port of Philadelphia on June 7, 1775, after leaving London weeks before. Aboard the ship was a British officer who was also a land speculator in the colony of New York and a soon to be suspected spy — Maj. Philip Wharton Skene (1725–1810). The Revolutionary War had just begun and already intrigue, speculation and suspicion were spreading wildly throughout...
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