Elizabeth Drinker and the Quaker Exile

Posted by on Mar 17, 2023 in | Comments Off on Elizabeth Drinker and the Quaker Exile In 1758, at the age of 23, Philadelphia Quaker Elizabeth Drinker began keeping a diary. In it, she recorded social calls, correspondence, the operation of her household, illnesses, births, deaths, and marriages. An avid reader, Elizabeth also recorded her thoughts on books she read. She continued her diary until the end of her life. Throughout the tumultuous years of the American Revolution,...
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“The Not So Good Old Days”: Disease and the Struggle for Public Health in Pennsylvania

Posted by on Oct 15, 2020 in | Comments Off on “The Not So Good Old Days”: Disease and the Struggle for Public Health in Pennsylvania In 1930 A. J. Bohl was proud to work in the Pennsylvania Department of Health (DOH). After 25 years there, he wrote an article in Pennsylvania’s Health in which he recalled growing up in the 1880s, when disease and illness ravaged the state. “There wasn’t much attention paid to the communicable diseases. Everybody, as a matter of course, had measles, chicken pox, whooping cough and mumps, and...
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The Gender of Assimilation: The Carlisle Indian Industrial School Experiment

Posted by on May 8, 2015 in | Comments Off on The Gender of Assimilation: The Carlisle Indian Industrial School Experiment In his celebrated 1702 book Magnalia Christi American (The Glorious Works of Christ in America), Puritan minister Cotton Mather described local Native Americans. “The men are most abominably slothful; making their poor Squaws, or Wives,to plant and dress, and barn, and beat their Corn, and build their Wigwams for them; which perhaps may be the reason for their extraordinary Ease in Childbirth,”...
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A Tour Through Very Early York County

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on A Tour Through Very Early York County Everyone has some interest in the past, even if only an intrinsic realization that our present existence is shaped by past experiences. For many, there is a much greater aware­ness of our debt to the past, or at least an abiding interest in prior human events and products. The degree and reasons for these curiosities vary enor­mously: from the function of a rusted tool, or the fascina­tion with...
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Letters

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Letters Compelling in Themselves Having caught up, belatedly, with the Spring 2010 edition of Pennsylvania Heritage, I am bowled over with the depth of its coverage of Black history in the Commonwealth. Cumberland Willis Posey’s fortitude and subsequent enrichment of the broad community, the tales of so many brave civil rights activists, including the remarkable Forten women, aided by my favorite Quaker...
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