Revolutionary Things: Objects from the Collection

Massachusetts has the Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill and the Shot Heard Round the World; Virginia can lay claim to Mount Vernon, Monticello and Yorktown; and New Jersey and New York bore the brunt of the fighting in the conflict. But few if any of the original 13 colonies can compete with Pennsylvania in terms of the sheer concentration of people, places and things associated with the nation’s...
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1st Pennsylvania Regiment Flag and Banners of Liberty

One of the most significant objects in the collection of The State Museum of Pennsylvania is currently being featured in Banners of Liberty, a special exhibition of rare and original Revolutionary War–era flags at the Museum of the American Revolution (MOAR) in Philadelphia. The 40-by-54-inch silk flag belonged to the 1st Pennsylvania Regiment of the Continental Line between 1776 and 1783. Over...
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Preserving Pieces of Pennsylvania’s Past: An Inside Look at the Building of the Commonwealth’s Collections

Associations between butterflies and buttons, Conestoga wagons and cannon, sculpture and arrowheads, or fossils and founder William Penn’s original Charter may seem tenuous, even obscure and, perhaps, nonsensical. But a relationship does exist: they are among the one and a half million objects and thirty thousand cubic feet of manuscripts, records, maps and photographs in the custody and...
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