Bookshelf

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bookshelf The Spectator and the Topographical City by Martin Aurand published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006; 232 pages, cloth, $29.95 Martin Aurand’s The Spectator and the Topographical City examines Pittsburgh’s built environment as it relates to the city’s unique topography. The author explores the conditions present in the natural landscape that led to the creation of architectural...
read more

An Activist Government in Harrisburg: Governor George H. Earle III and Pennsylvania’s “Little New Deal”

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on An Activist Government in Harrisburg: Governor George H. Earle III and Pennsylvania’s “Little New Deal” Despite substantive efforts by Governor Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946) during his second non-consecutive term, from 1931 to 1935, unemployment, underemployment, and poverty continued to plague the Commonwealth. The Great Depression had crippled the nation and Pennsylvania – America’s workshop – was hard hit as unemployment soared to nearly 40 percent in several industrial...
read more

Hotel Washington

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Hotel Washington An unsigned postcard of the Hotel Washington in Chambersburg sent to Roland G. Smith at the Ligonier Motor and Machine Company in Ligonier, Westmoreland County, was postmarked October 19, 1913, nearly fifty years after Confederate forces decimated the Franklin County seat on July 30, 1864. Southern soldiers destroyed 550 buildings and structures in Chambersburg in addition to looting houses and...
read more

Making Peace on the Gettysburg Battlefield, Fifty Years Later

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Making Peace on the Gettysburg Battlefield, Fifty Years Later For six frenetic days in 1913, from Sunday, June 29, through Saturday, July 4, two armies – fifty-four thousand strong combined – invaded Gettysburg for a second time. They fought the first time a half century earlier, July 1-3, 1863, and were looking forward, admittedly many anxiously, to facing each other again. It wasn’t a fight they anticipated at the second meeting,...
read more