The city embodies the American spirit: freedom, democracy, innovation, arts, and a love of knowledge.
IN WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA, CARS CAN STILL FILL UP AT A FOUNT THAT NURTURED THE AUTOMOTIVE AGE IN ITS INFANCY
In a nation of inventors it has always been the single most invented thing. At this very moment hundreds of Americans are busy obeying Emerson’s famous dictum—even though the machine he exhorted them to build has existed in near-transcendental perfection for almost a century.
A canoe trip along a river not far from industrial America reveals that the footprints of human history have been all but covered over by what looks like a primeval paradise
Long-lost views of sunny, easy days at a wealthy lake resort foreshadow a terrible tragedy
The Colonial Revival was born in a time of late-nineteenth-century ferment, and from then on the style resurfaced every time Americans needed reassurance
Ninety years ago a highborn zealot named Gifford Pinchot knew more about woodlands than any man in America. What he did about them changed the country we live in and helped define environmentalism.
Fifty years ago the builders of the Pennsylvania Turnpike completed America’s first superhighway—and helped determine the shape of travel to come
When Pierre S. du Pont bought the deteriorated Longwood Gardens in 1906, he thought that owning property was a sign of mental derangement. Still, he worked hard to create a stupendous fantasy garden, a place, he said, “where I can entertain my friends.”
The storm broke over their small town and changed their lives forever
Wherever you travel in this country, you have a good chance of bringing a piece of the past home with you
Only one man would have had the wit, the audacity, and the self-confidence to make the case
A fond, canny, and surprising tour of the town where the Constitution was born
A recently discovered collection of glass-plate negatives offers a remarkable look at our grandparents
From Germany and Switzerland, farmer-potters transplanted their skills to Pennsylvania and produced a distinctive ceramic found nowhere else in America
Gargantuan, gross, and cynical, the patrician boss Boies Penrose descended from aristocracy to dominate Pennsylvania Republican politics for thirty years
Refugees from the French Revolution, many of them of noble birth, built a unique community in the backwoods of Pennsylvania—and hoped their queen would join them
Horace Engle’s An amateur photographer surreptitiously captured the mood of unsuspecting neighbors—with affecting results
“De railroad bridges’s A sad song in de air…”
“I do not admit that a woman can draw like that,” said Degas when he saw one of her pictures
Among the Pennsylvania Dutch, both plain and fancy, the milk is yet, the schnitz-un-gnepp delights the soul, and the soup is thick enough to stand on
When the anthracite miners downed tools in 1902, economic feudalism went on trial
How gullible Edwin L. Drake, an ailing ex-railroad conductor, brought about America’s first and gaudiest oil boom