1998 Summer, Volume 15, Issue 1

Americans Shall Rule America! The Know-Nothing Party in Cumberland County

In 1854 Americans took a detour from the road to civil war. It was the year of the Kansas-Nebraska act, which allowed slavery to spread into the formerly free Kansas territory. This act, the warfare between pro- and anti-slavery settlers in Kansas that followed, and the rise of the free soil Republican party, so inflamed hostile feelings between North and South that the firing on Fort Sumter took place less than seven years later.

Bishop Henry Heisey Brubaker, Missionary from Mechanicsburg

While it may not be an historian's job to "praise famous men," it is his job to tell of men and women, famous or less so, and remember that they were human beings with a human capacity for the remarkable. Henry Heisey Brubaker—in the formal custom of the day, he always styled himself "H. H. Brubaker"—was an imposing figure in the Brethren in Christ Church during the middle years of the twentieth century.

The Deterioration of the Seminary Rule System at Irving College, 1909-1926

Irving College, located between Simpson and Main Streets in Mechanicsburg from 1856 through 1929, once offered the same type of curriculum, administrative trends, and student organizations that existed at many women's colleges throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Irving was founded in 1856, during the initial rush of female colleges, when no less than seven women's colleges were within a 50 mile radius of the county seat.