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The Topless Bathing Suit Revisited

In April 1968, syndicated columnist James J. Kilpatrick delivered the Detroit Historical Society's annual Lewis Cass Lecture.  The lectureship was then twenty years old, and Kilpatrick followed such distinguished historians as Bruce Carron and Sylvester K. Stevens. Unlike his predecessors, Kilpatrick was a journalist, and so he took his inspiration from Thomas Carlyle's belief that "Histories are a kind of distilled newspapers."

Select Brotherhoods: The Shippensburg Black and White Freemasons, 1858-1919

"The decisive measure of the man is how he acts in public."  Snow was falling on the square at King and Railroad Streets, the center of Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, 20 February 1858. The economic focus of town had gradually moved four blocks west from King and Queen Streets since the railroad had brought passenger service in 1837.

Introduction of Thompson-McGowan Collection

Carlisle historian Ruth Hodge, representing the African-American community of Carlisle, was actively involved in the discussion about renaming Carlisle High School's West Building. She had several individuals in mind who qualified for the honor, but when requested to pick just one name, she had no difficulty in narrowing the selection to the late Emma Thompson McGowan, a teacher in the Carlisle school system for almost thirty years.

Robert James Coffey (1839-1910): An Unsung Pennsylvania Soldier and Writer

Robert James Coffey, a career newspaperman and prolific writer of verse, was born on 14 April 1839 in a place, he later remembered, "Where the landscape is wild and grand; / In that heaven-blessed state of William Penn, /In the Valley of Cumberland." More precisely, he was born in the village of Cleversburg, a little southeast of Shippensburg.

Companion to the Review Essay: Visualizing a Mission

At an academic conference on Marianne Moore, I needled one of the editors of Moore's letters for writing assertively that in 1896 the Moore family moved from Pittsburgh to "nearby Carlisle." Even a century later, with a turnpike, the trip is four and a half hours by a fast car; at the end of the nineteenth century, it must have been akin to burning your bridges behind you. "Oh, that's all right," said this professor from Pomona College, "from California every place in Pennsylvania is nearby." If unguarded, perspective can trump historical reality every time.

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