Recent

There was a time when Cumberland County had no Republican party. It was born of the 1850s struggle between slavery and free labor that produced the Civil War. The party itself helped bring about war, for it was exclusively northern and "free soil", determined to stop slavery's spread. Merely by winning the presidency and Congress in 1860, the Republicans provoked seven southern states to secede, with four to follow upon the war's outbreak.

Within the last two decades historians of American education have cited the inclination of educational theorists and practitioners to focus so exclusively on the schools as vehicles of learning that they ignore the possibilities of other educating forms. Failure to consider education in its widest possible context only contributes to a parochial account of the learning process.

During the mid-nineteenth century photography exploded into popularity in Europe and the United States. Beginning with the introduction of the daguerreotype in 1839, the technique of using a chemical process to fix an image onto a sensitized metal plate captivated the imagination of many: those who wished to preserve the memory of a loved one, those who wished to record historical events, those who wished to create artistic impressions, and those who attempted to make a living satisfying the wishes of all the others.

History is, on the one hand, individual stories and, on the other, stories of groups, nations and cultures. In my recollection of classes I took when I was in college, the starting point was the latter, but in my recent experience of trying to write history, I began with individual stories I found in the Johnson Collection in the Cumberland County Historical Society - a collection of letters and papers of an African-American family in Carlisle.