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.
Brian Butka and Kevin Patrick, Diners of Pennsylvania. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1999. 250pp. Paperback, $19.95. ISBN 0-8117-2878-1
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.
In July 1855, six companies from the 2nd Infantry rook possession of an old fur trading post on the banks of the Upper Missouri River and transformed it into a base of operations against the Sioux. But before setting out on this assignment, the officers and men of this regiment spent almost a year and a half at Carlisle Barracks filling their ranks, drilling, and preparing for service on the prairie. Among the officers in this contingent was 34-year-old Lieutenant Thomas William Sweeny.
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.
Being one of the oldest surviving county historical society in Pennsylvania, the Cumberland County Historical Society (CCHS) has cause for celebration during its 125th anniversary year. Founded in 1874 as the Hamilton Library Association, the Society's first century is recalled by Milton E. Flower in the publication "The First One Hundred Years".
To mark the 125th anniversary of the Hamilton Library Association Cumberland County History reprints here the Association's first annual report, for the year 1881, and a subsequent annual report, for 1900.
He could be an unlikable man-loud, arrogant, vulgar; but he was also civicminded and generous to his workers; and he deserves to be remembered. He was, from the last decade of the nineteenth to the third decade of the twentieth century, one of the most prominent businessmen in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In any era he would have been a colorful character, a volatile yet romantic man who made his fortune from shoes and flowers.
In his book, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, Christopher Lasch cautions that "Nostalgia appeals to the feeling that the past offered delights no longer attainable ...," a past that "stands outside time, frozen in unchanging perfection." "The hallmark of nostalgia," he writes, "is a dependency on the disparagement of the present."
On 14 September 1906 William Trickett, dean of the Dickinson School of Law, wrote a letter offering a faculty position to a young lawyer then living in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trickett proposed that the young man—Walter Harrison Hitchler—teach courses in criminal law and equity. "I think you will like the work," wrote Trickett. "It will be useful to you, and may be the initiation into a career as professor of law, that may be lifelong and honorable."