In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Greetings from the Editor
  • Linda A. Ries, Editor

The background I bring to Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies is somewhat different from previous editors. Instead of an academic history background, I come from what used to be called “Applied History,” being an archaeologist for six years and an archivist for thirty-five. Referred to as “the eclectic one” at the Pennsylvania State Archives, I took care of preservation of manuscripts, the photograph collections, and William Penn’s 1681 Royal Charter for Pennsylvania. Always during that time, however, I considered myself a historian.

The evolution of a single spot in time and space has always fascinated me. These experiences also reinforced my belief in what historic preservationists call the importance of “place” in history. I grew up in the South Hills of postwar Pittsburgh. My parents, the earliest influences on my interest in history, enjoyed traveling and going on Sunday drives. They would pile their three daughters in the ‘58 Chevy Bel Air, give us comic books to mollify us, and off we would go. The growing Pennsylvania Turnpike and the new interstate highway system enabled us to efficiently go farther and faster on these jaunts. In spite of the fighting in the back seat, we saw Busy Run Battlefield, Fort Necessity and Braddock’s Grave, the Grand View Ship Hotel, [End Page 105] Fort Bedford, the Horseshoe Curve, and many, many other sites. Later, we left the Commonwealth’s borders and went to Florida, the Grand Canyon, and elsewhere, giving me an idea of Pennsylvania’s place in the world. I was far too young to understand the full significance of these places, let alone the nascent concept of “heritage tourism.” But yes, Mum and Dad, I remembered, and it did make an impression! I was fascinated that such amazing and exciting things could, and did, happen in a place where we children initially thought nothing did. At the time, western Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh were dreary, drab, tarnished environments. The idea, for example, that George Washington and General Braddock were once tromping around a battlefield that was now the Edgar Thomson Steel Works was hard to wrap my head around. Or that the even drearier town of Homestead was the site of one of the biggest labor standoffs in American history. How did these things happen? Why did they happen?


Click for larger view
View full resolution
Figure 1.

The Ries family visiting Fort Bedford, 1960. The editor is second from right. I do not know why we are wearing sailor hats at an inland fort.

Courtesy of Christine Ries Palmer.

In my teens my curiosity piqued, and I began reading works on Commonwealth history in the late 1960s and early 1970s, found by wandering around the main branch of the Carnegie Library in Oakland or [End Page 106] Hillman Library at Pitt. There on the shelf for anyone to read were books and periodicals on Pennsylvania history, especially western Pennsylvania. William Hunter’s Forts on the Pennsylvania Frontier, Paul Wallace’s Indian Paths of Pennsylvania, just to name two, and published by my future employers, the Historical and Museum Commission, were my personal portals to another time. The Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine and Pennsylvania History likewise contained shorter works, but were just as exciting.1 I specifically remember Stephen H. Cutcliffe’s 1976 article in WHPM on the Sideling Hill Affair that sparked a lifelong interest in James Smith and the Black Boys. Likewise, James Kirby Martin’s 1971 “The Return of the Paxton Boys and the Historical State of the Pennsylvania Frontier, 1764–1774” printed in the pages of this journal, had similar effect.

Almost by accident, I took a Pennsylvania history undergraduate course from John Frantz at Penn State’s University Park in the fall of 1973. Though an archaeology major and soon graduating in 1974, I had an elective to use and was curious to know more about my own state. I was afraid it would be all boring political history pedagogy, one reason I tended to avoid those kinds of classes. It was not. I learned about William Penn’s vision and legacy, the emigration of many ethnic and religious groups, industrial...

pdf