A Guide Book Of Art Architecture And Historic Interests In Pennsylvania

A guide for tourists, this includes information of all the counties of Pennsylvania.

The notion of a uniquely Quaker style in architecture, dress, and domestic interiors is a subject with which scholars have long grappled, since Quakers have traditionally held both an appreciation for high-quality workmanship and a distrust of ostentation. Early Quakers, or members of the Society of Friends, who held "plainness" or "simplicity" as a virtue, were also active consumers of fine material goods. Through an examination of some of the material possessions of Quaker families in America during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, the contributors to Quaker Aesthetics draw on the methods of art, social, religious, and public historians as well as folklorists to explore how Friends during this period reconciled their material lives with their belief in the value of simplicity. In early America, Quakers dominated the political and social landscape of the Delaware Valley, and, because this region held a position of political and economic strength, the Quakers were tightly connected to the transatlantic economy. Given this vantage, they had easy access to the latest trends in fashion and business. Detailing how Quakers have manufactured, bought, and used such goods as clothing, furniture, and buildings, the essays in Quaker Aesthetics reveal a much more complicated picture than that of a simple people with simple tastes. Instead, the authors show how, despite the high quality of their material lives, the Quakers in the past worked toward the spiritual simplicity they still cherish.

Incorporating more than 3,000 illustrations, Kornwolf's work conveys the full range of the colonial encounter with the continent's geography, from the high forms of architecture through formal landscape design and town planning. From these pages emerge the fine arts of environmental design, an understanding of the political and economic events that helped to determine settlement in North America, an appreciation of the various architectural and landscape forms that the settlers created, and an awareness of the diversity of the continent's geography and its peoples. Considering the humblest buildings along with the mansions of the wealthy and powerful, public buildings, forts, and churches, Kornwolf captures the true dynamism and diversity of colonial communities - their rivalries and frictions, their outlooks and attitudes - as they extended their hold on the land.

Two Northeast Indian communities with similar histories of colonization accepted Congregational and Moravian missionaries, respectively, within five years of one another: the Mohicans of Stockbridge, Massachusetts (1735), and Shekomeko, in Dutchess County, New York (1740). In To Live upon Hope, Rachel Wheeler explores the question of what "missionary Christianity" became in the hands of these two native communities. The Mohicans of Stockbridge and Shekomeko drew different conclusions from their experiences with colonial powers. Both tried to preserve what they deemed core elements of Mohican culture. The Indians of Stockbridge believed education in English cultural ways was essential to their survival and cast their acceptance of the mission project as a means of preserving their historic roles as cultural intermediaries. The Mohicans of Shekomeko, by contrast, sought new sources of spiritual power that might be accessed in order to combat the ills that came with colonization, such as alcohol and disease. Through extensive research, especially in the Moravian records of day-to-day life, Wheeler offers an understanding of the lived experience of Mohican communities under colonialism. She complicates the understanding of eighteenth-century American Christianity by demonstrating that mission programs were not always driven by the destruction of indigenous culture and the advancement of imperial projects. In To Live upon Hope, Wheeler challenges the prevailing view of accommodation or resistance as the two poles of Indian responses to European colonization; colonialism placed severe strains on native peoples, yet Indians also exercised a level of agency and creativity that aided in their survival.