This unique book combines state-specific facts and 30 fun-to-do hands-on projects. The People Projects Book includes using sidewalk chalk to draw a life-sized state People on Parade, making a diversity flag, writing a poem about a state poet, designing a scrapbook of famous state women and more! Kids will have a blast and build essential knowledge skills including research, reading, writing, science and math. Great for students in K-8 grades and for displaying in the classroom, library or home.

A detailed study of early historical preservation efforts between the 1780s and the 1850s In Historic Real Estate, Whitney Martinko shows how Americans in the fledgling United States pointed to evidence of the past in the world around them and debated whether, and how, to preserve historic structures as permanent features of the new nation's landscape. From Indigenous mounds in the Ohio Valley to Independence Hall in Philadelphia; from Benjamin Franklin's childhood home in Boston to St. Philip's Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina; from Dutch colonial manors of the Hudson Valley to Henry Clay's Kentucky estate, early advocates of preservation strove not only to place boundaries on competitive real estate markets but also to determine what should not be for sale, how consumers should behave, and how certain types of labor should be valued. Before historic preservation existed as we know it today, many Americans articulated eclectic and sometimes contradictory definitions of architectural preservation to work out practical strategies for defining the relationship between public good and private profit. In arguing for the preservation of houses of worship and Indigenous earthworks, for example, some invoked the "public interest" of their stewards to strengthen corporate control of these collective spaces. Meanwhile, businessmen and political partisans adopted preservation of commercial sites to create opportunities for, and limits on, individual profit in a growing marketplace of goods. And owners of old houses and ancestral estates developed methods of preservation to reconcile competing demands for the seclusion of, and access to, American homes to shape the ways that capitalism affected family economies. In these ways, individuals harnessed preservation to garner political, economic, and social profit from the performance of public service. Ultimately, Martinko argues, by portraying the problems of the real estate market as social rather than economic, advocates of preservation affirmed a capitalist system of land development by promising to make it moral.

Pittsburgh Signs Project: 250 Signs of Western Pennsylvania is a crowd-sourced book of photographs documenting and celebrating the visual landscape of the region through its signs, past and present.

Conceived in the era of eugenics as a solution to what was termed the “problem of the feeble-minded,” state-operated institutions subjected people with intellectual and developmental disabilities to a life of compulsory incarceration. One of nearly 300 such facilities in the United States, Pennhurst State School and Hospital was initially hailed as a “model institution” but was later revealed to be a nightmare, where medical experimentation and physical and psychological abuse were rampant. At its peak, more than 3,500 residents were confined at Pennhurst, supervised by a staff of fewer than 600. Using a blended narrative of essays and first-person accounts, this history of Pennhurst examines the institution from its founding during an age of Progressive reform to its present-day exploitation as a controversial Halloween attraction. In doing so, it traces a decades-long battle to reform the abhorrent school and hospital and reveals its role as a catalyst for the disability rights movement. Beginning in the 1950s, parent-advocates, social workers, and attorneys joined forces to challenge the dehumanizing conditions at Pennhurst. Their groundbreaking advocacy, accelerated in 1968 by the explosive televised exposé Suffer the Little Children, laid the foundation for lawsuits that transformed American jurisprudence and ended mass institutionalization in the United States. As a result, Pennhurst became a symbolic force in the disability civil rights movement in America and around the world. Extensively researched and featuring the stories of survivors, parents, and advocates, this compelling history will appeal both to those with connections to Pennhurst and to anyone interested in the history of institutionalization and the disability rights movement.

See how the Pennsylvania Turnpike proved the doubters wrong and came to be known as the World's Greatest Highway. The Pennsylvania Turnpike is one of the best-known highways in the United States. Most Pennsylvania Turnpike travelers are unaware that its construction was inspired by the route of the never-completed South Pennsylvania Railroad. In the 1930s, men of great vision conceived, planned, and built the nation's first long-distance superhighway using the abandoned railroad's partially finished tunnels as its foundation. The Pennsylvania Turnpike draws from the extensive photograph collection in the Pennsylvania State Archives. Many were taken by photographers hired by both the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission and its contractors, and most have never been published previously. Originally predicted to be a financial failure, the project wound up being a tremendous success and, eventually was expanded and improved, laying the groundwork for the nation's Interstate Highway System.