Pennsylvania State Quotes

Pennsylvania one year paid out $90,000 in bounties for the killing of 130,000 owls and hawks to save the state’s farmers a slightly less than whopping $1,875 in estimated livestock losses. (It is not very often, after all, that an owl carries off a cow.)

One of the most memorably unexpected events I experienced in the course of doing this book came in a dissection room at the University of Nottingham in England when a professor and surgeon named Ben Ollivere (about whom much more in due course) gently incised and peeled back a sliver of skin about a millimeter thick from the arm of a cadaver. It was so thin as to be translucent. “That,” he said, “is where all your skin color is. That’s all that race is—a sliver of epidermis.” I mentioned this to Nina Jablonski when we met in her office in State College, Pennsylvania, soon afterward. She gave a nod of vigorous assent. “It is extraordinary how such a small facet of our composition is given so much importance,” she said. “People act as if skin color is a determinant of character when all it is is a reaction to sunlight. Biologically, there is actually no such thing as race—nothing in terms of skin color, facial features, hair type, bone structure, or anything else that is a defining quality among peoples. And yet look how many people have been enslaved or hated or lynched or deprived of fundamental rights through history because of the color of their skin.

Too many in your state [Pennsylvania], as in this [New York], love pure democracy dearly. They seem not to consider that pure democracy, like pure rum, easily produces intoxication, and with it a thousand mad pranks and fooleries.

E Pluribus Unum The United States of America (USA) Is a meeting place For peoples of varied backgrounds. And from the Great Plains of Nebraska and Wyoming To Maryland's Eastern Shore. From the Great Lakes adjacent Minnesota, To the Everglades of Southern Florida. We are one. From the corals Off of California's coasts. To the mountains Of the Shenandoah, in Virginia. We are one. From the steel and concrete towers Of New York City To Liberty Bell In Pennsylvania. We are One. Out of many: A single, We've become. Out of many: A single; We are one. As the many stones that make the Obelisk In Washington, Many individuals Make the United States Of America. And the best of all the world Is here with us.

Myth The United States of America is made up of fifty states. Truth Technically, no. There are only forty-six states in the United States—Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia are commonwealths.

During elections for the 1776 convention to frame a constitution for Pennsylvania, a Privates Committee urged voters to oppose “great and overgrown rich men . . . they will be too apt to be framing distinctions in society.

Louise Clark's southern accent was as thick as hominy grits. No one else in the Philadelphia branch of her family had such an accent. Her mother and father had dropped theirs as soon as they crossed the Pennsylvania state line.

As the polls began closing in the East, with states like New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Virginia going for Barack Obama, it was quickly becoming clear that this would be an especially bad night for racists all across the country.

At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and a head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps fifty feet down to the lawn...pauses briefly to strangle the Chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness...towards the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue, and trying desperately to remember which one of those fore hundred identical balconies is the one outside of Martha Mitchell's apartment....Ah...Nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The President of the United States would never act that weird. At least not during football season.

LYNCHING STATES Mississippi, 15; Arkansas, 8; Virginia, 5; Tennessee, 15; Alabama, 12; Kentucky, 12; Texas, 9; Georgia, 19; South Carolina, 5; Florida, 7; Louisiana, 15; Missouri, 4; Ohio, 2; Maryland, 1; West Virginia, 2; Indiana, 1; Kansas, 1; Pennsylvania, 1.

No. I wasn’t there. I was back in Gladstone, Pennsylvania, and I was twelve years old. Two state troopers were in the driveway, with a white car parked . . . and swiftly they were striding to interrupt a birthday party to tell us all that Daddy was dead. Killed in an accident on Greenfield Highway. “Chris! Chris!” I screamed, terrified he might have gone. “I’m here. I’m coming. I knew you’d need me.

Once a state has completely withered away, it is an extremely difficult task to re-create it, as Blackwell quickly discovered. If Blackwell had been under any illusions that the Quakers were a meek and passive people, he was in for a rude surprise. He was to find very quickly that devotion to peace, to liberty, and to individualism in no sense implies passive resignation to tyranny. Quite the contrary.

After Obama’s victory, 395 new voting restrictions were introduced in 49 states from 2011 to 2015. Following the Tea Party’s triumph in the 2010 elections, half the states in the country, nearly all of them under Republican control—from Texas to Wisconsin to Pennsylvania—passed laws making it harder to vote. The sudden escalation of efforts to curb voting rights most closely resembled the Redemption period that ended Reconstruction, when every southern state adopted devices like literacy tests and poll taxes to disenfranchise African-American voters.

That’s what it was. He wasn’t any more Wynant than I am. You know how it is: we told the Philly police he’d sent a wire from there and broadcasted his description, and for the next week anybody that’s skinny and maybe got whiskers is Wynant to half of the State of Pennsylvania.

Trina had filed a civil suit against the officer who raped her, and the jury awarded her a judgment of $62,000. The guard appealed, and the Court reversed the verdict because the correctional officer had not been permitted to tell the jury that Trina was in prison for murder. Consequently, Trina never received any financial aid or services from the state to compensate her for being violently raped by one of its “correctional” officers. In 2014, Trina turned fifty-two. She has been in prison for thirty-eight years. She is one of nearly five hundred people in Pennsylvania who have been condemned to mandatory life imprisonment without parole for crimes they were accused of committing when they were between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. It is the largest population of child offenders condemned to die in prison in any single jurisdiction in the world.

Hershey Pennsylvania was self-proclaimed as the “Sweetest Place On Earth,” but less advertised than chocolate, it was also home to one of the state’s largest Children’s Hospitals. The streets lined with Hershey Kiss–shaped streetlamps that led excited children and families on vacation to chocolate tour rides and rollercoasters were the same exact streets that led anxious children and families to x-rays and MRIs on the worsts days of their lives. Chocolate was being created on the same street that childhood diseases were being diagnosed. And that was life. The sweetest of sensations and the deepest of devastations live next door to each other.

The United States was of an anti-intellectual bent. And yet the two most technologically advanced laboratories in the world, as far as Paul could tell, were no longer in Paris’s Louvre or London’s Burlington House. They were now in Menlo Park, New Jersey, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They were operated by two self-made men with no formal training at all.

Lots of people leave Pennsylvania limping and bruised. The state also has what are reputed to be the meanest rattlesnakes anywhere along the trail,

On this trip as we drove across Pennsylvania, a state so ludicrously vast that it takes a whole day to traverse,

In which state was the first successful oil well drilled in 1859? The Drake Well in Titusville, Pennsylvania was the first successful oil well drilled for the sole purpose of finding oil.

During elections for the 1776 convention to frame a constitution for Pennsylvania, a Privates Committee urged voters to oppose “great and overgrown rich men . . . they will be too apt to be framing distinctions in society.” The Privates Committee drew up a bill of rights for the convention, including the statement that “an enormous proportion of property vested in a few individuals is dangerous to the rights, and destructive of the common happiness, of mankind; and therefore every free state hath a right by its laws to discourage the possession of such property.

Between 1799 and 1810 the legislatures of New Jersey, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania passed statutes forbidding the state courts from citing any cases decided by English courts after July 4, 1776.

So the incompetents in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s state capital, knew or should have known that, even by their own lax rules, Gosnell should not have been carrying out abortions—but they didn’t care.

In 2005 Rick Santorum, a senator from AccuWeather’s home state of Pennsylvania and a recipient of Myers family campaign contributions, introduced a bill that would have written this idea into law. The bill was a little vague, but it appeared to eliminate the National Weather Service’s website or any other means of communication with the public. It allowed the Weather Service to warn people about the weather just before it was about to kill them, but at no other time—and exactly how anyone would be any good at predicting extreme weather if he or she wasn’t predicting all the other weather was left unclear. Pause a moment to consider the audacity of that maneuver. A private company whose weather predictions were totally dependent on the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. taxpayer to gather the data necessary for those predictions, and on decades of intellectual weather work sponsored by the U.S. taxpayer, and on international data-sharing treaties made on behalf of the U.S. taxpayer, and on the very forecasts that the National Weather Service generated, was, in effect, trying to force the U.S. taxpayer to pay all over again for what the National Weather Service might be able to tell him or her for free.

It was in his economic interest to keep women servants from marrying or from having sexual relations, because childbearing would interfere with work. Benjamin Franklin, writing as “Poor Richard” in 1736, gave advice to his readers: “Let thy maidservant be faithful, strong and homely.” Servants could not marry without permission, could be separated from their families, could be whipped for various offenses. Pennsylvania law in the seventeenth century said that marriage of servants “without the consent of the Masters . . . shall be proceeded against as for Adultery, or fornication, and Children to be reputed as Bastards.

Lots of people leave Pennsylvania limping and bruised. The state also has what are reputed to be the meanest rattlesnakes anywhere along the trail, and the most unreliable water sources, particularly in high summer.

Latro, California: "Terrible diarrhea, Doctor, and I feel so weak!" "Take these pills and come back in three days if you're not better." Parkington, Texas: "Terrible diarrhea..." "Take these pills..." Hainesport, Louisiana: "Terrible..." "Take..." Baker Bay, Florida... Washington, DC... Philadelphia, Pennsylvania... New York, New York... Boston, Massachusetts... Chicago, Illinois: "Doctor, I know it's Sunday, but the kid's in such a terrible state - you've got to help me!" "Give him some junior aspirin and bring him to my office tomorrow. Goodbye." EVERYWHERE, USA: a sudden upswing in orders for very small coffins, the right size to take a baby dead from acute infantile enteritis.

who most deserves to be dubbed the inventor of the electronic digital computer: John Atanasoff, a professor who worked almost alone at Iowa State, or the team led by John Mauchly and Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania.

They had the first hospital in America. The first library and zoo. They had the first newspaper, the first TV and radio broadcasts. Pennsylvania had the first capital of the United States. And most importantly, the banana split was invented here!

For the first time I got a good look at the woman who, despite avowed intentions, had saved my life. I was surprised first to see that she was old. Her hair was silver, tied back behind her head in a no-nonsense bun. Her face was lined with wrinkles. On her head she wore a hat with a very wide brim, a kind of hat I’d never seen before. She also wore tight-fitting black pants and black leather boots and a brown leather jacket. A patch on her shoulder read PENNSYLVANIA STATE POLICE TROOPER. On the front of her jacket was a nameplate that read CAXTON.

Pennsylvania is a state of firsts. They had the first hospital in America. The first library and zoo. They had the first newspaper, the first TV and radio broadcasts. Pennsylvania had the first capital of the United States. And most importantly, the banana split was invented here!

I think this is going to trigger ‘Sputnik 2.0,’ a biomedical duel on progress between China and the United States,” said Carl June, a noted cancer researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who at the time was still struggling to get regulatory approval for a similar clinical trial.

Pennsylvania gave Gosnell carte blanche for the next seventeen years. With every license extension and slipshod inspection, state health regulators sent a message: do what you like, because no matter what you do, we won’t bother you, and we don’t care whom you kill or injure along the way.

In 1790, “squatter” appeared in a Pennsylvania newspaper, but written as “squatlers,” describing men who inhabited the western borderlands of that state, along the Susquehanna River. They were men who “sit down on river bottoms,” pretend to have titles, and chase off anyone who dares to usurp their claims.5

Wrecking civilization one story at a time." "That hardest day in any cancer patient's life is the day after he's cured." "Some of us aren’t made strong. We’re extras, made out of the leftovers the gods had after making the good men. " --Inclinations of the Solar Winds "Just Foxing along--another day, another song.

Biological warfare (BW) and chemical warfare (CW) research was run out of Edgeware Arsenal but also involved testing in many other locations including Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. As in the radiation experiments described in an earlier chapter, BW/CW research involved releasing bacteria, fungi and viruses into general population areas. The bacterium Serratia marascens was released in many locations including New York (June 7-10, 1966), San Francisco (September, 1950), and Pennsylvania State Highway #16 westward for one mile from Benchmark #193 (January 7, 1955). Other infectious agents released into civilian populations included Aspergillus fumigatus and Bacillus globigii.

The Knights of Labor originated in the late 1860s and early 1870s in Philadelphia, but slowly expanded into the rest of Pennsylvania and finally became a national organization with 750,000 members. It encompassed many trade unions and was organized geographically rather than by occupation. “The Knights attempted to organize all American productive workers into ‘one big union’ regardless of skill, trade, industry, race or sex and were divided into local, district and national assemblies, with a centralized structure”155—although substantial autonomy was granted to local assemblies, which took the initiative in establishing hundreds of cooperative stores and factories. The national leadership was less energetic on this score than local leadership. The overarching purpose of the organization was, as its longtime leader Terence Powderly said, “to associate our own labors; to establish co-operative institutions such as will tend to supersede the wage-system, by the introduction of a co-operative industrial system.”156 To this end, the Knights lobbied politically, engaged in numerous strikes, lent their support to other radical social movements, and, of course, organized co-ops. Masses of workers genuinely believed that they could rise from being “rented slaves” to become cooperators in control of their work and wages, living in revitalized and stabilized communities, no longer subject to periods of unemployment. Cooperation was a religion for some of them.

Nowhere do the words “slave” or “slavery” appear in the final document. “What will be said of this new principle of founding a right to govern Freemen on a power derived from slaves,” Pennsylvania’s John Dickinson wondered—correctly, as it would turn out. He predicted: “The omitting the Word will be regarded as an Endeavour to conceal a principle of which we are ashamed.”49

In a 2017 poll taken by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, most Americans appeared ignorant of the fundamentals of the US Constitution. Thirty-seven percent could not name a single right protected by the First Amendment. Only one out of four Americans could name all three branches of government. One in three could not name any branch of government. In a 2018 survey conducted by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, almost 75 percent of those polled were not able to identify the thirteen original colonies. Over half had no idea whom the United States fought in World War II. Less than 25 percent knew why colonists had fought the Revolutionary War. Twelve percent thought Dwight D. Eisenhower commanded troops in the Civil War.

The right of equal suffrage among the States is another exceptionable part of the Confederation. Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Delaware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina.

TO THE EAST AND TO THE WEST. To the East and to the West, To the man of the Seaside State and of Pennsylvania, To the Kanadian of the north, to the Southerner I love, These with perfect trust to depict you as myself, the germs are in all men, I believe the main purport of these States is to found a superb friendship, exaltè, previously unknown, Because I perceive it waits, and has been always waiting, latent in all men.

To all to whom these Presents shall come, we the undersigned Delegates of the States affixed to our Names send greeting. Articles of Confederation and perpetual Union between the states of New Hampshire, Massachusetts-bay Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. Article I The Stile of this Confederacy shall be "The United States of America".

Well, I was able to write in further reply to Dennis Prager, now you have your answer. The nineteen suicide murderers of New York and Washington and Pennsylvania were beyond any doubt the most sincere believers on those planes. Perhaps we can hear a little less about how "people of faith" possess moral advantages that others can only envy. And what is to be learned from the jubilation and the ecstatic propaganda with which this great feat of fidelity has been greeted in the Islamic world? At the time, the United States has an attorney general named John Ashcroft, who had stated that America had "no king but Jesus" (a claim that was exactly two words too long). It had a president who wanted to hand over the care of the poor to "faith based" institutions. Might this not be a moment where the light of reason, and the defense of a society that separated church and state and valued free expression and free inquiry, be granted a point or two?

It may not be improper to observe that in both those instances (the one of Pennsylvania, and the other of the United States), there is no such thing as the idea of a compact between the people on one side, and the government on the other. The compact was that of the people with each other, to produce and constitute a government. To suppose that any government can be a party in a compact with the whole people, is to suppose it to have existence before it can have a right to exist. The only instance in which a compact can take place between the people and those who exercise the government is, that the people shall pay them, while they choose to employ them. Government is not a trade which any man, or any body of men, has a right to set up and exercise for his own emolument, but is altogether a trust, in right of those by whom that trust is delegated, and by whom it is always resumeable. It has of itself no rights; they are altogether duties.

Left unsaid was that Biden states received 88.4 percent of the funding and an average award of more than $3.5 million—3.34 times as large as the amount Trump states received. Four states that received funds switched from Trump states in 2016 to Biden states in 2020. Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania received $35,579,609—more than half of all funds. By contrast, Florida, a state that became more firmly Trump-supporting in 2020, received only $287,000 in CEIR funding.86

It inspired Scottish immigrant Frances Wright—feminist, abolitionist, and advocate of free public education—to write, “What is it to be an American? Is it to have drawn the first breath in Maine, in Pennsylvania, in Florida, or in Missouri? Pshaw! Hence with such paltry, pettifogging calculations of nativities! They are Americans who have complied with the constitutional regulations of the United States…wed the principles of America’s declaration to their hearts and render the duties of American citizens practically to their lives.

Justices in the United States believe that their duty is to uphold the Constitution, but if they do not understand that the authority of the Constitution itself rests upon the inalienable natural rights of all human beings, then they not only undermine the Constitution, which they are sworn to uphold but also turn themselves into wielders of arbitrary power. Regrettably, this misuse of power occurred in both the Dred Scott decision and in the Roe v. Wade decision (and its subsequent interpretation in cases such as Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Robert P. Casey).

Howe's first object is, partly by threats and partly by promises, to terrify or seduce the people to deliver up their arms and receive mercy. The ministry recommended the same plan to Gage, and this is what the tories call making their peace, "a peace which passeth all understanding" indeed! A peace which would be the immediate forerunner of a worse ruin than any we have yet thought of. Ye men of Pennsylvania, do reason upon these things! Were the back counties to give up their arms, they would fall an easy prey to the Indians, who are all armed: this perhaps is what some Tories would not be sorry for. Were the home counties to deliver up their arms, they would be exposed to the resentment of the back counties who would then have it in their power to chastise their defection at pleasure. And were any one state to give up its arms, that state must be garrisoned by all Howe's army of Britons and Hessians to preserve it from the anger of the rest. Mutual fear is the principal link in the chain of mutual love, and woe be to that state that breaks the compact. Howe is mercifully inviting you to barbarous destruction, and men must be either rogues or fools that will not see it. I dwell not upon the vapors of imagination; I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as A, B, C, hold up truth to your eyes.

Teachers seeking to 'teach the controversy' over Darwinian evolution in today's climate will likely be met with false warnings that it is unconstitutional to say anything negative about Darwinian evolution. Students who attempt to raise questions about Darwinism, or who try to elicit from the teacher an honest answer about the status of intelligent design theory will trigger administrators' concerns about whether they stand in Constitutional jeopardy. A chilling effect on open inquiry is being felt in several states already, including Ohio. South Carolina, and Pennsylvania. [District Court] Judge Jones's message is clear: give Darwin only praise, or else face the wrath of the judiciary.

It was not what the ballroom crowd wanted to hear at that moment. Not after listening to Muskie denounce Wallace as a cancer in the soul of America… but McGovern wasn’t talking to the people in that ballroom; he was making a very artful pitch to potential Wallace voters in the other primary states. Wisconsin was three weeks away, then Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan—and Wallace would be raising angry hell in every one of them. McGovern’s brain-trust, though, had come up with the idea that the Wallace vote was “soft”—that the typical Wallace voter, especially in the North and Midwest, was far less committed to Wallace himself than to his thundering, gut-level appeal to rise up and smash all the “pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington” who’d been fucking them over for so long.

The intriguing history of American applied toponymy includes a few notoriously unpopular sweeping decisions a year after President Benjamin Harrison created the Board on Geographic Names in 1890. Harrison acted at the behest of several government agencies, including the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, which was responsible for mapping the nation's coastline, harbors, and coastal waterways. Troubled by inconsistencies in spelling, board members voted to replace centre with center, drop the ugh from names ending in orough, and shorten the suffix burgh to burg. Overnight, Centreview (in Mississippi) became Centerview, Isleborough (in Maine) became Isleboro, and Pittsburgh (in Pennsylvania) lost its final h and a lot of civic pride. The city was chartered in 1816 as Pittsburg, but the Post Office Department added the extra letter sometime later. Although both spellings were used locally and the shorter version had been the official name, many Pittsburghers complained bitterly about the cost of reprinting stationery and repainting signs. Making the spelling consistent with Harrisburg, they argued, was hardly a good reason for truncating the Iron City's moniker--although Harrisburg was the state capital, it was a smaller and economically less important place. Local officials protested that the board had exceeded its authority. The twenty-year crusade to restore the final h bore fruit in 1911, when the board reversed itself--but only for Pittsburgh. In 1916 the board reaffirmed its blanket change of centre, borough, and burgh as well as its right to make exceptions for Pittsburgh and other places with an entrenched local usage.

Whites generally are unable or unwilling to acknowledge how structural patterning generates white bias and responsibility for that structural patterning. Perhaps it is Mumia Abu-Jamal who again has deftly and complexly summarized the phenomenon of viciously racist bias in relation to African American experience of “criminal justice.” Contemplating Pennsylvania’s death row population which was 60 percent black at the time of his writing in a state where blacks make up only 11 percent of the population, Abu-Jamal reflects: Does this mean that African-Americans are somehow innocents, subjected to a set up by state officials? Not especially. What it does suggest is that state actors, at all stages of the criminal justice system, including slating at the police station, arraignment at the judicial office, pretrial, trial and sentencing stage before a court, treat African-American defendants with a special vengeance not experienced by white defendants.[94] Hence, we have the prison house and criminal justice structures as a bastion of white racism, displaying severe racial disparities, unequally disseminating terror and group loss for racialized groups in the US. It is a bitter fruit of the nation’s legacy of four centuries of slavery in North America, of the Jim Crow rollback of Reconstruction that often was reinforced by lynching practices. Some of today’s prisons are, in fact, built on sites of former slave plantations.[95] More importantly, prisons today are institutions that preserve a white society marked by white dominance and the confinement of nonwhite bodies, especially black bodies, exposing those bodies to commodification, immobilization, and disintegration.

ED ABBEY’S FBI file was a thick one, and makes for engrossing reading. The file begins in 1947, when Abbey, just twenty and freshly back from serving in the Army in Europe, posts a typewritten notice on the bulletin board at the State Teachers College in Pennsylvania. The note urges young men to send their draft cards to the president in protest of peacetime conscription, exhorting them to “emancipate themselves.” It is at that point that Abbey becomes “the subject of a Communist index card” at the FBI, and from then until the end of his life the Bureau will keep track of where Abbey is residing, following his many moves. They will note when he heads west and, as acting editor of the University of New Mexico’s literary magazine, The Thunderbird, decides to print an issue with a cover emblazoned with the words: “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest!” The quote is from Diderot, but Abbey thinks it funnier to attribute the words to Louisa May Alcott. And so he quickly loses his editorship while the FBI adds a few more pages to his file. The Bureau will become particularly intrigued when Mr. Abbey attends an international conference in defense of children in Vienna, Austria, since the conference, according to the FBI, was “initiated by Communists in 1952.” Also quoted in full in his files is a letter to the editor that he sends to the New Mexico Daily Lobo, in which he writes: “In this day of the cold war, which everyday [sic] shows signs of becoming warmer, the individual who finds himself opposed to war is apt to feel very much out of step with his fellow citizens” and then announces the need to form a group to “discuss implications and possibilities of resistance to war.

McDougall was a certified revolutionary hero, while the Scottish-born cashier, the punctilious and corpulent William Seton, was a Loyalist who had spent the war in the city. In a striking show of bipartisan unity, the most vociferous Sons of Liberty—Marinus Willett, Isaac Sears, and John Lamb—appended their names to the bank’s petition for a state charter. As a triple power at the new bank—a director, the author of its constitution, and its attorney—Hamilton straddled a critical nexus of economic power. One of Hamilton’s motivations in backing the bank was to introduce order into the manic universe of American currency. By the end of the Revolution, it took $167 in continental dollars to buy one dollar’s worth of gold and silver. This worthless currency had been superseded by new paper currency, but the states also issued bills, and large batches of New Jersey and Pennsylvania paper swamped Manhattan. Shopkeepers had to be veritable mathematical wizards to figure out the fluctuating values of the varied bills and coins in circulation. Congress adopted the dollar as the official monetary unit in 1785, but for many years New York shopkeepers still quoted prices in pounds, shillings, and pence. The city was awash with strange foreign coins bearing exotic names: Spanish doubloons, British and French guineas, Prussian carolines, Portuguese moidores. To make matters worse, exchange rates differed from state to state. Hamilton hoped that the Bank of New York would counter all this chaos by issuing its own notes and also listing the current exchange rates for the miscellaneous currencies. Many Americans still regarded banking as a black, unfathomable art, and it was anathema to upstate populists. The Bank of New York was denounced by some as the cat’s-paw of British capitalists. Hamilton’s petition to the state legislature for a bank charter was denied for seven years, as Governor George Clinton succumbed to the prejudices of his agricultural constituents who thought the bank would give preferential treatment to merchants and shut out farmers. Clinton distrusted corporations as shady plots against the populace, foreshadowing the Jeffersonian revulsion against Hamilton’s economic programs. The upshot was that in June 1784 the Bank of New York opened as a private bank without a charter. It occupied the Walton mansion on St. George’s Square (now Pearl Street), a three-story building of yellow brick and brown trim, and three years later it relocated to Hanover Square. It was to house the personal bank accounts of both Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and prove one of Hamilton’s most durable monuments, becoming the oldest stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

There is not a single penal institution or reformatory in the United States where men are not tortured "to be made good," by means of the blackjack, the club, the straightjacket, the water-cure, the "humming bird" (an electrical contrivance run along the human body), the solitary, the bullring, and starvation diet. In these institutions his will is broken, his soul degraded, his spirit subdued by the deadly monotony and routine of prison life. In Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and in the South, these horrors have become so flagrant as to reach the outside world, while in most other prisons the same Christian methods still prevail. But prison walls rarely allow the agonized shrieks of the victims to escape—prison walls are thick, they dull the sound. Society might with greater immunity abolish all prisons at once, than to hope for protection from these twentieth century chambers of horrors.

The Ingallses had no way of knowing it, but the locust swarm descending upon them was the largest in recorded human history. It would become known as “Albert’s swarm”: in Nebraska, a meteorologist named Albert Child measured its flight for ten days in June, telegraphing for further information from east and west, noting wind speed and carefully calculating the extent of the cloud of insects. He startled himself with his conclusions: the swarm appeared to be 110 miles wide, 1,800 miles long, and a quarter to a half mile in depth. The wind was blowing at ten miles an hour, but the locusts were moving even faster, at fifteen. They covered 198,000 square miles, Child concluded, an area equal to the states of Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont combined.49 “This is utterly incredible,” he wrote, “yet how can we put it aside?”50 The cloud consisted of some 3.5 trillion insects.

the morning, I drove to Pennsylvania, thirty miles or so to the north. The Appalachian Trail runs for 230 miles in a northeasterly arc across the state, like the broad end of a slice of pie. I never met a hiker with a good word to say about the trail in Pennsylvania. It is, as someone told a National Geographic reporter in 1987, the place “where boots go to die.” During the last ice age it experienced what geologists call a periglacial climate—a zone at the edge of an ice sheet characterized by frequent freeze—thaw cycles that fractured the rock. The result is mile upon mile of jagged, oddly angled slabs of stone strewn about in wobbly piles known to science as felsenmeer (literally, “sea of rocks”). These require constant attentiveness if you are not to twist an ankle or sprawl on your face—not a pleasant experience with fifty pounds of momentum on your back. Lots of people leave Pennsylvania limping and bruised. The state also has what are reputed to be the meanest

the headline death and disaster atop the latest dispatch from Homestead. “Capital and labor have met once more on a bloody field,” the article stated. “Never in the history of strikes and riots, since the railroad riots of 1877, have there been so many lives sacrificed, and such fighting between the representatives of the two great social divisions.” Members of the Pennsylvania National Guard were on their way to restore order, the dispatch reported. He and Goldman had been right. It was clear that Frick would soon vanquish the strikers. Exiting the station, Berkman looked to the east. Above him, perched on what locals still called Jenkins Hill, the Capitol dome was bathed in a flood of golden light from the deep red sun rising behind it. “Like a living thing the light palpitates,” Berkman recalled, “trembling with passion to kiss the uppermost peak, striking it with blinding brilliancy, and then spreading in a broadening embrace down the shoulders of the towering giant.

One of the most memorably unexpected events I experienced in the course of doing this book came in a dissection room at the University of Nottingham in England when a professor and surgeon named Ben Ollivere (about whom much more in due course) gently incised and peeled back a sliver of skin about a millimeter thick from the arm of a cadaver. It was so thin as to be translucent. “That,” he said, “is where all your skin color is. That’s all that race is—a sliver of epidermis.” I mentioned this to Nina Jablonski when we met in her office in State College, Pennsylvania, soon afterward. She gave a nod of vigorous assent. “It is extraordinary how such a small facet of our composition is given so much importance,” she said. “People act as if skin color is a determinant of character when all it is is a reaction to sunlight. Biologically, there is actually no such thing as race—nothing in terms of skin color, facial features, hair type, bone structure, or anything else that is a defining quality among peoples.

A 2011 study done by Alan Krueger, a Princeton economics professor who served for two years as the chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Stacy Dale, an analyst with Mathematica Policy Research, tried to adjust for that sort of thing. Krueger and Dale examined sets of students who had started college in 1976 and in 1989; that way, they could get a sense of incomes both earlier and later in careers. And they determined that the graduates of more selective colleges could expect earnings 7 percent greater than graduates of less selective colleges, even if the graduates in that latter group had SAT scores and high school GPAs identical to those of their peers at more exclusive institutions. But then Krueger and Dale made their adjustment. They looked specifically at graduates of less selective colleges who had applied to more exclusive ones even though they hadn’t gone there. And they discovered that the difference in earnings pretty much disappeared. Someone with a given SAT score who had gone to Penn State but had also applied to the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school with a much lower acceptance rate, generally made the same amount of money later on as someone with an equivalent SAT score who was an alumnus of UPenn. It was a fascinating conclusion, suggesting that at a certain level of intelligence and competence, what drives earnings isn’t the luster of the diploma but the type of person in possession of it. If he or she came from a background and a mindset that made an elite institution seem desirable and within reach, then he or she was more likely to have the tools and temperament for a high income down the road, whether an elite institution ultimately came into play or not. This was powerfully reflected in a related determination that Krueger and Dale made in their 2011 study: “The average SAT score of schools that rejected a student is more than twice as strong a predictor of the student’s subsequent earnings as the average SAT score of the school the student attended.

The president-elect did take the threats seriously. Either he or his friend, Illinois’s new governor, Richard Yates—likely operating with Lincoln’s consent—sent the state’s adjutant general, Thomas Mather, to Washington to discuss the troubling rumors with Winfield Scott. In the bargain, Lincoln hoped that Mather might also learn definitively whether the ancient, Southern-born general could himself be relied upon to remain loyal to the Union in the event the secession crisis widened to include his native state of Virginia. In the capital, the “old warrior, grizzly and wrinkled…breathing [with]…great labor,” wheezed in reply to Mather’s inquiries that Lincoln could confidently “come to Washington as soon as he is ready.” Scott promised to “plant cannon on both ends of Pennsylvania avenue, and if any of them [secessionists] show their faces or raise a finger I’ll blow them to hell.” Mather returned home to “assure Mr. Lincoln that, if Scott were alive on the day of the inauguration, there need be no alarm lest the performance be interrupted by any one.

In the weeks ahead, Oppenheimer, Acheson and Lilienthal did their best to keep the Acheson-Lilienthal plan alive, lobbying the bureaucracy and the media. In response, Baruch complained to Acheson that he was “embarrassed” that he was being undercut. Hoping that he could still influence Baruch, Acheson agreed to bring everyone together at Blair House on Pennsylvania Avenue on Friday afternoon, May 17, 1946. But as Acheson worked to contain the atomic genie, others were working to contain, if not destroy, Oppenheimer. That same week, J. Edgar Hoover was urging his agents to step up their surveillance of Oppenheimer. Though he hadn’t a shred of evidence, Hoover now floated the possibility that Oppenheimer intended to defect to the Soviet Union. Having decided that Oppenheimer was a Soviet sympathizer, the FBI director reasoned that “he would be far more valuable there as an advisor in the construction of atomic plants than he would be as a casual informant in the United States.” He instructed his agents to “follow Oppenheimer’s activities and contacts closely. . . .

Dr. Morris Netherton, a pioneer in the field of past-life therapy (and my teacher),7 relates the incident of a patient who returned to her previous life as Rita McCullum. Rita was born in 1903 and lived in rural Pennsylvania with her foster parents until they were killed in a car accident in 1916. In the early 1920s she married a man named McCullum and moved to New York, where they had a garment manufacturing company off Seventh Avenue in midtown Manhattan. Life was hard and money short. Her husband died in 1928. In 1929, her son died from polio, and the stock market crashed. Like many others during the Great Depression, Rita succumbed to bankruptcy and depression. On the sunny day of June 11, 1933, she hanged herself from the ceiling fan of her factory. Because this memory featured traceable facts, Netherton and his patient contacted New York City’s Hall of Records. They received a photocopy of a notarized death certificate of a woman named Rita McCullum. Under manner of death, it stated that she died by hanging at an address in the West Thirties, still today the heart of the garment district. The date of death was June 11, 1933.8

The Company We Keep So now we have seen that our cells are in relationship with our thoughts, feelings, and each other. How do they factor into our relationships with others? Listening and communicating clearly play an important part in healthy relationships. Can relationships play an essential role in our own health? More than fifty years ago there was a seminal finding when the social and health habits of more than 4,500 men and women were followed for a period of ten years. This epidemiological study led researchers to a groundbreaking discovery: people who had few or no social contacts died earlier than those who lived richer social lives. Social connections, we learned, had a profound influence on physical health.9 Further evidence for this fascinating finding came from the town of Roseto, Pennsylvania. Epidemiologists were interested in Roseto because of its extremely low rate of coronary artery disease and death caused by heart disease compared to the rest of the United States. What were the town’s residents doing differently that protected them from the number one killer in the United States? On close examination, it seemed to defy common sense: health nuts, these townspeople were not. They didn’t get much exercise, many were overweight, they smoked, and they relished high-fat diets. They had all the risk factors for heart disease. Their health secret, effective despite questionable lifestyle choices, turned out to be strong communal, cultural, and familial ties. A few years later, as the younger generation started leaving town, they faced a rude awakening. Even when they had improved their health behaviors—stopped smoking, started exercising, changed their diets—their rate of heart disease rose dramatically. Why? Because they had lost the extraordinarily close connection they enjoyed with neighbors and family.10 From studies such as these, we learn that social isolation is almost as great a precursor of heart disease as elevated cholesterol or smoking. People connection is as important as cellular connections. Since the initial large population studies, scientists in the field of psychoneuroimmunology have demonstrated that having a support system helps in recovery from illness, prevention of viral infections, and maintaining healthier hearts.11 For example, in the 1990s researchers began laboratory studies with healthy volunteers to uncover biological links to social and psychological behavior. Infected experimentally with cold viruses, volunteers were kept in isolation and monitored for symptoms and evidence of infection. All showed immunological evidence of a viral infection, yet only some developed symptoms of a cold. Guess which ones got sick: those who reported the most stress and the fewest social interactions in their “real life” outside the lab setting.12 We Share the Single Cell’s Fate Community is part of our healing network, all the way down to the level of our cells. A single cell left alone in a petri dish will not survive. In fact, cells actually program themselves to die if they are isolated! Neurons in the developing brain that fail to connect to other cells also program themselves to die—more evidence of the life-saving need for connection; no cell thrives alone. What we see in the microcosm is reflected in the larger organism: just as our cells need to stay connected to stay alive, we, too, need regular contact with family, friends, and community. Personal relationships nourish our cells,

The crime was discovered when Trina became pregnant. As is often the case, the correctional officer was fired but not criminally prosecuted. Trina remained imprisoned and gave birth to a son. Like hundreds of women who give birth while in prison, Trina was completely unprepared for the stress of childbirth. She delivered her baby while handcuffed to a bed. It wasn’t until 2008 that most states abandoned the practice of shackling or handcuffing incarcerated women during delivery. Trina’s baby boy was taken away from her and placed in foster care. After this series of events—the fire, the imprisonment, the rape, the traumatic birth, and then the seizure of her son—Trina’s mental health deteriorated further. Over the years, she became less functional and more mentally disabled. Her body began to spasm and quiver uncontrollably, until she required a cane and then a wheelchair. By the time she had turned thirty, prison doctors diagnosed her with multiple sclerosis, intellectual disability, and mental illness related to trauma. Trina had filed a civil suit against the officer who raped her, and the jury awarded her a judgment of $62,000. The guard appealed, and the Court reversed the verdict because the correctional officer had not been permitted to tell the jury that Trina was in prison for murder. Consequently, Trina never received any financial aid or services from the state to compensate her for being violently raped by one of its “correctional” officers. In 2014, Trina turned fifty-two. She has been in prison for thirty-eight years. She is one of nearly five hundred people in Pennsylvania who have been condemned to mandatory life imprisonment without parole for crimes they were accused of committing when they were between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. It is the largest population of child offenders condemned to die in prison in any single jurisdiction in the world.

ON THE MODUS OPERANDI OF OUR CURRENT PRESIDENT, DONALD J. TRUMP "According to a new ABC/Washington Post poll, President Trump’s disapproval rating has hit a new high." The President's response to this news was "“I don’t do it for the polls. Honestly — people won’t necessarily agree with this — I do nothing for the polls,” the president told reporters on Wednesday. “I do it to do what’s right. I’m here for an extended period of time. I’m here for a period that’s a very important period of time. And we are straightening out this country.” - Both Quotes Taken From Aol News - August 31, 2018 In The United States, as in other Republics, the two main categories of Presidential motivation for their assigned tasks are #1: Self Interest in seeking to attain and to hold on to political power for their own sakes, regarding the welfare of This Republic to be of secondary importance. #2: Seeking to attain and to hold on to the power of that same office for the selfless sake of this Republic's welfare, irregardless of their personal interest, and in the best of cases going against their personal interests to do what is best for this Republic even if it means making profound and extreme personal sacrifices. Abraham Lincoln understood this last mentioned motivation and gave his life for it. The primary information any political scientist needs to ascertain regarding the diagnosis of a particular President's modus operandi is to first take an insightful and detailed look at the individual's past. The litmus test always being what would he or she be willing to sacrifice for the Nation. In the case of our current President, Donald John Trump, he abandoned a life of liberal luxury linked to self imposed limited responsibilities for an intensely grueling, veritably non stop two year nightmare of criss crossing this immense Country's varied terrain, both literally and socially when he could have easily maintained his life of liberal leisure. While my assertion that his personal choice was, in my view, sacrificially done for the sake of a great power in a state of rapid decline can be contradicted by saying it was motivated by selfish reasons, all evidence points to the contrary. For knowing the human condition, fraught with a plentitude of weaknesses, for a man in the end portion of his lifetime to sacrifice an easy life for a hard working incessant schedule of thankless tasks it is entirely doubtful that this choice was made devoid of a special and even exalted inspiration to do so. And while the right motivations are pivotal to a President's success, what is also obviously needed are generic and specific political, military and ministerial skills which must be naturally endowed by Our Creator upon the particular President elected for the purposes of advancing a Nation's general well being for one and all. If one looks at the latest National statistics since President Trump took office, (such as our rising GNP, the booming market, the dramatically shrinking unemployment rate, and the overall positive emotive strains in regards to our Nation's future, on both the left and the right) one can make definitive objective conclusions pertaining to the exceptionally noble character and efficiency of the current resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And if one can drown out the constant communicative assaults on our current Commander In Chief, and especially if one can honestly assess the remarkable lack of substantial mistakes made by the current President, all of these factors point to a leader who is impressively strong, morally and in other imperative ways. And at the most propitious time. For the main reason that so many people in our Republic palpably despise our current President is that his political and especially his social agenda directly threatens their licentious way of life. - John Lars Zwerenz

And by the end of March one of them had already begun his journey. Twenty-two years old, an A.B. and LL.B. of Harvard, Francis Parkman was back from a winter trip to scenes in Pennsylvania and Ohio that would figure in his book and now he started with his cousin, Quincy Adams Shaw, for St. Louis. He was prepared to find it quite as alien to Beacon Hill as the Dakota lands beyond it, whither he was going. He was already an author (a poet and romancer), had already designed the great edifice his books were to build, and already suffered from the mysterious, composite illness that was to make his life a long torture. He hoped, in fact, that a summer on the prairies might relieve or even cure the malady that had impaired his eyes and, he feared, his heart and brain as well. He had done his best to cure it by systematic exercise, hard living in the White Mountains, and a regimen self-imposed in the code of his Puritan ancestors which would excuse no weakness. But more specifically Parkman was going west to study the Indians. He intended to write the history of the conflict between imperial Britain and imperial France, which was in great part a story of Indians. The Conspiracy of Pontiac had already taken shape in his mind; beyond it stretched out the aisles and transepts of what remains the most considerable achievement by an American historian. So he needed to see some uncorrupted Indians in their native state. It was Parkman’s fortune to witness and take part in one of the greatest national experiences, at the moment and site of its occurrence. It is our misfortune that he did not understand the smallest part of it. No other historian, not even Xenophon, has ever had so magnificent an opportunity: Parkman did not even know that it was there, and if his trip to the prairies produced one of the exuberant masterpieces of American literature, it ought instead to have produced a key work of American history. But the other half of his inheritance forbade. It was the Puritan virtues that held him to the ideal of labor and achievement and kept him faithful to his goal in spite of suffering all but unparalleled in literary history. And likewise it was the narrowness, prejudice, and mere snobbery of the Brahmins that insulated him from the coarse, crude folk who were the movement he traveled with, turned him shuddering away from them to rejoice in the ineffabilities of Beacon Hill, and denied our culture a study of the American empire at the moment of its birth. Much may rightly be regretted, therefore. But set it down also that, though the Brahmin was indifferent to Manifest Destiny, the Puritan took with him a quiet valor which has not been outmatched among literary folk or in the history of the West.

On the first day of the meeting that would become known as the United States Constitutional Convention, Edmund Randolph of Virginia kicked off the proceedings. Addressing his great fellow Virginian General George Washington, victorious hero of the War of Independence, who sat in the chair, Randolph hoped to convince delegates sent by seven, so far, of the thirteen states, with more on the way, to abandon the confederation formed by the states that had sent them—the union that had declared American independence from England and won the war—and to replace it with another form of government. “Our chief danger,” Randolph announced, “arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions.” This was in May of 1787, in Philadelphia, in the same ground-floor room of the Pennsylvania State House, borrowed from the Pennsylvania assembly, where in 1776 the Continental Congress had declared independence. Others in the room already agreed with Randolph: James Madison, also of Virginia; Robert Morris of Pennsylvania; Gouverneur Morris of New York and Pennsylvania; Alexander Hamilton of New York; Washington. They wanted the convention to institute a national government. As we know, their effort was a success. We often say the confederation was a weak government, the national government stronger. But the more important difference has to do with whom those governments acted on. The confederation acted on thirteen state legislatures. The nation would act on all American citizens, throughout all the states. That would be a mighty change. To persuade his fellow delegates to make it, Randolph was reeling off a list of what he said were potentially fatal problems, urgently in need, he said, of immediate repair. He reiterated what he called the chief threat to the country. “None of the constitutions”—he meant those of the states’ governments—“have provided sufficient checks against the democracy.” The term “democracy” could mean different things, sometimes even contradictory things, in 1787. People used it to mean “the mob,” which historians today would call “the crowd,” a movement of people denied other access to power, involving protest, riot, what recently has been called occupation, and often violence against people and property. But sometimes “democracy” just meant assertive lawmaking by a legislative body staffed by gentlemen highly sensitive to the desires of their genteel constituents. Men who condemned the working-class mob as a democracy sometimes prided themselves on being “democratical” in their own representative bodies. What Randolph meant that morning by “democracy” is clear. When he said “our chief danger arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions,” and “none of the constitutions have provided sufficient checks against the democracy,” he was speaking in a context of social and economic turmoil, pervading all thirteen states, which the other delegates were not only aware of but also had good reason to be urgently worried about. So familiar was the problem that Randolph would barely have had to explain it, and he didn’t explain it in detail. Yet he did say things whose context everyone there would already have understood.

During elections for the 1776 convention to frame a constitution for Pennsylvania, a Privates Committee urged voters to oppose “great and overgrown rich men … they will be too apt to be framing distinctions in society.

AT legend has it that Pennsylvania hiking clubs and trail crews are proud of their state's nickname of Rocksylvania and don't remove rocks from the trail. In fact, some people claim they actually dump wheelbarrows full of rocks onto the trail.

In Pennsylvania, a key state that Trump flipped from Obama’s column, there are now more than a million permit holders, and in some counties more than one-third of the adult population is licensed to carry.5

People often point to the London Metropolitan Police, who were formed in the 1820s by Sir Robert Peel,” Vitale said when we met. “They are held up as this liberal ideal of a dispassionate, politically neutral police with the support of the citizenry. But this really misreads the history. Peel is sent to manage the British occupation of Ireland. He’s confronted with a dilemma. Historically, peasant uprisings, rural outrages were dealt with by either the local militia or the British military. In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, in the need for soldiers in other parts of the British Empire, he is having more and more difficulty managing these disorders. In addition, when he does call out the militia, they often open fire on the crowd and kill lots of people, creating martyrs and inflaming further unrest. He said, ‘I need a force that can manage these outrages without inflaming passions further.’ He developed the Peace Preservation Force, which was the first attempt to create a hybrid military-civilian force that can try to win over the population by embedding itself in the local communities, taking on some crime control functions, but its primary purpose was always to manage the occupation. He then exports that model to London as the industrial working classes are flooding the city, dealing with poverty, cycles of boom and bust in the economy, and that becomes their primary mission. “The creation of the very first state police force in the United States was the Pennsylvania State Police in 1905,” Vitale went on. “For the same reasons. It was modeled similarly on U.S. occupation forces in the Philippines. There was a back-and-forth with personnel and ideas. What happened was local police were unable to manage the coal strikes and iron strikes. . . . They needed a force that was more adherent to the interests of capital. . . . Interestingly, for these small-town police forces in a coal mining town there was sometimes sympathy. They wouldn’t open fire on the strikers. So, the state police force was created to be the strong arm for the law. Again, the direct connection between colonialism and the domestic management of workers. . . . It’s a two-way exchange. As we’re developing ideas throughout our own colonial undertakings, bringing those ideas home, and then refining them and shipping them back to our partners around the world who are often despotic regimes with close economic relationships to the United States. There’s a very sad history here of the U.S. exporting basically models of policing that morph into death squads and horrible human rights abuses.” The almost exclusive reliance on militarized police to deal with profound inequality and social problems is turning poor neighborhoods in cities such as Chicago into failed states. The “broken windows” policy, adopted by many cities, argues that disorder produces crime. It criminalizes minor infractions, upending decades of research showing that social dislocation leads to crime. It creates an environment where the poor are constantly harassed, fined, and arrested for nonsubstantive activities.

In ten days,” I said, “the United States will have elected its first woman president. The question at that moment will be whether the hate and division that surfaced during the 2016 campaign will be remembered as a last gasp of a defeated populace, clinging desperately to the old order they once ruled as it was swept away, or the beginning of a recalcitrant movement against American democratic pluralism.” Most members of the audience applauded with the same smug certainty that I was showing. One man, though, with a strong Central European accent, stooped over a cane, spoke to me afterward. “I have seen movements like this before,” he told me.”They are not so easily dismissed.” Like so many other members of the Washington cognoscenti, I had been dead wrong. I could justify it. Oh, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million; her 2 percent win was the largest of any losing presidential candidate since the disputed election of 1876. Had it not been for the Russians, or James Comey, or Anthony Weiner, or Jill Stein, surely she would have won Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which she lost collectively by a smaller number than a capacity crowd at Lambeau Field. Perhaps all true, but I was wrong nonetheless. And since that miscalculation, the troubles have grown for Jews, leaping from the abstraction of the Internet to the reality of toppled headstones at Jewish cemeteries in St. Louis and Philadelphia, swastikas as graffiti, and bomb threats against synagogues and Jewish community centers, daycare facilities, and schools.

The individual voters featured in this book come from ten counties that switched allegiances from Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016, in the five pivotal Great Lakes or Rust Belt states of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Those counties were chosen to ensure as much variety among the population tiers listed above as is possible.

Pigeoners (some professional game dealers, most opportunists) came from every corner of the United States—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, Massachusetts, Alabama, and Louisiana (to name a few).

The poet Kenneth Goldsmith, for one, taught a course at the University of Pennsylvania called “Wasting Time on the Internet,” in which digital distraction was mandatory because he wholeheartedly believes that the Internet’s frenetic state can jumpstart new arenas for creative writing. A surrealist, “electronic collective unconscious” can produce new work, he says, “in ways that aren’t yet recognized as literary.

However, despite his average intelligence, he may be classed as a defective delinquent, and for the care and treatment of this class of criminal the state of Pennsylvania has made no provision.” Continuing

On November 4, while the votes were still being counted, Rick Perry, Trump’s former secretary of energy, wrote Meadows about his “AGRESSIVE STRATEGY.” “Why can’t the states of GA NC PENN and other R controlled state houses declare this is BS […] and just send their own electors to vote,” Perry mused. Perry sent the message to a group chat that included Meadows and two people who were still part of Trump’s cabinet at the time: Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson and Secretary of Agriculture George Ervin “Sonny” Perdue III. “Interesting,” Carson wrote. Alternate electors were a central element of various plots to overturn Trump’s loss that were cooked up by his allies in the weeks after the election. There were basically five states that mattered in the 2020 presidential race: Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, and Wisconsin. The rest of the results were predictable. It was all coming down to the margin in those swing states. Of course, presidential elections aren’t technically decided in the states. They

As to the arms guarantee, the above tracked the language of the Pennsylvania Declaration of Rights of 1776 in guaranteeing the right to bear arms for self-defense and defense of the state.19 Similar to what would become the federal First Amendment, which begins "Congress shall make no law," the above proposed that a free press "shall not be restrained by any [federal] law" and that "no law shall be passed for disarming the people" as a whole "or any of them"—except that criminals or other dangerous persons could be disarmed. Bearing arms to hunt was not out of place in a bill of rights, in that British authorities had been notorious for disarming the people under the guise of game laws.20 The above clarifies that the term "bear arms" is not linguistically restricted to matters of the militia or the national defense.

Coxe responded to the Dissent of the Minority under the pen name ''A Pennsylvanian" in "To the Citizens of the United States, III," published in the Pennsylvania Gazette, February 20, 1788. He wrote as follows: The power of the sword, say the minority of Pennsylvania, is in the hands of Congress. My friends and countrymen, it is not so, for the powers of the sword are in the hands of the yeomanry of america from sixteen to sixty. The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be tremendous and irresistible. Who are the militia? are they not ourselves. Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom. Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American . . . . [T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people.

The Fugitive Slave Act ordered all citizens to assist law enforcement in apprehending fugitive slaves. It voided state laws in Massachusetts, Vermont, Ohio, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, which barred state officials from aid ing in the capture, arrest, or imprisonment of fugitive slaves. In the Fugitive Slave Act, Congress “nationalized slavery. No black person was safe on American soil. The old division of free state/slave state had vanished.”40 If there was any question of whose states’ rights Southern leaders supported, it was certainly not those of free states.

In Pennsylvania, high public-college tuition caused largely by lack of political support meant that student borrowers had the second-highest average debt of any state,

What few people know is that many of America’s founding fathers were Freemasons. Some of the more notable were: George Washington, the first president of the United States of America, Ben Franklin who led the Pennsylvania chapter, Paul Revere who led a Massachusetts chapter, John Hancock, and Chief Justice John Marshall who greatly influenced the shaping of the Supreme Court.

Despite their vastly different personalities, Trump and Sanders were actually viewed by many voters as practically interchangeable. As amazing as it might seem to partisan Democrats and Republicans, I spoke to many people who said they would vote for either Trump or Sanders, but no one else. On Election Day, about 12 percent of Bernie Sanders supporters in the Democratic primary voted for Donald Trump in the general election.12 These Sanders voters gave Trump the margin of victory in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—the three states that in the end handed Trump the White House.

Pennsylvania State Police searching

Nationwide, the Klan had expanded to nearly three million members, and most of the growth was in the Northern states, Steve’s domain—Ohio, Michigan, Kansas, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. Out West, Colorado and Oregon were adding to their Klan rolls just as quickly.

By the following year, the rumor had been confirmed. Jefferson then spent much of 1802 contemplating the implications of neighboring a large French holding. His immediate concern was access to New Orleans, where the Mississippi River emptied into the Gulf of Mexico—small streams and rivers as far north as Pennsylvania and New York merged and flowed into the vital Mississippi. Jefferson decided to dispatch James Monroe as a special envoy to negotiate with France. Once in Paris, Monroe was to join the American minister to France, Robert R. Livingston, to negotiate the purchase of New Orleans and territories near it. Jefferson authorized up to $10 million. Monroe and Livingston, however, were shocked at the French willingness to cede the entirety of the French holding in North America. As transoceanic communication was only as fast as that of a sailing vessel, and relaying the message back to Washington raised the risk of Napoleon changing his mind, the American negotiators went beyond their mandate and agreed in principle to pay $15 million for the territory ranging from New Orleans up to Canada, with a natural western border ending at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. The news of the agreement took well over a month to reach the president. With the details finalized through the remainder of 1803, the United States more than doubled in size.

Exasperated, the navy turned to science for help. On October 2, 1957, Hubert Frings, a Pennsylvania State University professor of zoology, got a call from Washington. Would he be willing to come to Midway Atoll for the December/January nesting season? In other words, would Frings make the supreme sacrifice of spending his between-semester break on a tropical island in lieu of hanging around Altoona, Pennsylvania? You bet. Accompanying him would be his wife, Mable, a librarian and bioacoustician with a special interest in cricket and grasshopper “chirp sequences.

The Great Lakes. If there’s a climate-change sweet spot in the United States, this is it: the Northern states that get their water from the Great Lakes. They’re Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Maryland’s districts, portions of which appear in figure 4.3, were less compact, especially on the convex hull measure, in 2013 than a decade earlier.10 figure 4.3 features District 3, the only one of Maryland’s eight districts to make the “Worst 10” lists. Districts 2, 4, and 7 also have narrow necks and tight twists and turns. A slim, contorted finger of District 2 traces the two northern blobs of District 3. Except for the 6th District, which will be discussed in the next chapter, partisan machinations did not dictate the shape of these districts. Race did play a role as the plan designed by Democratic governor Martin O’Malley carefully allocated Democratic voters so as to maintain the 4th and 7th as majority-black districts. Chapter 5 also addresses the Pennsylvania plan invalidated by the state Supreme Court, while part of the Virginia map was found to pack African Americans, a topic considered in chapter 3. Contributing to the low compactness scores for several states, such as Rhode Island and Hawaii, are their ragged shorelines. Indiana and Nevada had the most compact statewide plans for the 2010s. Table 4.3  States Having the Lowest Average Compactness Scores as of 2013 State Reock Polsby-Popper Convex Hull Maryland 2 1 1 North Carolina 5 4 4 Louisiana 7 3 3 West Virginia 8 5 2 Virginia 4 7 13 Hawaii 18 2 25

Much of the criticism concerning partisan gerrymandering during the 2010s focused on GOP-drawn districts in states like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, as discussed in the next chapter. However, when all states with more than one district are considered, comparison of the average district compactness concludes that Democrats ignored this traditional districting principle more than did Republicans.11 On each of the three measures considered here, Democratic districts scored less well than those fashioned by the GOP. Legislatively

If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there

Arizona used welfare dollars to pay for abstinence-only sex education. Pennsylvania diverted TANF funds to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers. Maine used the money to support a Christian summer camp.[14] And then there’s Mississippi. A 389-page audit released in 2020 found that money overseen by the Mississippi Department of Human Services (DHS) and intended for the state’s poorest families was used to hire an evangelical worship singer who performed at rallies and church concerts; to purchase a Nissan Armada, Chevrolet Silverado, and Ford F-250 for the head of a local nonprofit and two of her family members; and even to pay the former NFL quarterback Brett Favre $1.1 million for speeches he never gave.

Much of the criticism concerning partisan gerrymandering during the 2010s focused on GOP-drawn districts in states like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, as discussed in the next chapter. However, when all states with more than one district are considered, comparison of the average district compactness concludes that Democrats ignored this traditional districting principle more than did Republicans.11 On each of the three measures considered here, Democratic districts scored less well than those fashioned by the GOP. Legislatively drawn plans in states not controlled by one party were more compact than those drawn by Republicans or Democrats on the convex hull measure, but on the other two measures they scored between the two parties’ plans. In keeping with the suspicions of reformers, partisan plans tended to have less compact districts than plans drawn by other entities. Districts in plans prepared by independent commissions scored slightly better on Reock but were a little less compact than districts prepared by courts on Polsby-Popper and convex hull. In two of the nation’s most populous states, restricting the influence of the legislature coincided with more compact districts in 2013 than in 2003. In California, authority to redistrict was shifted from the legislature to an independent commission, while in Florida the legislature retained the authority to draw new districts but a constitutional amendment banned efforts to advance the interests of a party or incumbent.

Then, when the State Chief Executive of Minnesota sent a request to Washington for the assistance of the Army against the riots he was unable to control—three directives burst forth within two hours, stopping all trains in the country, commandeering all cars to speed to Minnesota. An order signed by Wesley Mouch demanded the immediate release of the freight cars held in the service of Kip’s Ma. But by that time, it was too late. Ma’s freight cars were in California, where the soybeans had been sent to a progressive concern made up of sociologists preaching the cult of Oriental austerity, and of businessmen formerly in the numbers racket. In Minnesota, farmers were setting fire to their own farms, they were demolishing grain elevators and the homes of county officials, they were fighting along the track of the railroad, some to tear it up, some to defend it with their lives—and, with no goal to reach save violence, they were dying in the streets of gutted towns and in the silent gullies of a roadless night. Then there was only the acrid stench of grain rotting in half-smoldering piles—a few columns of smoke rising from the plains, standing still in the air over blackened ruins—and, in an office in Pennsylvania, Hank Rearden sitting at his desk, looking at a list of men who had gone bankrupt; they were the manufacturers of farm equipment, who could not be paid and would not be able to pay him. The harvest of soybeans did not reach the markets of the country: it had been reaped prematurely, it was moldy and unfit for consumption.

Moshe had few friends. Most of Pottstown’s Jews had left Chicken Hill by then. Nate was a friend, but he was a Negro, so there was that space between them. But with Malachi, there was no space. They were fellow escapees who, having endured the landing at Ellis Island and escaped the grinding sweatshops and vicious crime of the vermin-infested Lower East Side, had arrived by hook or crook in the land of opportunity that was Pennsylvania, home to Quakers, Mormons, and Presbyterians. Who cared that life was lonely, that jobs were thankless drudgery, that the romance of the proud American state was myth, that the rules of life were laid carefully in neat books and laws written by stern Europeans who stalked the town and state like the grim reaper, with their righteous churches spouting that Jews murdered their precious Jesus Christ? Their fellow Pennsylvanians knew nothing about the shattered shtetls and destroyed synagogues of the old country; they had not set eyes on the stunned elderly immigrants starving in tenements in New York, the old ones who came alone, who spoke Yiddish only, whose children died or left them to live in charity homes, the women frightened until the end, the men consigned to a life of selling vegetables and fruits on horse-drawn carts. They were a lost nation spread across the American countryside, bewildered, their yeshiva education useless, their proud history ignored, as the clankety-clank of American industry churned around them, their proud past as watchmakers and tailors, scholars and historians, musicians and artists, gone, wasted. Americans cared about money. And power. And government. Jews had none of those things; their job was to tread lightly in the land of milk and honey and be thankful that they were free to walk the land without getting their duffs kicked—or worse. Life in America was hard, but it was free, and if you worked hard, you might gain some opportunity, maybe even open a shop or business of some kind.

Thus, to protect against any power being used to violate the rights in the declaration of rights, such rights-violating powers are expressly not delegated as part of those “general powers.” It is not simply that the constitution affirmatively protects those rights, but that the power to violate them is not given to the state government in the first place. This, in a sense, was an answer to Hamilton’s and the Federalists’ promise that enumerated powers would not infringe on rights: we will not only spell those rights out, but explain that those powers do not extend to those rights at all. Pennsylvania’s framers intended to hold up their liberties with a belt and pair of suspenders.

the morning hours of September 17, 1787, the members of the constitutional convention gathered in the old Pennsylvania State House on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia to sign the new Constitution of the United States of America.  They had debated and deliberated in secrecy since May, and on this day people had begun to gather outside the state house to learn what the new constitution proposed.  In the sunshine of mid-afternoon, as Benjamin Franklin emerged from the signing session, a Mrs. Powell asked him, “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”  To which Franklin replied, “A republic - if you can keep it.”[4]

The Bush administration caught a break when the Supreme Court handed down a compromise on June 29. Ruling 5–4, the justices preserved key portions of the Pennsylvania law but also upheld Roe, striking down the portion of the Abortion Control Act that placed an “undue burden” on the mother’s efforts to seek an abortion, which was just the spousal notification requirement. The court also overturned the trimester standard governing abortion restrictions in favor of the looser concept of “viability.” Sandra Day O’Connor, writing the majority opinion, expressed a degree of exasperation with the Republican administration’s continued efforts to attack Roe: “Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt. Yet 19 years after our holding that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy in its early stages, Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113 (1973), that definition of liberty is still questioned. Joining the respondents as amicus curiae, the United States, as it has done in five other cases in the last decade, again asks us to overrule Roe.” Justice O’Connor’s opinion also included a good deal of concern for the institutional damage that would happen if the court were politically whipsawed to overturn the settled precedent of Roe: “A decision to overrule Roe’s essential holding under the existing circumstances would address error, if error there was, at the cost of both profound and unnecessary damage to the Court’s legitimacy, and to the nation’s commitment to the rule of law. It is therefore imperative to adhere to the essence of Roe’s original decision, and we do so today.” In his dissent, Chief Justice William Rehnquist complained that the court had rendered Roe a “facade” and replaced it with something “created largely out of whole cloth” and “not built to last.” “Roe v. Wade stands as a sort of Potemkin village,” Rehnquist wrote, “which may be pointed out to passers-by as a monument to the importance of adhering to precedent.

Why don’t you look out that side and see if you can spot him? It shouldn’t be too hard. He’s not much bigger than the State of Pennsylvania.