Spot 3

Over the past several months, I have written about efforts to “mine” the rich preserves of knowledge buried in the past to release their power in the present. Previous installments of this series have focused mainly on conceptual conveyances of this potential – books, stories, and documents. But what about our need for a…

For the introductory piece in this series, I reflected on the dual challenges facing those with an interest in exploring history: Investing the time and effort necessary for unearthing the lessons of the past and figuring out how to make them relevant and meaningful in the present. For The Nittany Valley Society in particular,…

 For years, they stood unused and largely unremarked upon: Two single-story brick structures capped with white domes adjacent to the Eisenhower Auditorium. In the years before they were torn down during one of the latest campus facelifts, people would occasionally ask about them. These buildings obviously served some function related to observing the night sky,…

Over its 161 years, Penn State has twice sanctioned books chronicling the university’s history, once in the 1940s and again with an updated version in the 1980s. While history professor and Penn State historian Wayland Dunaway’s 1946 “History of The Pennsylvania State College” was the first official account of Old State’s history to be…

Why should we care about the past? The potential answers to this question are many and varied, but certainly, in looking back to understand what came before, we can see something of ourselves reflected back at us, extracting value from the experience. It is not without peril. Genuine self-examination risks exposure to the truth…

Evan Pugh was Penn State’s first president. It’s great if you happen to know of Evan Pugh. In fact, it’s likely that knowing about him already puts you in the minority among students and alumni. But just knowing this bit of raw information isn’t worth much in and of itself. It’s available to anyone…