More to Do than You Can Do

Last week's Trailheads post has a listing of events for June (please note that there are a few updates). We’re headed into the busiest season of the year, so you’ll find loads of options for exploring Pennsylvania’s rich history and enjoying the summer weather.

You know how I love to see connections between sites, so here’s something that made me happy (and I didn’t exactly have to dig deep to find the links). The Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies (Elizabethtown College) conference this weekend on the history and nature of prophecy among various religious groups in early America features both of the religious history sites on the Trails of History. This evening (June 6), fresh from a speaking engagement at Old Economy Village on Wednesday, Dr. Alice Ott will present her work on Harmony Society founder George Rapp, his religious beliefs, and his own and others’ perceptions of him as a prophet. Ott was a PHMC Scholar in Residence at OEV in 2006. Tomorrow, Ephrata Cloister museum educator Michael Showalter will share a piece of his considerable research on the site’s history in a talk entitled “Three Wives, Two Ghosts, One Mystic: A Footnote in the Ephrata Story.” He will be presenting alongside Dr. Jeff Bach, director of the Young Center, who has researched and written extensively about the community at Ephrata (now that I think of it, some of that work was conducted when Bach was a PHMC Scholar in Residence).



Reenactors interpret US GIs fighting alongside the French Resistance (PMM Facebook page)

Today is the 70th anniversary of the landing of 160,000 Allied troops on the beaches of Normandy, France. The invasion, known as D-Day, was part of a larger plan to defeat Nazi Germany and release its hold on Europe. In honor of this occasion, you might like to see photos from the “World War II Revisited” program at the Pennsylvania Military Museum on Memorial Day weekend.