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Penn State’s ‘State of State’ Conference
I spoke to Penn Staters at this year’s “State of State” conference about the “spirit of place” that pervades the Nittany Valley and what Penn Staters (and every friend and visitor) can do to conserve that spirit and pass it along to new generations.
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In Search of Evan Pugh, or, a Challenge for Penn Staters to Honor Their Founder
Three Penn State presidents have been laid to rest here in Centre County. President Atherton is famously interred right along Pollock Road adjacent to Schwab Auditorium, while Milton Eisenhower finds his final repose in Centre County Memorial Park along the Benner Pike. Evan Pugh, Penn State’s founding president and one of the most consequential personalities…
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Penn State Football Remixes Its Past
Suffering through a prolonged period of frustration and despair, the Penn State football team faces a do-or-die moment in an early Big Ten contest: Trailing in the fourth quarter and needing an unlikely game-extending play to keep hope alive, the Lions thread the needle, capping off a precarious come-from-behind win with an explosive score from…
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Yule Ales Add to Advent Spirit
Today, it is not unusual to enter a bar and find a laundry list of exotic beers on tap or to hear news of a local brew pub or microbrewery opening up. Such was not the case in 1984 (only five years after the legalization of homebrewing) when the editor of the Centre Daily Times…
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A Salute to Veterans and the Veterans’ Education and Advancement Fund
The great stories of any age are often best understood by tracing the tiny threads of personal experience. In following these winding strands, seeing where and how they intersect, we come to understand how the collective weight of countless individual acts underpins the forces that shape our world. On the afternoon of April 11, 1945,…
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The Penn State-Wisconsin Rivalry That Never Was
Recently, I found myself caught in Park Ave traffic behind a car adorned with an obnoxiously large Ohio State Buckeyes magnet. With merely a glimpse of it, my pulse quickened and my palms tightly gripped the steering wheel. As an ardent Nittany Lions fan, I recoiled at the unwelcome reminder of our rival. And there…
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Why Learn the Penn State Story?
The creation of a Penn State undergraduate course on the university’s history is a source of great excitement and pride for many who dwell in body and in spirit in Mount Nittany’s gentle shadow. In early 2013, Sean Clark and Zach Zimbler suggested that Penn State ought to offer a class on the history of…
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One-Room Schools Bring History Alive
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 more visceral, immersive experience, our tendency to learn…
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A Brief History of Penn State Astronomy
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,…
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The First History of Penn State
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 published,…
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Looking Back to Move Forward
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 about…
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Elliot Abrams: The More Things Change…
To even the most casual radio listeners here in the Valley (and in many other markets throughout the country), Accuweather meteorologist Elliot Abrams is the familiar voice of the morning weather forecast. Abrams has been with Accuweather since its early days; even as he has become a fixture of an expanding international corporation, for residents…
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Why Learn the Penn State Story?
As the keynote speaker for this year’s Willow Gathering, Penn State Lunar Lion mission director Michael Paul talked about how, for Penn State, being the only university among a field of private competitors striving to reach the Moon is opening up incredible opportunities for the institution and her students. Hands-on learning and connections with the global aerospace community are…
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Three Coaches, Three Speeches at Penn State’s IFC/Panhellenic Dance Marathon
This weekend marks the continuation of one of the Nittany Valley’s most remarkable stories. What we know today as THON began humbly some 42 years ago and grew into a phenomenon. “The world’s largest student-run philanthropy” raises millions annually for pediatric cancer patients while uniting the Penn State community like little else. The appearance of various PSU personalities, including the…
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A Penn State Love Story: Evan and Rebecca Valentine Pugh
In The Legends of the Nittany Valley, a unique and fun mythology emerges for the places in and around Penn State, but our community also has its own real-life fairy tale: The story of the tragically short-lived love between Rebecca Valentine and Evan Pugh, the University’s founding president. Pugh is a truly remarkable figure. If it’s…
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