2023 Annual Meeting

“Future Visions of Pennsylvania and the Mid-Atlantic”

How does the past inform Pennsylvania and the Mid-Atlantic’s futures? What is the impact of (post-) extractive and (post-) industrial sites on our understanding of the region? How do the region’s historic sites and monuments shape our knowledge of the past and might be used to re-envision a more inclusive past and future? How did the region’s earliest residents inform later uses and perceptions of the landscape?

Straddling the Mason-Dixon line and housing historic battlefields as well as military, educational, and industrial complexes, the region invites critical inquiry into issues of race, gender, ethnicity, protest, and war. The conference will be held in person at the Penn Harris Hotel on October 26-28, 2023, in Camp Hill, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Registration and payment are available through our online store, with the option to mail a registration form.

Highlights of the program include an opening plenary session by State Archivist David Carmicheal, who will discuss the planning and execution of the new state-of-the-art Pennsylvania Archives Building. Friday’s lunchtime keynote speaker is Dr. Anthea M. Hartig, Elizabeth MacMillan Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, who will offer thoughts on “History in the Twenty-First Century.” Ms. Barbara Barksdale will give the Friday afternoon plenary on The Midland Project, a decades-long effort to restore Midland, an African American Cemetery. Other sessions will offer cutting-edge research and analyses of the mid-Atlantic from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries.