This summer, Gettysburg will be invaded for a second time – not by military figures named Lee or Pickett, but by Gilbert & Sullivan characters such as Major-General Stanley, Captain Corcoran, Sir Joseph Porter and three little maids, Yum-Yum, Pitti-Sing and Peep-Bo. They will be featured at the second International Gilbert & Sullivan Festival at the historic Majestic Theater downtown,…

Is that stranger a suicide bomber? Is traffic slowing for an ambush ahead? Is that an ordinary dead deer on the roadside — or is the carcass loaded with explosives? Soldiers in war zones are trained to a heightened level of awareness, keen to spot signs of danger. And while most returning soldiers readjust to the everyday demands of civilian…

  A law-abiding social studies teacher, Alice is stunned to find herself a defendant in Central Court at the Lebanon County Courthouse. Because her neighbor has sworn that Alice tore up his lawn with her SUV, police have charged her with criminal mischief. Alice has explained she was grocery shopping at the time of the incident, but since her neighbor…

Meeshel Tarsa kneels on the ground and digs into the rich Pennsylvania earth with her bare hands. Surrounded by 25 wide-eyed fourth-grade students at Southeast Elementary School in the City of Lebanon, Meeshel pulls out the first of eight potatoes she finds as she carefully moves the soil beneath the spot where the children had planted one of many seed…

Early on the morning of April 12, 1861, Confederate artillery in Charleston, South Carolina, opened fire on Fort Sumter out in the harbor. The artillery barrage launched a Civil War that dragged on for almost exactly four years, killed more than 600,000 people and transformed the nation. A century and a half later, the American Civil War still fascinates Americans…