Through the medium of a serialized comic, award-winning graphic novelist Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez, has amplified and highlighted the importance of telling stories about Puerto Rico’s history, exploring present-day social and environmental issues, and celebrating the diversity of the Puerto Rican diaspora. La Borinqueña launched in 2016 under Miranda-Rodriguez’s studio, Somos Arte, where he serves as Creative Director and is a noted philanthropist. The story came at a pivotal moment for Latinx and Hispanic communities as political tension and a series of natural disasters rocked the Caribbean. 

Alex Schaufele Director of Exhibitions at PCAD says, "So it's really beautiful about what Eduardo has done with this project, with this series of books and novels. He works with so many different artists to bring his vision and his storytelling to life. And Pennsylvania College of Art and Design is an art college. We teach a variety of different media, including illustration, graphic design, all of which are components of going into a graphic novel. So it was two-fold. It was a great story, but it also helped kind of show our students, well, you can do things like this, and it also helps to show the community like there's more that goes into making a book than just all of a sudden there being a book, right? Like especially an illustrated book. And so the exhibition really showed all the components of making that happen, and it was really exciting. And so that's that's kind of what started it and launched it coming to Penn.  

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The calendar says October and fall is in the air. That means leaves are or will be changing color soon.

Pennsylvania is one of the best states in the country for leaf peeping. Last week, Marketplace.com ranked Route 6 in the norther tier of Pennsylvania as the third best place in the country for fall foliage.

This time of year is when many people travel throughout the back roads of Pennsylvania to find the most colorful spots.

On The Spark Tuesday, Ryan Reed, a natural resources specialist in the Bureau of Forestry at the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources said there were 177,000 visits to DCNR’s Pennsylvania Fall Foliage Reports webpage last week — a record. Ryan added that he has done 28 media interviews on leaf-peeping this fall compared to just seven a few years ago. Both figures show there is growing interest in viewing the colorful leaves throughout the state. Previously, DCNR has said that more people were enjoying the outdoors during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and it appears that trend has continued.

Reed listed where the most vibrant leaves can be found right now,”You’ll find the best color right now in the northern tier across, say, Potter, Tioga, Susquehanna, Wayne Counties, and then extending southward across the central Appalachians up onto the Allegheny Plateau and even down into the Laurel Highlands in southern Pennsylvania, where the elevation really drives that color change.”

Reed indicated that autumn leaf colors are more than pleasing to view,”The interest in the season gives us a chance to reflect on the state of the health of the forest. And so many regions throughout Pennsylvania, unfortunately, will suffer. Some onslaughts from certain invasive insects — think things like spongy moth formerly called gypsy moth, emerald ash borer. And so those threats can diminish our overall quality of color. But fortunately, our forests are by and large, very, very healthy and very well cared for, especially the public forests like those that we maintain in the Bureau of Forestry. So yeah, it’s an important thing to consider when leading into fall foliage season. How healthy have our our trees been and what have been the conditions leading up to the season? If you’d asked me in May what I thought about this year’s fall foliage season, I might not have given you a very good, good answer.” Reed said that’s because last May was so dry.

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Last Friday was the 300th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin arriving in Pennsylvania. Franklin set foot in Philadelphia October 6, 1723 arriving from Boston. The then 17-year-old got three loaves of what he called “puffy buns” and set off through what would be his adopted city.

That began a life that would not only have a great impact on Pennsylvania and what eventually became a new nation, but the world.

The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission is commemorating Franklin contributions with displays at the State Museum of Pennsylvania and the Governors Residence in Harrisburg.

We’re joined on The Spark Monday by Curt Miner, Chief of Interpretation for the PHMC and David Gary with the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, who told us how Franklin's arrival date was only discovered in 1980 on the back of a letter,"We know that from a letter from a batch of scrap notes that Franklin wrote on the back of a letter that his French banker sent to him in November of 1783. You can see the scratches. It's a columns of numbers and some abbreviated place names. And in 1980, someone from Yale published Benjamin Franklin papers came to the APS, has to look at this document, read the French letter about banking regulations, turned it over and saw these scratch notes, and was able to interpret what they really meant. It starts September 25th in Boston, and then it rolls down at the bottom. You see Philadelphia. He arrives on October 6th, 1723."

Miner said that Franklin was a man of many interests and he tried to improve upon what was already known,"That was a word he used. It was improvements. We often think of Franklin as an inventor, and that kind of conjures up someone sort of sitting alone in a room studying. And he certainly did that. But he was out in the world and he was identifying problems that needed to be solved in what would become this new young nation, then a colony. Of course, what we found interesting when you look at Franklin that way, you see, traditional narratives of his discovery of electricity and the kite and lightning were those are interesting and important. But what was his aim ultimately? Well, can I discover something useful that can be applied? And what we have found in our own collections is a humble iron, sharp pointed lightning rod. That was the outcome of Franklin's experiments with electricity and the practical application. If I can attract lightning from the sky, from the cloud, as he would say, and put it on top of a building at its highest point, I can save a lot of these structures, which were all wooden structures in colonial Philadelphia from burning to the ground. One of his great practical applications from the 1750s."

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A growing number of Americans are celebrating Indigenous People’s Day rather than Columbus Day Monday. Dickinson College is opening a Center for the Futures of Native Peoples and also honored an indigenous woman with the college’s environmental activism prize.

With us on The Spark Monday was Tara Houska is a citizen of Couchiching First Nation and a tribal attorney, land defender, environmental and Indigenous-rights advocate. Houska is the recipient of this year’s Rose-Walters Prize for Global Environmental Activism at Dickinson, who was asked what Indigenous people's Day meant to her, "To me, Indigenous Peoples Day means truth telling. It's recognizing the original peoples of this land and, uh, asking, you know, an entire nation to consider that, to recognize that, to respect that and reflect on that."

Also on the program was Darren Lone Fight, the founding director of Dickinson’s new Center for the Futures of Native Peoples (CFNP) and citizen of the Muscogee Nation and an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa and Sahnish Nation), who talked about the Center, "One of the things that I think often happens to Indigenous peoples is that we're historicist, we're sort of trapped in the past tense for non-Indigenous societies. So one of the things that I think is really critical is that we'd be looking towards the visions and dreams of the Indigenous future from the myriad sort of myriad tribes that create those visions. In addition to that, I think that the center is really designed as a forceful retort to the damage that was done by the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The Carlisle School was intent on through these kind of assimilate of programs. It was functionally a reprograming camp. It was attempting to erase language, the grammar and of a people. It was attempting to erase Indigenous history and Indigenous ways of being in the world. And so in whatever way possible, the center is looking to reconcile with that history and Dickinson's involvement with it and to advocate forcefully for an Indigenous led, Indigenously envisioned future."

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Brilliant songwriter, painter, recording artist, entrepreneur, and father of 2 Terian Mack has been affiliated with mainstream artists like Kanye West and 8-time grammy award producer Mailk Yusef for the better part of 4 years. Terian also serves as a creative artist mentor for United Masters- which provides music and content to the world's biggest brands. Most recently, Terian Mack's music was highlighted in by the NFL. 

Mack says that his sound is very unique to the ear, "I'm just like really different. I like things that are different and I'm on this whole kick of like just being totally like independent in a sense of my mindset. Like I don't want to be like, influenced by anything other than like what I'm choosing or, you know, so is like breaking down who who I am, who where I came from. Like why we like what we like, stuff like that. So sound wise, I like to just call it like. Like punk rap.

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It’s been a significant week at the State Capitol – especially when it comes to election-related issues.

Lawmakers are looking to move up the state’s primary election in 2024 from its scheduled date of April 23rd because it conflicts with the Jewish holiday of Passover and so that Pennsylvania voters could have more of an impact on the outcome of choosing the nominees for president.

The House prefers moving the primary to April 2 while the Senate has already approved March 19 for a new primary date.

Either way, the state's 67 counties aren't thrilled with moving the primary up, because they say they need time to prepare for an election like nailing down polling places, making sure there's enough poll workers and getting mail-in ballots out.

Legislators also considered other election-related proposals like requiring voters to present identification when voting and allowing counties to pre-canvass or count mail-in ballots before election day.

Nothing was settled, but everyone admits time is running short to make election changes.

Also, the 2023-24 fiscal year state budget isn’t finished.

To bring us up-to-date on The Spark Friday was Stephen Caruso, the Capitol reporter for Spotlight PA.

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Many rural hospitals are struggling financially. It’s estimated that more than 600 or 30% of the nation’s rural hospitals are at risk of closing. Eleven of them are in Pennsylvania.

Rural hospitals serve relatively small populations and don’t have enough business to cover their fixed costs.

Bucktail Medical Center in South Renovo, Clinton County has started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for the hospital. Bucktail’s CEO Timothy Reeves was on The Spark Thursday.

Reeves states that, "Our service area is about 3100 people. We do a lot of things. Here we are. We are an acute care hospital. We have 16 inpatient beds. We have an emergency room that's open 24/7. We have a long term care facility that is 43 beds. We have a community clinic with two providers that serves as the primary care provider for people in these communities. And we also offer a basic for ambulance service, and I only ever have one Doctor here at a time. Our volumes are slow and that Doctor works both in the E.R. and in the acute care hospital. 

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Crime and gun violence declined in the U.S. over a 20-year period starting in the early part of this century.

But then came the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and murders surged by 30% across the country, but especially in cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore and Chicago. However, smaller cities in our region like Harrisburg and York weren’t immuned either.

There are signs the number of shootings has actually gone down nationwide in 2023, but there still are way too many.

What is noticeable is the age of the shooters and the victims of gun violence.  The nationwide homicide rate for 15 to 19-year-olds increased by 91% from 2014 to 2021.

Something else that has proliferated during the last 20 years is the use of social media. Has it had an impact on gun violence?

Our guest on The Spark Thursday studies that topic. Joining us was Dr. Desmond Patton, a professor of social policy, communications and psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. Who explains that, "It is extremely hard to determine whether or not a Facebook post, if you will, actually caused a violent act, because usually there are a number of factors at play. Number one, it's really hard to interpret social media posts and to understand if that interpretation caused harm. And so we spent a lot of time trying to make meaning of social media posts, working with youth in particular to translate and interpret context in meaning in social media posts. But even with that local level context, it's still extremely hard to accurately interpret the meaning of a social media post. And then everything that happens in the real world, whether or not there was an event that happened external to the social media engagement, or if there were additional reasons why someone might be angry or have the desire to cause harm. And so it's really hard to put a clear and direct pinpoint on direct columns in this space. 

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The Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra is one of Central Pennsylvania’s cultural treasures. The Orchestra opens its season this Saturday and Sunday at the Harrisburg Forum with Jonathan Bailey’s Holland’s Motor City Dance Mix.

The Masterworks concert will kick off a season of seven high-caliber classical concerts featuring favorite composers in addition to introducing new music with the world premiere of Jonathan Leshoff’s Saul.

Maestro Stuart Malina explains the size of this production, "There will be probably 105 musicians on the stage playing. Not not there's not a chorus. Sometimes people say, Oh, well, yeah, it's a chorus. 60 people know 105 instrumentalists playing two sets of timpani, a huge brass section, big percussion section. Everything will be big. And it's one of the great works in the history of classical music. It's it's familiar to many audiences from the movie Fantasia. But it is it is a marvelous work of art, and we're excited to be performing it.

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Lancaster Historian Randy Harris has been recognized by the National Park Service with two prestigious awards for submitting 20 Pennsylvania resources to the Park Service’s National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Listings. He is the first person in the Network to Freedom’s 25-year history to win both the Robert G. Stanton and Wilbur H. Siebert Awards.

These awards may not be familiar to those outside historian circles but they are the Oscars of verifying Underground Railroad sites.

Southeast Pennsylvania was a strategic location for many enslaved people seeking freedom due to its proximity to the slave state of Maryland and free Blacks and Whites working to help the enslaved escape bondage.

Randy Harris explains, "At the end of the revolution when Pennsylvania was forming as a state, creating its own governance structure, the folks at the time had the foresight to create the Gradual Abolition Act of 1780, which was the first unit of government in the Western Hemisphere to begin the dismantling of this horrible institution of slavery in the Western Hemisphere, in the Americas. In doing that as currently, of course, it was gradual. It wasn't a free get out of slavery writ by anybody. If you were born before 1780, unfortunately, you were enslaved for life. If your "owner" wanted you to remain in that capacity or that status. If you were a child born after that, you had to wait till age 28. And they were all made in sorts of ways that people could barter their time, sell their time, or these even hate to say the word these owners could could claim a monetary effect and sell years of time of someone who was in their indentured servitude. It was, in essence, slavery by another name, but it was at least a glimmer of hope to freedom".

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