Harrisburg Historical is a free website and mobile app dedicated to promoting rich and significant stories, places, and people of the Pennsylvania Capital Region. Harrisburg Historical offers compelling place-based storytelling that includes short-form stories and tours, interactive maps, primary sources, secondary resources, and high-quality images, audio, and video clips. The website and app provide an easy way to navigate the histories of the greater Harrisburg area.

Harrisburg Historical is a project of the Digital Harrisburg Initiative, and is produced and managed by Messiah University's Center for Public Humanities and Department of History, Politics and International Relations.  

Stories and tours are developed, written, edited, and reviewed by students, professors, teachers, local historians, and community stakeholders. Stories are published in three forms. Post-its (ca. 100 words) signal a significant place and point the reader to resources developed more fully at other websites. Briefs (ca. 500 words) tell stories from place in short form. Historical essays offer fuller pieces about 1,000 words long. Stories are published on an ongoing basis. 

How to Contribute

To make recommendations for potential stories, offer corrections for published stories, or to volunteer to review, write, or develop stories or multimedia resources, please contact digitalharrisburg@messiah.edu.

Partnerships and Funding

Harrisburg Historical was launched in February 2025 through generous funding from Messiah University's Center for Public Humanities. The site was initially developed in 2023 in collaboration with the IIPT-Commonwealth Monument Project and the Dauphin County Library System, and with funding from the Council of Independent College's Humanities Research for the Public Good. The research of Harrisburg Historical stories is supported by local historians, regional institutions, and partners, including the Historical Society of Dauphin County, Historic Harrisburg Association, Pennsylvania State Archives, and Commonwealth Monument Project.

Privacy Policy

The Center for Public Humanities at Messiah University operates the Harrisburg Historical website and app through a framework called Curatescape, a platform developed by Cleveland State University's Center for Public History + Digital Humanities. Whenever you use Harrisburg Historical, we collect basic information that your browser or device sends to us that is called Log Data. This Log Data may include information such as your computer’s Internet Protocol (IP) address, browser or device version, content that you visit, the time and date of your visit, the time spent on those pages, and other statistics, including your location (if you have given us permission to do so, e.g. by enabling location services in your browser or device). We use this information only to provide core functionality and do not collect personally identifiable information for marketing or any other purpose. On the website – but not in the mobile apps – Harrisburg Historical shares some collected information with Google for the purpose of analyzing general usage patterns. Google's terms and policies are available here. If you have any questions or suggestions regarding our Privacy Policy, please contact us.