Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
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Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America
No full textLiberty’s Prisoners is a useful and well-researched analysis of American carceral history that uses Philadelphia as a case study
Front Matter
No full textThis is the front matter for Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Volume 124, Number
Pardon or Punish? Legal and Community Interpretations of a Nineteenth-Century Infanticide
No full textThis article discusses the 1809 conviction of Susanna Cox for first-degree murder following the death of her newborn son. It uses sources from history and oral tradition in order to examine the case’s long- and short-term ramifications for political and social interpretations of capital punishment within Pennsylvania. I explore the impact one case could have on legal history, the treatment of accused and convicted women, issues of linguistic separation within the courtroom, and changing legislative patterns within the Commonwealth. These factors contributed to the case’s ongoing impact on regional and ethnic social memory
Luxurious Citizens: The Politics of Consumption in Nineteenth-Century America
No full textJoanna Cohen’s Luxurious Citizens is a smart and elegant study of the creation of the American consumer-citizen in the years between the nation’s founding and the end of the Civil War
The Many Lives of James Bird: From "Mournful" Ballad to Nostalgic Legend
No full textIn late 1814, the US military executed for desertion a young marine from Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, who had served honorably with the fleet of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry during the War of 1812. Only a year prior, James Bird’s hometown newspaper, the Wilkes-Barre Gleaner, had praised his bravery during the Battle of Lake Erie, when Perry and his men routed the British navy. After news of the youth’s death spread in 1814 to 1815, Gleaner editor Charles Miner penned the lyrics of a ballad that would disseminate the story far beyond Bird’s home and time in history. The long life of the ballad of James Bird is as unusual among triumphant War of 1812 ballads as is its tragic narrative. Through the years, versions of it have been collected from New England to the West Coast. This paper explains the marked staying power of the ballad and Bird’s story by considering the historical and cultural context for their transmission in different eras. In the early nineteenth century, when the new nation was still forging its identity, Bird’s heroism and subsequent death served the competing interests of partisan politics and national mythmaking, while also reminding the postrevolutionary generation of the dangers of arbitrary power. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the wartime poetry of a young and politically charged republic became the subject of shared nostalgia amid the potentially troubling consequences of rapid industrialization and urbanization. One element of the ballad’s reception remained constant over time: the willingness of Bird’s admirers to overlook the youth’s potential flaws, lest they jeopardize his merits as a folk hero. Ultimately, the ballad’s appropriation by each successive generation also owed to a fruitful interaction between print and oral culture in which the reading public helped combine and propagate new elements of the story. Over time, the ballad nearly became secondary to the anecdotes surrounding it, and the “truth” of the young marine’s life became as malleable as its meaning
"She is the beauty of this place": Elizabeth Velora Elwell and the Role of Prisoner Participation and Deviance at Eastern State Penitentiary
No full textElizabeth Elwell represented nineteenth-century reformers’ worst fears: a woman fallen from grace who maintained an exceptional understanding of social norms and an ability to manipulate those norms to meet her needs. While imprisoned at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Elwell documented the extensive web of relationships she managed within the prison. Incarcerated during a transformative period in United States history—the Civil War—Elwell maintained a romantic relationship with a black inmate, in direct opposition to the racial prejudices of the era. Elwell’s experience demonstrates that, though often abused and neglected, women used their lower position in nineteenth-century prisons to undermine the system that sought to control them
Newly Available and Processed Collections at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania
No full textWhat follows are descriptions of some of the collections at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania that have either been acquired within the past year or that have been more fully processed and therefore are more accessible to researchers. 
Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America
No full textIn Dangerous Neighbors, James Alexander Dun follows how the French colony of Saint Domingue became the independent nation of Haiti and how these events reverberated throughout the United States. While Dun’s work is ostensibly about the Haitian Revolution, he focuses on contemporary Americans, specifically those in Philadelphia, and the ways in which news about the Haitian Revolution became integral to debates about America’s own political ideals
Gettysburg: The Quest for Meaning: Essays on How We Remember the Battle and Understand Its Consequences
No full textOccasionally, a monograph such as Gettysburg: The Quest for Meaning is published to little fanfare but invokes a certain sense of academic reflection that is rarely accomplished by other works in the field
Editorial
No full textThis is the editorial page for Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography Volume 142 Number 1