Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
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“Painful Leisure” and “Awful Business”: Female Death Workers in Pennsylvania
No full textIn late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Pennsylvania, women were the primary caretakers of the dying and dead. Watchers tended to the physical, spiritual, and social needs of the dying. Layers out of the dead washed, groomed, fxed, and dressed dead bodies. Watchers and layers included female relatives and neighbors and women who offered their services for pay. By the second half of the nineteenth century, most Pennsylvania women did not participate in these activities; the care of the dying and dead became the responsibility of formally trained and licensed professionals. The Civil War, industrial tragedies, the rise of undertaking and embalming as professions, and the increasing dependence on medical institutions such as hospitals and homes for the incurable contributed to the changes in the care of the dying and dead
Gathering Together: The Shawnee People through Diaspora and Nationhood, 1600–1870
No full textBook Review for "Gathering Together: The Shawnee People through Diaspora and Nationhood, 1600–1870" by Sami Lakomäk
The Ku Klux Klan in Western Pennsylvania, 1921–1928
No full textBook Review for "The Ku Klux Klan in Western Pennsylvania, 1921–1928" by John Craig
Editorial
No full textThis is an editorial for the October 2016 issue of the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
Identifying and Mapping Ethnicity in Philadelphia in the Early Republic
No full textABSTRACT: This essay focuses on issues of ethnicity and race in Philadelphia during the fi nal decade of the eighteenth century. It draws on an older methodology of name identifi cation to determine the ethnic background of thousands of the inhabitants and then maps those people to explain how and why Europeans and African Americans arranged themselves in the city. In residential and commercial terms, integrated rather than segregated neighborhoods characterized the urban center. The diverse urban population scattered across neighborhoods—living, shopping, drinking, and sharing housing with people from various European backgrounds and, more than occasionally, even across racial lines. All fi gures are available at http://hsp.org/publications/pennsylvania-magazine-of-history-biography /pmhb-october-2016
Three Miles, Two Creeks: Local Pennsylvania History in the Classroom
Full text linkThis article describes an undergraduate history assignment at Susquehanna University, through which students create virtual museum exhibits on the local history of Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. Students narrate and interpret the Penn’s Creek Massacre of 1755 and the Stump Massacre of 1768. The goal is to tell a cohesive story and offer a clear viewpoint on the events while adhering to the research and design standards used by public history professionals. The historical content of the assignment emphasizes the diversity and violence of the American frontier in the decades before the Revolutionary War. The exhibition format highlights the need to think carefully about audience, voice, and storytelling, three aspects of making history that are often disregarded in student research papers. The ultimate value of the assignment is its ability to increase students’ awareness of the manipulation involved in the process of historical interpretation, even as they attempt to “get it right.
Back Matter
No full textThis is the back matter for the issue, listing the contributors and advertising a call for proposals for the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Pennsylvania Historical Association
Expert Vision: J. Horace McFarland in the Woods
Full text linkWhen he lectured before public audiences in the 1910s, American Civic Association (ACA) president J. Horace McFarland liked to talk about a recurring scene from his professional life. In the scene, McFarland sat at his offce desk in Harrisburg, drafting memos to fellow City Beautiful reformers, reading legislative reports concerning scenic preservation, and meeting with his many visitors. All the while, his eyes fitted to the photographs on his off ce walls, images of wild scenery that he had taken on trips into the mountains of northern Pennsylvania. The noise and motion of the city dropped away when he looked at the trees, streams, and distant ridges. The sudden stillness of the offce and the crispness of the photos carried him out of the capital and into the wild. No, he could not make the trip just yet. He was needed in the city, and so the woods must wait
Review Essay: Getting History\u27s Words Right: Diaries of Emilie Davis
No full textA remarkable historical source came to light in 1999, when the Historical Society of Pennsylvania acquired pocket diaries for 1863, 1864, and 1865, kept by a young African American woman in Philadelphia. These are small, preprinted books, three dates to a page, that Emilie Davis flled with notes about herself, friends and family, the preachers, teachers, and doctors in her community, the lectures and concerts she attended, and the Civil War. Although it is rare for someone to be such a faithful diarist for just three years, and despite evidence in the diary that Davis also wrote countless letters to friends and family, so far the three wartime diaries are all that we have of Davis. Their survival is highly unusual; that they open a new door into Philadelphia’s midcentury African American community makes them invaluable; and that they give voice to a young, literate woman who, in many respects, owns the city streets makes them extraordinary
Book Review: Dunore\u27s New World: The Extraordinary Life of a Royal Governor in Revolutionary America, with Jacobites, Counterfeiters, Land Schemes, Shipwrecks, Scalping, Indian Politics, Runaway Slaves, and Two Illegal Royal Weddings by James Corbett Davi
No full textThis stimulating biography reveals much about an obscure yet powerful leader in eighteenth-century British colonial America. James Corbett David has meticulously researched the exciting career of the fourth Earl of Dunmore, the intriguing Scottish noble John Murray, whose wife was Charlotte Stewart, a daughter of the Earl of Galloway. Chronologically and topically arranged, this highly readable biography consists of an introduction, f ve major chapters, and a conclusion. David vividly enumerates Dunmore’s paradoxical involvements with power brokers, with the oppressed, and with radicals as he strove to achieve wealth, land, and status as governor of numerous British colonies