Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
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Book Review: The Homestead Strike: Labor, Violence, and American Industry by Paul Kahan
No full textPaul Kahan quotes Mark Twain at the outset: “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme” (4). Indeed, echoes of late nineteenth-century class conflict, inequality, and exploitative working conditions resonate in disturbing ways today, and Kahan’s acknowledgment that “contemporary events inspired [him] to write” about this iconic 1892 labor battle is refreshing (4). Current relevance provides one of two compelling reasons that Homestead warrants renewed attention, the other being that Paul Krause’s Battle for Homestead, the best devoted, extant treatment of this topic, is twenty-three years old and over fve hundred pages long. Kahan’s take appears in a Routledge series aiming to deliver concise accounts of pivotal episodes in US history while offering students “a window into the historian’s craft.
Front Matter
No full textTable of Contents; Cover Illustration; Editorial Advisory Committee; Editors; Contributor
Assessing the Modern Urban School System: The Institutionalization of Standardized Testing in Philadelphia, 1925-30
Full text linkIn 1926, teachers at South Philadelphia High School for Girls faced a problem. Some students were underperforming in their coursework and scoring low on standardized tests. By contemporary measures, educators feared these children would become a future drag on society. Anna Biddle, a South Philadelphia High teacher, pessimistically observed, “Such girls certainly have no place in any four-year high school course,” but the students believed that public education was their best means to secure stable employment, particularly, she noted, “in an offi ce.” Impressed by the students’ stated aspirations, Biddle led a corps of teachers to develop a program for the girls that would take them away from the rest of the student population to receive instruction about the “routine[s] . . . the ideal business girl must know.” The instructors doubted their chances of success, but rationalized that “the state always spends more money on its incompetents than on any others and a small sum spent for prevention can be looked upon as an investment. These girls may become social problems; just now, however, they are teaching problems.
The Christian Deist Writings of Benjamin Franklin
No full textThe solution to characterizing Benjamin Franklin’s religious beliefs is realizing there were English deists who labeled themselves “Christian deists.” Christian deists believed in miracles and thought Jesus was a deist: he taught only piety and morality. They claimed Jesus’s message had been corrupted by priests who wanted money and power. By 1735, Franklin had given up his unorthodox deism and, in essays defending Reverend Samuel Hemphill, espoused Christian deist ideas. Franklin was possibly converted to Christian deism by James Pitt, a popular English writer whose essays Franklin frequently reprinted. Franklin also espoused Christian deist ideas at the end of his life
Guyasuta and the Fall of Indian America
No full textBook Review of "Guyasuta and the Fall of Indian America" by Brady J. Crytze
Front Matter
No full textThis is the front matter for the October 2016 issue of Pennsylvania Magazine of Biography and History
Old Buck’s Lieutenant: Glancy Jones, James Buchanan, and the Antebellum Northern Democracy
No full textABSTRACT: Partisan relationships have always been fundamental to American politics. In antebellum Pennsylvania the personal and political partnership of Democrats James Buchanan and Jehu Glancy Jones was absolutely critical to state and national events. While much scholarship exists on Buchanan, few historians have examined the life of Jones, a man of undeniable importance to Buchanan’s rise to the presidency, the passage of now-infamous antebellum legislation, and the fracturing of the Democratic Party. By studying Jones’s career, we can better appreciate the role of political underlings, dispel myths about the motives and principles of antebellum Democrats, and clarify the links between state and national politics
Book Review: Citizens in a Strange Land. A Study of German-American Broadsides and Their Meaning for Germans in North America, 1730-1830 by Herman Wellenreuther
No full textHerman Wellenreuther and his research team have produced an interesting new book on broadsides, defned as sheets “printed on a single sheet on either one or both sides irrespective of its contents." Most were printed in Philadelphia and the larger towns of the southeastern counties of Pennsylvania, where many German immigrants in Pennsylvania settled
Book Review: Keystone State in Crisis: The Civil War in Pennsylvania by Judith Giesberg
No full textThis short study attempts something unusual by essentially ignoring the Gettysburg campaign and almost anything to do with actual combat in a concise analysis of Civil War–era Pennsylvania. It would seem to be almost self-defeating to write about the confict in a key Northern state and yet to slight the war’s biggest battle (fought within its borders, no less) and spend only a minimal amount of space conveying the actual experiences of hundreds of thousands of its residents in uniform. Yet Giesberg’s compact volume does offer real value for anyone teaching or studying this period. It succeeds in rendering some of the excellent social and political scholarship on the wartime North (including the author’s own notable work) into an easily digestible format