Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
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Book Reviews
Full text linkThe Chesapeake House: Architectural Investigations by Colonial Williamsburg; Crossroads of Empire: The Middle Colonies in British North America; Speculators in Empire: Iroquoia and the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix; The Heart of the Taufschein: Fraktur and the Pivotal Role of Berks County, Pennsylvania; Memories of War: Visiting Battlegrounds and Bonefields in the Early American Republic; "Prigg v. Pennsylvania": Slavery, the Supreme Court, and the Ambivalent Consitution; Lincoln and McClellan at War; S. Weir Mitchell, 1829-1914; Anthracite Labor Wars: Tenancy, Italians, and Organized Crime in the Northern Coalfield of Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1897-1959; 200 Years of Latino History in Pennsylvania: A Photographic Record of the Community; Nature\u27s Entrepot: Philadelphia\u27s Urban Sphere and Its Environmental Thresholds; As American as Shoofly Pie: The Foodlore and Fakelore of Pennsylvania Dutch Cuisin
“New and Untried Hands”: Thomas Edison’s Electrification of Pennsylvania Towns, 1883–85
Full text linkThis article places local events in broad technological and organizational contexts and offers an evaluation of their signifcance to the larger project of electrifcation in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Edison’s work in those ffteen-odd months was crucial to sorting out the technological, economic, and organizational arrangements necessary for his dream of constructing power networks in cities and towns across the country. By unwittingly demonstrating the limitations of his own system in eastern Pennsylvania, Edison kept the door open to a rival who would emerge at the other end of the state. George Westinghouse of Pittsburgh recognized the opportunity and, within just a few years, assembled a cadre of skilled engineers, secured the necessary patents, and devised a feasible business model to promote the more economical alternating current (AC) model of distribution
The Blood Demonstration: Teaching the History of the Philadelphia Welfare Rights Organization
Full text linkDespite a growing body of scholarship that documents civil rights activism in the North during the 1950s and 1960s, college educators continue to rely on traditional understandings of African Americans’ struggle for civil rights as being rooted in the South. Moreover, history professors continue to privilege a male-centered narrative that tends to define the civil rights movement through mass marches and protests. In an effort to challenge this pedagogy, this article describes a method for teaching the history of women’s role in the struggle for social justice in the 1960s through their participation in the Philadelphia Welfare Rights Organization (PWRO). Through the use of primary sources such as the Philadelphia Tribune and the PWRO’s newsletter along with secondarysources such as Lisa Levenstein’s A Movement Without Marches, this article offers a way to expand and complicate students’ understanding of the civil rights and women’s movements of the late twentieth century. Just as importantly, it assists teachers in stressing the significance of African American women’s fight for equality in Pennsylvania history. Supplemental resources are posted on the journals’ web pages
Book Review: The Contest for the Delaware Valley: Allegiance, Identity, and Empire in the Seventeenth Century by Mark L. Thompson
No full textWhen William Penn arrived in the Delaware Valley in 1682, he found a population with diverse national origins, the legacy of a seventy-year contest among colonizing powers to control the valley. Those disputes had rested on the shared assumption that everyone belonged to nations, cultural and political collectivities formed of sovereign and subjects. But with Sweden, the Netherlands, and England all claiming ownership of the Delaware Valley, settlers with different backgrounds fought, traded, and transferred their loyalties to a succession of political regimes. Thompson argues that those “cosmopolitan forms of interaction and communication coexisted with, and indeed reinforced, national identities.
Book Review: Revolutionary Medicine: The Founding Fathers and Mothers in Sickness and in Health by Jeanne E. Abrams
No full textYellow fever, smallpox, cholera, malaria, infuenza, and countless other diseases swept through eighteenth-century North America with frightening regularity. As Jeanne E. Abrams makes clear, no one, not even the elite families of the founding fathers, was immune from the ravages of disease. Abrams provides an eminently readable account of the illnesses and health of the “founding fathers and mothers” that focuses on the Franklins, the Adamses, the Washingtons, and the Jeffersons. Piecing together letters, diaries, and other sources, Abrams recounts in vivid detail the founding families’ frequent encounters with illness and death, arguing that these personal experiences directly infuenced the development of early public health policies; however, the policy history frequently gets lost in the welter of personal history
Book Review: Philadelphia Spiritualism: The Curious Case of Katie King by Stephanie Hoover
No full textPhiladelphia Spiritualism investigates a short-lived episode involving a presumed spirit summoned by late nineteenth-century mediums in London and Philadelphia. Author Stephanie Hoover uses the case study, written in the style of a true-crime tale, to expose the fraud and fakery of the spiritualists of that era.The “curious case” of Katie King is situated within a long line of charlatanism dating back to the late 1850s, when the spiritualism movement arose in Hydesville, New York. It was there that the Fox sisters discovered that they could crack their toe joints to make a rapping sound. They perfected the ability and used it to convince the nation that the sound was being made by spirits who had come back to talk to the living. The Fox sisters set into motion a mass transatlantic movement that inspired millions of believers
The Art of Racial Politics: The Work of Robert Douglass Jr., 1833-46
No full textThe vibrant black community living in Philadelphia during the 1830s counted among its members a wide array of professionals, including merchants, educators, master craftsmen, and artists.In 1833, an article published in the Genius of Universal Emancipation, aBaltimore-based abolitionist periodical, and subsequently reprinted in the Liberator noted the recent artistic turn taken by twenty-four-year-old Robert Douglass Jr., “the son of a very respectable colored gentleman” in Philadelphia. Douglass was already well established in the “business of sign and ornamental painting”—a line of work, the writers hastened to add, in which “few persons in our country, if any, have made greater prof ciency”— and “evidence of his skill” could be observed not just in his shop but in the “many other parts of the city” where his creations were displayed. In addition to ornamental works, the artist had recently taken up portrait painting and was now “eminently successful” in both pursuits. Douglass’s turn from sign-painting to portraiture would provide him with a livelihood—and connections to the abolitionist movement in the United States and Britain—for decades
Book Reviews
Full text linkThe Pennsylvania Railroad, Vol.1, Building and Empire, 1846-1817; Across the Divide: Union Soldiers View the Northern Home Front; The Civil War and American Art; An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing "The Gross Clinic" Anew; Ed Bacon: Planning, Politics, and the Building of Modern Philadelphia; The March on Washinton: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Right
Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site
Full text linkNestled within the largest contiguous forest in southeastern Pennsylvania, the restored buildings and structures of the Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site commemorate America’s early energy history. The 848-acre park encompasses over 600 acres of woodland and 145 acres of farmland, meadows, and pastures. Today, recreational uses such as hunting, camping, hiking, and fshing have complicated the interpretation of the rural site, but here discerning visitors learn about how industries extracted energy from the natural resources present in the very mountains and forests they have escaped the city to enjoy. Within this idyllic, pastoral landscape, an iron-making operation ran intermittently for over a century (1771–1883)