Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
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Abundance, Dependence, and Trauma at Philadelphia’s Point Breeze Petroleum Refnery: A Mirror on the History of Pennsylvania’s Oil Industry
Get PDFCatastrophic fre struck the Atlantic Refning Company petroleum refnery at Point Breeze on June 11, 1879. Lightning sparked this f rst confagration at the plant, and it was devastating. The blaze destroyed twenty-fve thousand cases of petroleum stored at Atlantic’s Schuylkill River docks, as well as fve foreign ships. Six other ships were towed away before they ignited. Fire destroyed virtually every structure at the works, including the offce and the superintendent’s house, the cooperage, the tin shop (which made cans for shipping oil), and ref ning equipment. Fueled by oil that saturated the ground, the fre continued to burn long into the night. Two days later, lingering fames from one of the burning ships at the wharf spread under increasing winds to more of the oil company’s waterfront property. In total, about a half mile of Philadelphia’s waterfront was destroyed. Amazingly, fremen, sailors, workmen, and nearby residents escaped injury, but an estimated two thousand men were thrown out of employment, most sailors lost all their belongings, and some houses were destroyed. Rather than marking an exception, however, this fre highlights Pennsylvania’s often traumatic relationship with the commodity that it introduced to the world in 1859
Elizabeth Haddon Estaugh, 1680–1762: Building the Quaker Community of Haddonfi eld, NJ, 1701–1762
No full textThis is a book review for the April 2016 issue of Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
Fort Indiantown Gap and Pennsylvania’s Role in Refugee Resettlement
No full textFort Indiantown Gap, located near Annville in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, is celebrated as a Pennsylvania Army and National Guard training center. Less well known, however, is the military site’s connection to Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees. In 1932, the state of Pennsylvania purchased more than 18,000 acres of land in northern Lebanon and Dauphin Counties to establish a munitions testing and military training site for the Pennsylvania National Guard. The federal government contributed funds for its construction through public works programs, and by 1934 the Indiantown Gap Military Reservation, named after a former Native American village located in a gap in the Blue Mountains, was up and running. The reservation fell under federal control during World War II and was used as training grounds for soldiers and housing for German prisoners of war, many of whom labored on nearby farms. Today, the Pennsylvania National Guard (PNG) maintains the reservation, known as Fort Indiantown Gap since 1975, and operates a museum dedicated to the history of the PNG
"A Measure Alike Military and Philanthropic": Historians and the Emancipation Proclamation
Get PDFTimed to coincide with the sesquicentennial of the final decree are a number of important new books on the origins, character, and effects of the Proclamation. Some of them focus entirely on the two Proclamations, while others contextualize those turbulent few months between Lincoln’s issuance of his preliminary Proclamation in September 1862 and his signing of the official Emancipation Proclamation January 1, 1863, within larger studies of emancipation or the war’s impact on slavery. In the process, a consensus of sorts has emerged, at least regarding most of the central questions that previously divided historians. Yet, if very few recent authors find it particularly constructive to battle over simplistic views of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator, the question of whether the president “was an enthusiastic or reluctant” liberator, as Harold Holzer remarks, “continues to test our will to understand the complex past as its participants lived it.
The Contested History of American Freedom
Get PDFNo idea is more fundamental to Americans’ sense of ourselves as individuals and as a nation than freedom. The central term in our political vocabulary, freedom—or liberty, with which it is almost always used interchangeably—is deeply embedded in the record of our history and the language of everyday life. The Declaration of Independence lists liberty among mankind’s inalienable rights; the Constitution announces securing liberty’s blessings as its purpose.1 Freedom has often been invoked to mobilize support for war: the United States fought the Civil War to bring about “a new birth of freedom,” World War II for the “Four Freedoms,” the Cold War to defend the “Free World.” The recently concluded war in Iraq was given the title “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Americans’ love of freedom has been represented by liberty poles, caps, and statues and been acted out by burning stamps and draft cards, fleeing from slave masters, and demonstrating for the right to vote. Obviously, other peoples also cherish freedom, but the idea seems to occupy a more prominent place in public and private discourse in the United States than in many other countries. “Every man in the street, white, black, red or yellow,” wrote the educator and statesman Ralph Bunche in 1940, “knows that this is ‘the land of the free’... [and] ‘the cradle of liberty.’
The Surgeon and the Abolitionist: William Chancellor and Anthony Benezet
Get PDFAnthony Benezet and William Chancellor might, at first, seem strange collaborators. They both arrived in Philadelphia at about the same time: Chancellor by birth in 1730, the eldest son of an Anglican father who was a politically connected sailmaker; Benezet by ship in 1731, the eighteen-year-old son of a French Huguenot émigré. From that coincidental starting point, Benezet’s and Chancellor’s lives diverged in significant ways. Benezet renounced the life of business after an unsuccessful early trial and became a pioneering schoolteacher, first in Germantown and then, more famously, at Penn Charter School in Philadelphia. He went on to establish and teach in a school for girls and a school for blacks, both among the first of their kind in America. Partly through his adopted Quaker faith, partly through his native humane disposition, and partly through his acquaintance with enslaved and free blacks in Philadelphia, he became a staunch campaigner against slavery and the slave trade, writing and publishing some of the most influential abolitionist tracts to appear before the American Revolution. Chancellor, by contrast, became a doctor of physic, selling medicines that he imported from London at his apothecary shop on Philadelphia’s Market Street. As a young man he sailed out of New York on a slave ship, using his medical skills to evaluate the health of potential slaves, either captured or purchased, and to keep them alive and healthy at sea so they could be sold at a profit in New York on the ship’s return.It seems unlikely that the paths of these two would cross, or that the ardent abolitionist Benezet would choose to collaborate with a doctor who abetted the slave trade through his practice. Yet evidence suggests strongly that the two did work together, in a way—that Benezet used the slave physician’s testimony to powerful effect as he composed his first antislavery tract for public dissemination in 1759. In order to ascertain the probable nature of the relationship between the two men, how Chancellor came to share his experiences with the abolitionist, and what the consequences were of their collaboration, we must look first at Benezet to see what he might have desired from Chancellor, then follow the course of Chancellor’s background and life to evaluate the experiences that might have led him to aid Benezet. In the process we get a snapshot of Philadelphia mercantile society in the decades leading up to the separation from England and of the forces that shaped disparate responses to the institution of African slavery in America
On the Origins and Intention of Benjamin Franklin\u27s "On the Providence of God in the Government of the World"
Get PDFPhilosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries used the phrase “government of the world” to discuss matters of physics, ethics, theology, and politics. In physics, the phrase referred to the order of the universe: the essence of matter, and whether it moved chaotically or by discernible laws. The order of physical nature had ethical implications—whether or not human beings possessed free will, and if they did, whether or not they could know the effects of, and be accountable for, their actions. Natural philosophers and theologians provided conflicting answers to these questions. Christian theologians such as Samuel Clarke argued that God was “a Supra-Mundane Intelligence”— existing outside of, and therefore not bound by, the mechanistic realm of matter—that providently suspended and intervened in the laws of nature to issue revelatory dictates and to justly govern the world. These divines debated deists such as Lord Shaftesbury, who argued that God was nature itself, subsisting by its own self-governing laws that were accessible to human reason. The deists, in turn, debated the skeptics, such as Bernard Mandeville, who questioned not just the existence of a creator but whether there was any order to nature at all. The divines called deists undercover atheists, and the deists called the skeptics atheists. Philosophers’ ideas about God’s government of the world also shaped their political views regarding what kind of laws humans should make to govern themselves. As a citizen of the Republic of Letters, the young Benjamin Franklin enthusiastically read all of these thinkers, and he participated in and contributed to the great philosophic and political debates of his age
Book Reviews
Get PDFAntislavery and Abolition in Philadelphia: Emancipation and the Long Struggle for Racial Justice in the City of Brotherly Love; Gleanings of Freedom: Free and Slave Labor along the Mason-Dixon Line; “We Will Be Satisfied With Nothing Less”: The African American Struggle for Equal Rights in the North during Reconstructio
