Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
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The Grid and the River: Philadelphia’s Green Places, 1682–1876
No full textThe Grid and the River: Philadelphia’s Green Places, 1682–1876 is excellent history. At a time when historians disparage the art of city planning as “elitist,” Elizabeth Milroy traces its origins and evolution in a detailed and beautifully illustrated monograph
Mixed Feelings: Stephen Colwell, Christian Sensibility, and the American State, 1841–61
No full textStephen Colwell argued that a high tariff could produce a moral political economy in an industrializing United States. He suggested that by providing industrial workers with wages higher than the international market would allow, the policy acted on Christian sensibility and its charge to protect the weak. Yet Colwell could not decide on exactly how the tariff would do so, and his struggle revealed complexity and tension within an important element of the American statebuilding project. He moved from a vision of a robust state protecting workers against predatory merchants to a definition of the tariff as an implement of a circumscribed, associative state that relied on manufacturers to act as its partners. Realizing that they might decline to protect workers by passing the tariff’s profits along as higher wages, he admitted that the state relied on industrialists’ goodwill to make the measure effective
Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy
No full textThe transatlantic movement to abstain from the products of slave labor stands as a precedent for consumer boycotts designed to promote social change, attracting attention from British and American historians who have studied campaigns to introduce conscience into the marketplace
Whispers of Cruel Wrongs: The Correspondence of Louisa Jacobs and Her Circle, 1879–1911
No full textOne of the most precious experiences in learning about nineteenth-century life is to read personal letters. Unlike diaries, which are often lists of events, or autobiographies meant as an edited public record, letters are often spontaneous conversations full of interesting tidbits, gossip, rants, and emotional outbursts
Undocumented Fears: Immigration and the Politics of Divide and Conquer in Hazleton, Pennsylvania
No full textJamie Longazel’s book explores the economics and politics of Latino immigrant settlement in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, focusing on anti-immigrant policies and politics that emerged in the community in the mid-2000s
The Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African Americans in the Mid-Atlantic Borderland, 1817–1863
No full textIn the decades before the Civil War, free African American communities in Maryland and Pennsylvania lived on a literal borderland between slavery and freedom. In Maryland, black men and women lived in the midst of bondage, facing policies attempting to reenslave or drive them from the state. In Pennsylvania, tenuous holds on freedom were undermined daily by attempts to capture fugitives from bondage
A Greene Country Towne: Philadelphia’s Ecology in the Cultural Imagination
No full textIn the acknowledgements for A Greene Country Towne, editors Alan C. Braddock and Laura Turner Igoe thank the usual suspects, including their partners, the volume’s contributors, and their respective institutions
The Many Names for Jarena Lee
No full textJarena Lee was the fi rst woman preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. She joined the antislavery movement and had her autobiography printed, fi rst in 1836 and then again in 1849. Despite these signifi cant contributions, she faded from the historical record. This essay synthesizes disparate and in cases contradictory archival, published, and digital sources to uncover her place and date of death. This project thus adds new biographical information about Lee, and it also refl ects on methodological issues posed by research in early African American women’s history
Founding Friendships: Friendships between Men and Women in the Early American Republic.
No full textWith Founding Friendships, Cassandra Good joins the ranks of such scholars as Fredrika Teute, Catherine Allgor, Richard Godbeer, and Lorri Glover, who have analyzed the private worlds of the founding generation in order to recapture and reconfi gure the connections between their experiences as wives, salonnières, fathers, sons, brothers, or friends, and the political realms within which they moved. Through a series of thematic chapters analyzing private letters, novels, advice books, and friendship albums, along with social ideals and gift-giving practices, Good considers the phenomenon of nonsexual, cross-sex friendships between educated elite white women and men in the early years of the republic. Acknowledging that most advice writers cautioned strongly against mixed-sex friendships—there was the ever-present danger of the “seduction of women by men who pretended to be their friends”—Good asks readers to look beyond published literary representations to examine how individuals shaped their feelings in diaries and letters, and to enter the spaces where they created platonic relationships: churches, literary and other circles, and the homes of married friends and fictive kin (46). This extensively researched, thoughtful book will rest comfortably on the shelf with its compatriots
The Reluctant President: Gaylord P. Harnwell and American University Leadership after World War II
No full textThis article examines the University of Pennsylvania’s presidential search of 1952–53, which led to the election of the physicistGaylord P. Harnwell, in light of other universities’ presidential searches and literature on such searches during that era. It reveals the existence of a competitiv e market for university leaders characterized by three common themes: how universities prioritized keeping their own rising stars; the growing power of the faculty in university governance, which translated to pressure to hire an academic as university president; and how professors who directed military-oriented research during World War II parlayed that experience into postwar administrative careers