Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
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Pennsylvania\u27s Warrantee Township Maps
No full textPennsylvania\u27s warrantee township maps represent a valuable research tool for the amateur and professional historian alike. Available through the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC) they were constructed in the 1940s from original drafts then available at the Pennsylvania Land Office. Characterized by their complexity, the hand-drawn and hand-detailed maps are a tribute to the meticulousness and patience of the people who created them. Aside from their artistic value, the maps are a treasure trove of data, as they record information such as the names of original applicants; acreage and location of tracts; dates of application, warrant, survey, and patent; and the names of patentees
An Eighteenth-Century Linguistic Borderland
Get PDFIn the eighteenth-century Pennsylvania backcountry, English, Scots-Irish, and German colonials and immigrants met Iroquoian, Algonquian, and Siouan speakers pushed by European settlement or pulled by the Six Nations to buffer Iroquoia. They created a complex, and at times confusing, linguistic landscape. Racial and ethnic diversity was audible, but language was also a permeable boundary. The journals of the Quaker trader James Kenny (1758–59, 1761–63), in manuscript at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and published in this journal nearly a century ago, are remarkable sources that provide insight into intercultural communication and multilingualism amid the overlapping ethnic revitalizations of the Great Awakening and prophetic nativism, pervasive rumors of violence, and warfare
"Upon God Knows What Ground": African American Slavery in Western Pennsylvania
Get PDFBetween 1790 and 1820 western Pennsylvania changed from a struggling backcountry to a burgeoning industrial power at the epicenter of trade and commerce—one in which the "invisible hands" of African American laborers were the principal driving force. The process by which they negotiated the complex, always ambiguous, legal terrain between slavery and freedom is readily visible in recently unearthed slave manuscripts from the Allegheny County Recorder of Deeds Office. Aged, brittle, yet as vivid as the day they were initially penned, these documents are now in the hands of Samuel Black, curator of African American col-lections at the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh
Taming Wild Girls: The Midnight Mission and the Campaign to Reform Philadelphia\u27s Moral Fabric, 1915-1918
Get PDFFearful of what they believed to be rampant working-class sexuality, which they associated with prostitution, and convinced that the root of sexual vice lay not with those men who pursued and purchased the services of prostitutes but rather with the prostitutes themselves, Progressive reformers launched a campaign to rid the streets of those who they believed peddled disease and immorality. Police raided suspected brothels, closely monitored dance halls, and questioned unescorted (and occasionally escorted) women in public spaces all in an effort to protect the decent, moral public from those willing to offer their very bodies for money
PMHB vol. 135, no. 3, Jul 2011 (Full Issue)
No full textTable of contents, Editorial Advisroy Committee, Contributors, Publication informatio
Committee of Detail Documents
Get PDFphotos, transcripts, and notes from:Document I: Twenty-Four Referred Resolutions from the Committee of the WholeDocument II: Resolutions Taken from the Proceedings of the Convention July 24–July 26Document III: Wilson\u27s Copy of the Pinckney PlanDocument IV: Randolph\u27s Sketch of the ConstitutionDocument V: "Beginning of a Draft with an Outline of the Continuation
"Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier": Youth Enlistment in a Northern County
Get PDFThis study constructs a social profile of the youngest soldiers from Franklin County, Pennsylvania. By developing a portrait of these boys, it provides a clearer picture of youth enlistment and the participation of young recruits and furthers our understanding of the boys who went to war. The cohort investigated consists of youths aged from ten to seventeen recorded as residents of Franklin County in the 1860 US census. These boys included the youngest legal soldiers in 1861, as well as those still too young to legally fight at war\u27s end. Eighteen was the minimum age for enlistment. There are marked differences of maturity between the youngest and the oldest, and this study will identify enlistment indicators for both the underage soldiers and those who enlisted legally. It is important, however, also to note what they had in common—they all became volunteer soldiers in the Union army
A Record of Pennsylvania Deserters
Get PDFA number of years ago Sally McMurry of the Pennsylvania State University came across an intriguing item while digging in the tax records in the basement of the Centre County Library and Historical Museum in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. Sitting on an open metal shelf was a sheaf of papers bound in deteriorating leather. The item was twenty-seven inches long and seventeen inches wide. Curious, McMurry opened it and discovered that it contained 274 pages of information on the men who had deserted from Pennsylvania infantry, artillery, and cavalry regiments during the Civil War. Why did such a document exist? What was its purpose? And how did such an extensive federal record come to Bellefonte
In Their Dreams: The S. Weir Mitchell Papers
Get PDFCivil War battlefields required the evacuation of large numbers of wounded to Northern cities. As the second most important hospital city in the North after Washington, DC, Philadelphia sheltered about 157,000 injured soldiers. The large number of amputees presented an opportunity to army contract surgeon S. Weir Mitchell, MD (1829–1914), who was already emerging as a physician of note in Philadelphia before the war. Mitchell asked his friend US Army Surgeon General William Hammond to set up a special hospital to treat and study injuries to the nerves. During the last year of the war, Hammond assembled one of the most unusual and important temporary hospitals at Turner\u27s Lane in Philadelphia. Mitchell and his hand-picked associates, William W. Keen, MD, and George R. Morehouse, MD, collectively known as "the Firm," found at Turner\u27s Lane an unparalleled opportunity to study diseases and wounds of the nerves. The team was conscious of the history-making nature of their work: "The opportunity was indeed unique and we knew it . . . it was exciting in its constancy of novel interest." In addition to seeing patients, Mitchell and his team found time to publish a systematic study of peripheral nerve injuries among injured soldiers, Gunshot Wounds and Other Injuries of Nerves (1864). The first hospital to treat nerve injuries, Turner\u27s Lane created a body of work that effectively founded American neurology