Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
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The Records of Camp William Penn
Get PDFFederal records offer tantalizing evidence of the struggle for freedom in Civil War–era Pennsylvania. Among the more recent additions to the holdings of the National Archives at Philadelphia are records of Camp William Penn. Situated just outside of the city, Camp William Penn was the first camp built exclusively for the training of African American soldiers and the largest training facility for the US Colored Troops. It trained African American men from both Union and Confederate states who enlisted in the Union army. Surviving records detail conditions at the camp and the personal and familial circumstances of many of the men who enlisted. The records offer glimpses into race relations in Philadelphia as a whole, and Pennsylvania more broadly
Old Baldy: A Horse\u27s Tale
No full textAmong the more curious of Pennsylvania\u27s Civil War artifacts is the head of Major General George Gordon Meade\u27s horse, Baldy, now on display at the Grand Army of the Republic Museum and Library in the Frankford section of Philadelphia. In life, Baldy was a warhorse and honored for his service. His celebrity reminds us of the strong bond between man and mount and of the important role that animals, particularly horses, played in this pre-automotive world. In death, Old Baldy\u27s stuffed and mounted head has become contested property, suggesting that even in the twenty-first century, a horse, or even a horse\u27s head, can elicit strong emotions and help connect us to one another and with our past
A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution. By Carolyn Eastman
Get PDFAtlantic history, hemispheric history, global history: recent scholarly shifts in scale have shown that the Revolution, far from creating a distinctive national identity, instead marked a political transition in a society that remained defined by transcultural contacts, exchanges, and affinities. In the context of the ever-expanding geography of our discipline, Carolyn Eastman\u27s account of the early republic is striking because it questions the nationalized mythology of the Revolutionary War from within. A Nation of Speechifiers draws entirely on evidence from the United States to demonstrate that a shared national identity did not emerge for decades after independence, much later than the nationalistic rhetoric of the era would suggest. Eastman argues that ordinary Americans "learned to think of themselves as members of a public" before they could inhabit a sense of national belonging
Second Suburb: Levittown, Pennsylvania. Edited by Dianne Harris
Get PDFThe word "Levittown" conjures up distinctively strong associations in the minds of scholars and the general public. The image that often emerges first is that of modest, single-family suburban houses clustered together by the thousands on an expanse of flat former farmland, followed by some combination of different judgments: a successful experiment in making home ownership broadly affordable; a cultural wasteland of conformity and consumption; a child-filled, family-friendly community; a site and symbol of racial exclusion and hostility. One of the important achievements of Second Suburb is that such common, partially conflicting assumptions are at once confirmed and complicated. Composed of a relatively brief set of first-person memories of living in Levittown, Pennsylvania, and of seven scholarly essays focusing on such topics as architecture, planning, racial politics, and the environment, this skillfully edited collection is full of creative tension with its exploration of contrasts
Benjamin Franklin and the Invention of Microfinance. By Bruce H. Yenawine
Get PDFAcademic writing on Benjamin Franklin has recently burgeoned into what some have called "Franklin studies," with two volumes of scholarly essays (one published, another on the way) and monographs focusing on his contributions to science, philosophy, and letters, among other subjects. Because of a strange twist of fate, Bruce Yenawine\u27s useful and interesting contribution both predates and comes at the crest of this rising wave. Just published in Pickering & Chatto\u27s Financial History series, it is an edited but not significantly updated version of his 1995 dissertation, completed two years before his death
Crucible of Freedom: Workers\u27 Democracy in the Industrial Heartland, 1914–1960. By Eric Leif Davin
Get PDFCrucible of Freedom is unlike any scholarly history book I have ever read. Throughout the work, Eric Davin interjects himself into the narrative. He frequently recounts anecdotes from individuals who describe what their grandparents told them about labor organizing in the 1930s and 1940s. Davin\u27s approach reminded me of William H.Whyte\u27s Street Corner Society. Much like Whyte, Davin is the participant-observer interpreting an oppositional culture that was—and remains—remote from Main Street America. There are also echoes of David Brooks\u27s sociological rendering of contemporary professionals in Bobos in Paradise
Pennsylvania\u27s Revolution. Edited by William Pencak
No full textBill Pencak has again brought together a veritable diaspora of early Pennsylvanianists with something to say about the state and the American Revolution. The volume starts with a big bang as Nathan Kozuskanich draws out the neglected links between the ideology of the Paxton Boys and the populist localism at the center of support for the Revolution in 1776. The notion of "safety against all belligerents" secured through participation in militias characterized both movements, much as we prefer to distance ourselves from Paxton while wrapping ourselves in the 1776 version of "Don\u27t Tread on Me." Patrick Spero and Phillip Munch argue for the importance of English- and German-language almanacs; their research is thorough but their arguments hardly surprising. John Frantz provides a brief survey of how religion informed the attitudes and actions of Germans during the Revolutionary War. (A translation of some of Henry Miller\u27s newspaper writings, with commentary by Pencak, appears as an appendix to the volume.) Pencak\u27s own essay on the loyalist clergy breaks some stereotypes in its fascinating explanation of the pressures on Anglican clergyman to oppose the Revolution and the differences in the ways ten of eleven of them did so
William Bartram, The Search for Nature\u27s Design: Selected Art, Letters, and Unpublished Writings. Edited by Thomas Hallock and Nancy E. Hoffman
Get PDFThis is a beautiful book, lovingly produced for readers who adore William Bartram (1739–1823) as an artist, Romantic, naturalist, and gardener and painstakingly assembled by scholars who approach him from a variety of perspectives. It provides clear capsule introductions to primary texts otherwise unavailable to most readers
[announcement] 2011 Paul A Stellhorn New Jersey History Award
No full textThe Stellhorn Award recognizes excellence in undergraduate writing about New Jersey history. It commemorates the career of an outstanding and much-loved historian of New Jersey, the late Paul A. Stellhorn
"We Are No Grumblers": Negotiating State and Federal Military Service in the Pennsylvania Reserve Division
Get PDFFor Sergeant John I. Faller, Company A, Seventh Pennsylvania Reserve Infantry, the month of April 1864 passed splendidly. The twenty-three-year-old Philadelphia machinist began serving out the final weeks of his three-year term of service inside the defenses of Washington. In March, he wrote to his sister that he liked his duty "very well," and he assured her that, "I am well over from head to feet and from the right hand to the left." Because he chose not to re-enlist in December, Faller looked forward to returning to his parents\u27 house in Carlisle and instructed his sister "to have a room fixed up for me when I get home next summer."As spring began, two important items escaped Sergeant Faller\u27s attention. First, he made no mention of Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant\u27s April 17 order to suspend prisoner exchanges. A few days earlier, at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, Confederate troops had refused to accept the surrender of defeated African American soldiers, killing or massacring 231 officers and men. Grant reasoned that if Confederate troops would not offer quarters to surrendering black soldiers, then it was the Union army\u27s obligation to hold Confederates taken in battle indefinitely to ensure the safety of African American prisoners of war. Second, Faller failed to detect the uproar in his regiment\u27s parent unit—the Pennsylvania Reserve Division—regarding the War Department\u27s proposal to extend its term of service beyond three years. While in winter encampment at Brandy Station, Virginia, the other regiments of the Pennsylvania Reserve Division had staged a near mutiny, protesting a War Department directive that proposed to retain the Keystone soldiers two to three months beyond their expected muster-out date. Perhaps Faller disregarded this disturbance simply because it did not matter to him whether he mustered out in May—the month designated by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania—or July—the month designated by the War Department. As long as Faller remained in Washington, he could avoid the enemy\u27s bullets and merely count down the days until he went home. However, on April 18, orders came from Major General George G. Meade directing Faller\u27s regiment, the Seventh Reserves, and another regiment, the Eighth Reserves, to join the Army of the Potomac at Brandy Station. Fourteen days later, Faller found himself marching into the Wilderness as part of Grant\u27s historic—and costly—Overland Campaign...