Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
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"We Stand on the Same Battlefield": The Gettysburg Centenary and the Shadow of Race
Get PDFOn November 19, 1962, acclaimed Civil War historian Bruce Catton delivered an address to an eager audience at Gettysburg College. That evening, instead of offering listeners installments from his popular New York Times Magazine series, which chronicled the "great turning points" of the Civil War, the fifty-five-year-old editor of American Heritage addressed the ongoing centennial commemoration of the conflict. Well aware that the very next year the greater Gettysburg community would observe the one hundredth anniversary of the conflict\u27s most celebrated battle, Catton came to urge both caution and careful consideration in the looming ceremonials. "If we are not careful," he declared, "we may become prisoners of the Civil War—prisoners of its romance, of its legendry, of the odd, heart-warming, and ever-living impulses which its people, its flags, its songs and its stories send tingling along the spine."What troubled Catton was not the propensity of his fellow Americans to look back on the conflict, but the "irresistible force of sentiment" that overwhelmed any discussion of the causes and consequences of the war
The Church Advocate
Get PDFDuring the nineteenth century, religious newspapers served as an integral source of information for numerous churchgoing individuals. Articles about the finer points of theology, minutes of denominational meetings, and developments regarding domestic and foreign missions filled the pages of these organs and kept ministers and laity informed about current ecclesiastical issues. The Civil War, however, caused editors and correspondents to include matters related to war and politics in addition to typical religious fare. The Church Advocate, the Church of God\u27s national weekly published in Lancaster, is a little-known source that reveals aspects of daily life on the Pennsylvania home front and relates the experiences of soldiers in camp and on the battlefield
Painting and Politics: The Journal of John Henry Brown
Get PDF"My business is now dwindling to nothing. I cannot lose sight of the fact, but for this odious war I would now have plenty of employment at increased prices. Aside from any personal or selfish feeling in the matter, I regard this war as most unholy. I think it madness to attempt to settle our troubles by the sword."As his comments of August 31, 1861, make clear, Philadelphian John Henry Brown was among those Pennsylvanians who did not approve of the Civil War. The forty-three-year-old Brown was a painter of watercoloron-ivory portrait miniatures, a financially precarious business in the era of photography. A year earlier, in August 1860, Brown had actually received a commission to travel to Springfield, Illinois, and paint the Republican presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln. He noted in his journal at the time that "I hardly know how to express the strength of my personal regard for Mr. Lincoln. I have never seen a man for whom I so soon formed an attachment. I like him much & agree with him in all things but his politics.
This "rends in Pieces all the Barriers between Virtue and Vice": Tennentists, Moravians, and the Antinomian Threat in the Delaware Valley
Get PDFN THE SUMMER OF 1745, Gilbert Tennent, one of the middle colonies\u27leading revivalist preachers, was preparing a sermon in hisPhiladelphia study during a fierce thunderstorm, when a bolt of lightningstruck the house and sent a surge of electricity through his body,blowing out the soles of his shoes and melting the buckles. AlthoughTennent would later explain this frightening experience as a random act of God,Moravians in Philadelphia interpreted the lightning bolt as a specificdemonstration of divine "warning" thrown down on one of theirmost vocal "enemies." In fact, according to a Reformed opponent of theMoravians, the leader of the whole Moravian enterprise, NicolausLudwig von Zinzendorf, had predicted as much three years earlier. Although coming after the fires of the Great Awakening had cooled, theMoravian interpretation of Tennent\u27s encounter with a bolt of lightningis testament to debates that surged to the fore during the GreatAwakening and that revolved around Moravian activity in the DelawareValley
Announcements: Library Company of Philadelphia and HSP Fellowships
No full textDescriptions and deadlines for 2011-2012 named Library Company of Philadelphia and HSP fellowships
Friends and Strangers: The Making of Creole Culture in Colonial Pennsylvania by John Smolenski
Get PDF"Quaker Pennsylvania" was made,not born, argues John Smolenski. From the time of its settlement in the 1680s until the 1720s, the colony\u27s Quaker pioneers, a contentious charter generation, struggled mightily to establish who among them would rule and which Quaker principles would guide the colony. Smolenski characterizes this tense process of cultural adaptation and change as "creolization"; it is the central theme of his book
Front Matter: PMHB, vol. 135, no. 3, Jul 2011
No full textTable of contents, Editorial Advisroy Committee, Contributors, Publication informatio
Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson\u27s "The Deserted Wife"
No full textElizabeth Graeme Fergusson (1737–1801) was one of the most prolific and notable poets in eighteenth-century Philadelphia. From her youthful romance with William Franklin; to her account of her trip to Great Britain, which was circulated among elite Philadelphians; to her friendships with John Dickinson, Jacob Duché, Francis Hopkinson, Milcah Martha Moore, Benjamin Rush, William Smith, and Annis Boudinot Stockton, Fergusson\u27s life was filled with wit, sociability,serious reflection,and nearly constant literary production. Most of her poetry remains in manuscript, although many letters to and from Fergusson were edited by Simon Gratz and published in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography in 1915 and 1917. The Library Company of Philadelphia, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the William Smith Papers at the University of Pennsylvania Archives and Record Center contain the bulk of her writings. Among this work are letters, petitions, psalm paraphrases, an epic versification of the story of Telemachus, odes to the seasons, devotional poems, a versification of John Dickinson\u27s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, comments on Benjamin Rush\u27s medical inquiries, and neoclassical poetry on all manner of topics."The Deserted Wife" is unusual among Fergusson\u27s oeuvre..
Raymond Pace Alexander: A New Negro Lawyer Fights for Civil Rights in Philadelphia. By David A. Canton
Get PDFCanton\u27s engaging narrative tells the story of Raymond Pace Alexander (1897–1974), a prominent Philadelphia African American attorney who has been overlooked and perhaps forgotten compared to his fellow "New Negro" lawyers such as Charles Hamilton Houston, William Hastie, and Thurgood Marshall. It is a valuable contribution to the fields of legal history, civil rights history, the history of African American lawyers, and community studies of African Americans in the twentieth century
The Catholic Herald and VIsitor and the Catholic
Get PDFRoman Catholic newspapers are important but overlooked sources providing an intimate window into Catholic thought in Civil War–era Pennsylvania. A sizeable portion of Philadelphia\u27s and Pittsburgh\u27s Civil War–era populations were Roman Catholic, mostly recent Irish and German immigrants. Indeed, an estimated 225,000 Philadelphians were Catholic; the diocese included 160 churches, 158 priests, and three colleges by 1861. In Pittsburgh, there were an estimated 50,000 Catholics, 86 priests, 77 churches, and one college. Throughout the conflict, Philadelphia\u27s Catholics found a voice in the Catholic Herald and Visitor. Catholics in western Pennsylvania published their own weekly in Pittsburgh named the Catholic. For most of the war, the Herald was the "official organ" of Bishop James Wood of Philadelphia, while the Catholic was published with the approbation of Pittsburgh\u27s Bishop Michael Domenec. These weeklies were the only locally edited English-language Catholic papers in the state, a fact that gave them an important role in shaping Catholic opinion in Pennsylvania during the Civil War