Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
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Citizen Environmentalists. By James Longhurst
Get PDFIn Citizen Environmentalists, James Longhurst demonstrates that historical explanations of the modern environmental movement must take local context and political power into account. The book focuses on the proliferation of small, grassroots environmental advocacy groups in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It features a case study of one such organization in Pittsburgh: GASP (Group Against Smog and Pollution). By stressing local rather than national events, and by integrating a political-science perspective with urban social history, Longhurst provides new insights into the sources and development of environmental activism
Front Matter: PMHB, vol. 135, no. 2, April 2011
No full textTable of contents, Editorial Advisroy Committee, Contributors, Publication informatio
Book Reviews [April 2011 -- all]
No full textAll 16 book reviews from the April 2011 issue of Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
John Barry: An American Hero in the Age of Sail. By Tim McGrath
Get PDFTim McGrath makes a strong argument that John Barry is a true, but forgotten,hero of this nation. Barry\u27s list of accomplishments is impressively long: a contender for the title "Father of the American Navy";the commander whofought both the first and last successful engagements of the Continental navy;the skipper who logged the greatest distance in a twenty-four-hour period during the eighteenth century; George Washington\u27s favorite sailor, who served with the Continental army at the battle of Princeton; the individual who extralegally brought about Pennsylvania\u27s ratification of the Constitution; a merchant captain who helped establish American trade with China; and commander of one of two U.S. Navy squadrons who "won" the 1798 Quasi-War with France. Despite this impressive resume, Barry is barely remembered today and John Paul Jones is the American naval officer most associated with valor and accomplishment during the Revolutionary War. McGrath explains Barry\u27s obscurity by the fact that he was humble, laconic, and, in marked contrast to Jones, unwillingto promote himself or his achievements
Front Matter: PMHB, vol. 135, no. 4, Oct 2011
No full textContents, Editorial Board, Contributors and subscription informatio
The John A. McAllister Civil War Envelope Collection
Get PDFBy June 1861 an "Envelope Mania" had taken hold of the Union, which, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, was an economic boon for engravers, stationers, and printers who had "no cause to complain of a lack of business" while others struggled to adjust to the new wartime economy. This collecting fad was made possible by recent innovations to methods of graphics printing. Civil War–era printers in the North fed the frenzy by producing patriotic, sentimental, and satiric illustrations that covered the entire fronts of wrappers and rendered them nearly unusable as anything other than collectors\u27 items. Consequently, many of these pieces never made it into circulation, but rather were saved in the scrapbooks of "collectors of curiosities" like Philadelphian John A. McAllister (1822–1896), who gave his collection of Civil War ephemera to the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1886
The Philadelphia Stock Exchange and the City It Made. By Domenic Vitiello, with George E. Thomas
Get PDF"Triumph and Tragedy" could well have been a subtitle of this history of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. The triumph came in the exchange\u27s first century, beginning in 1790 when merchant-financiers organized the Board of Brokers, the first stock exchange in the United States. New York also traded securities at the time, but its traders would not form a similar securities trading club, the forerunner of the New York Stock Exchange, until 1792.Until the 1830s, the exchanges of the two cities were peers. Philadelphia\u27s exchange benefited from the city being the capital of the country in the 1790s and the headquarters of the two Banks of the United States, while New York\u27s exchange thrived as its city became the largest of all U.S. cities and the nation\u27s commercial capital. When the second Bank of the United States lost its federal charter in 1836, and then as a state-chartered bank failed a few years later, New York City and its exchange continued to grow and shot ahead. But Philadelphia became a leading industrial city, and the Philadelphia Stock Exchange (the name adopted in 1875) played an important role in financing the economic infrastructure— banks, insurance companies, roads, railroads, urban transit, and utilities— that made it an industrial center. In the century of triumph a number of America\u27s leading financiers were Philadelphians: Thomas Willing, Robert Morris, Thomas and Nicholas Biddle, Enoch Clark, Jay Cooke, and Anthony Drexel
PMHB, Vol 135, No. 1, January 2011 (Full Issue)
No full textFeature Articles include:This "rends in Pieces all the Barriers between Virtue and Vice": Tennentists, Moravians, and the Antinomian Threat in the Delaware Valley (Jared S. Burkholder)With a Little Help from the Friends: The Quaker and Tactica; Contexts of Anthony Benezet\u27s Abolishionist Publishing (Jonathan D. Sassi)Philadelphia not Philanthropolis: The Limits of Pennsylvanian Antislavery in the Era of the Haitian Revolution (James Alexander Dun
Frontmatter PMHB Vol. 135, No. 1, January 2011
No full textTable of contents, Editorial Advisroy Committee, Contributors, Publication informatio
Philadelphia not Philanthropolis: The Limits of Pennsylvanian Antislavery in the Era of the Haitian Revolution
Get PDFIN THE WINTER OF 1796, Benjamin Giroud visited Philadelphia. Giroud was a Frenchman who had become an owner through marriage of a coffee plantation in Saint-Domingue, the embattled French West Indian colony that within a few years would declare its independence as the republic of Haiti. At the time of Giroud\u27s trip, however, such a development seemed unlikely. Having been the scene of violence and disruption for the previous seven years, in late 1796 the colony was entering a period of relative stability. The white royalists who had leagued with the Spanish and British to separate the colony from France had fled or were in retreat. The free colored population, who had long struggled for civic equality, had been transformed into a reliable source of support by decrees recognizing them as French citizens. Most significantly, the insurgent slaves, who beginning in August 1791 had collectively rejected and dismantled the system of chattel slavery that sustained the colony\u27s plantation economy, had been largely brought into the French fold by the 1794 policy of general emancipation. The decree of February 4, 1794, which ended slavery in all French possessions, had its origins in Saint- Domingue and was a ratification of the series of harried efforts to co-opt the insurgents by the French commissioners, Légér-Félicité Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel, as they struggled against various planter, royalist, and British factions. It offered liberty in exchange for armed service in defense of the revolution. Expanded by the National Convention in Paris, French emancipation was immediate, uncompensated, and universal in its application. By the time of Giroud\u27s trip, black and colored troops, fighting for France and led by Toussaint Louverture, had defeated the Spaniards and stymied the British. Giroud was an officer in the new commission of metropolitan officials headed by Sonthonax and was sent to take advantage of this success.Benjamin Giroud was also a member of Les Amis des Noirs, a society of antislavery activists that had sprung up in Paris in 1788, achieved somenoisy eminence during the early days of the republic, and then largely disappeared when its membership was purged during the Terror. Though Les AMis never advoated immediate emancipation, now that French policy had turned in that direction, the group revived. Giroud came to Philadelphia as a French republican and as an abolitionist, identities that overlapped if they were not precisely coterminous. He came to America looking for allies