Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
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Andrew Curtin and the Politics of Union
No full textABSTRACT: This article examines the elections and tenure of Governor Andrew Curtin of Pennsylvania, who secured election in 1860 and reelection in 1863 at the head of a centrist political coalition that first dubbed itself the People’s Party and later became the Union Party. Although Republicans constituted the largest proportion of Curtin’s supporters, his overall success hinged on Democrat and Whig converts who refused to back a straight Republican ticket. The governor appealed to these voters by embodying a nonpartisan patriotism in rhetoric and policy. His campaigns appealed across party lines to loyal Democrats, and in his governance he regularly clashed with Washington over a host of unpopular wartime policies. Curtin’s record suggests the fl uidity of Republicanism and provides powerful evidence for the underappreciated prevalence and signifi cance of political centrism in wartime northern politics
Klezmer: Music and Community in Twentieth-Century Jewish Philadelphia
No full textThe klezmer revival of the late twentieth century drew attention to this important area of Jewish music both through performance and through scholarship. Most writing on klezmer has focused largely on the revival itself and on its antecedent practices in the New York region. Hankus Netsky’s monograph on klezmer in twentieth-century Jewish Philadelphia provides an important counterpart to this literature, drawing attention not only to Philadelphia’s distinctive and creative Jewish musical tradition but also to the particularity and vibrancy of its broader Jewish culture
Nellie Rathbone Bright: Acclaimed Author, Educator Activist, Un-American Woman?
No full textThis paper documents the life of Nellie Rathbone Bright, an immigrant daughter, celebrated author, and activist educator, who challenged the boundaries of gender and sexuality and engaged in grassroots political work to alleviate racial inequities in her community and schools. Historians have documented how the national hysteria about communism incited politicians and citizens to disgrace progressive reformers and civil rights activists. Bright’s identity as a Black, unmarried, grassroots activist and educator pushes us to consider how the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality made her an innocent victim of the McCarthy era anticommunist campaign
The Raymond Walters Diaries: The Swarthmore College Days (1925–32)
No full textWhen Raymond Walters died in October 1970 at the age of eighty-five, the Cincinnati Enquirer summarized his professional accomplishments in this manner: “scholar—author—administrator.” Most of his scholarship, including several books and countless articles, was devoted to the study of the utility and value of higher education. He was a regular contributor to such magazines as Scribner’s and School and Society. He became something of an expert in statistical analysis, charting the fl uctuations in student bodypopulations at colleges and universities. A 1946 Associated Press story referred to Walters as the nation’s “statistician laureate of higher education.” His proudest accomplishment came from his service as president of the University of Cincinnati (1932–55). To this day, his is the longest tenure of any president in that university’s history
Race and Republicanism in Philadelphia’s Aurora: How Anglophobia and Antimonarchism Shaped William Duane’s Views on Revolutions in Saint-Domingue and Latin America, 1798–1822
No full textTo better understand the relationship between race and partisan politics in the early American republic, this article examines the democratic ideology espoused by William Duane—editor of Philadelphia’s Aurora—as it concerned multiracial independence movements in the Western Hemisphere. While Duane’s views appear to be wholly contradictory, this paper argues that Anglophobia and antimonarchism consistently animated his ideology, undergirding both the prejudice in his attacks on Saint-Dominguans loyal to Britain and the universalism in his defense of Latin Americans hostile to Spain. Duane’s willingness to incorporate slaves, free blacks, and Amerindians into his democratic worldview was at all times dependent upon the demographic group’s politics, not the political group’s demographics
Benjamin Franklin and the Theater of Empire
No full textRecent books on Benjamin Franklin cast a wide net, placing Franklin within the Atlantic republic of letters and community of scientists as well as the political economy of empire and capital-ism. Carla Mulford’s Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire sheds new light on imperial politics, theories of empire, and Enlightenment ideas throughout the Atlantic world. Her focus on empire builds on a resur-gence of imperial history, one that devotes equal attention to center and periphery and gives voice not only to policymakers but to women and men, free colonists and servants, slaves and indigenous peoples. Infl uenced by this literature, Mulford incorporates the entire empire—Canada, Ireland, Scotland, and India as well as Britain and her American colonies—into her analysis
Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln.
No full textOver three million men fought in the American Civil War, two million of whom donned the Union blue. In recent decades, historians have provided a proliferation of scholarship on soldiers from the North and South, considering their motivations for enlistment, wartime experiences, and the aftermath of their service. Yet, for Union soldiers, Jonathan W. White proposes that there has been inadequate coverage of their politics, especially in relationship to the presidential election of 1864. Traditionally, according to White, historians have surmised that the high percentage of votes cast for Lincoln by Union soldiers indicated a strong preference for both “Honest Abe” and the Republican Party (1–4). The usual evidence for this comes from the overwhelming support Lincoln received in 1864 from the soldier vote. White argues, however, that these numbers, if not outright lies, only tell part of the story. Forty percent of Union soldiers did not cast a ballot for Lincoln in 1864. Rather, through examining a combination of actions—direct support for Democratic candidate George McClellan, resignation from the army, or purposeful abstentions from voting—White argues that the politics of a significant and neglected portion of Union soldiers requires scholarly attention. 
“To Friends and All Whom It May Concerne”: William Southeby’s Rediscovered 1696 Antislavery Protest
No full textABSTRACT: Pennsylvania Quaker William Southeby wrote one of the earliest American critiques of slavery in 1696 and continued agitating against the institution until his death in 1722. Scholars have been restricted in their attention to Southeby because his 1696 protest and all but one of his other writings have been lost to history. This article reproduces and analyzes a recently discovered transcript of his 1696 address made in 1791 by another Quaker abolitionist, James Pemberton, along with Southeby’s other known antislavery essay, from around 1714. Both documents shed new light on the contentious early history of abolitionism
Between Sovereignty and Anarchy: The Politics of Violence in the American Revolutionary Era
No full textThe field of the American Revolution is garnering more scholarly attention than in years past, with the publication of some high-profi le texts (Claudio Saunt’s West of the Revolution in 2014 and Kathleen DuVal’s Independence Lost in 2015) and a substantial conference in 2013 on the topic at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. We have yet to see where this attention will lead. It has been decades since such scholars as Bernard Bailyn, Gordon S. Wood, and Alfred Young set the parameters of a debate that pitted an exceptional, ideologically driven, radical revolution (often called the neo-Whig argument by its critics) against an unfinished, materially driven, conservative revolution that left many peoples outside of its consideration (often called the neo-Progressive argument). Many scholars hope that the recent attention to the f i eld will lead to narratives that transcend this seemingly intractable binary. This volume, which comes out of a 2010 Ohio University conference on violence and sovereignty during the American Revolution, highlights both the possibilities and the limitations of the new thinking in the field
Abraham Lincoln, the Quakers, and the Civil War: “A Trial of Principle and Faith.”
No full textIn Abraham Lincoln, the Quakers, and the Civil War, William Kashatus explores aspects of the largely unknown relationship between the sixteenth president of the United States and the Religious Society of Friends. The author contends that Lincoln and American Quakers shared similar religious sensibilities and a steadfast belief in the immorality of slavery. Friends and President Lincoln both struggled to reconcile their principles to the ever-increasing harvest of death produced by civil war. The conflict posed serious fundamental problems for pacifi st Friends, who grappled with mandatory military service required by the draft and the use of violence in the name of emancipation. Lincoln, and later Congress, made accommodations for Quaker conscientious objectors, but their moral dilemma remained unresolved. Kashatus explains that the president and Quakers were friends in common affl iction. They both endured great emotional and spiritual challenges throughout the war and found great comfort and guidance in each other