Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
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Holy Nation: The Transatlantic Quaker Ministry in an Age of Revolution
No full textIn Holy Nation, Sarah Crabtree charts the beliefs and values of the Religious Society of Friends during the age of revolution. She focuses particularly on the intersection of religion with the politics of nation and empire throughout the Atlantic world. Crabtree argues that Quakers embraced and appropriated the Zion tradition to ensure consistent belief, attitudes, and common purpose during the years of the war for independence, the French Revolution, and Napoleonic Wars. She posits that, by comparing themselves to the “Israel of old,” Quakers likened their suffering and devout belief to that of the Israelites. The Society of Friends saw themselves as a distinct and chosen people. As the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries unfolded, Quakers argued that their beliefs fell under God’s law, not the laws of empires or nation-states. The Friends’ pacifist beliefs and “guarded education” of young members placed them at odds with growing states. However, Crabtree explains, Quakers found themselves unable to remain united in agreement about Friends’ place in the world
Upon the Ruins of Liberty: Slavery, the President’s House at Independence National Historic Park, and Public Memory
No full textIn his new book, Roger C. Aden recounts the saga of Philadelphia’s President’s House monument and its problematic commemoration from 2002 through 2011. Upon the Ruins of Liberty recalls the chronicle of George Washington, in a presidential mansion located within spitting distance of the Liberty Bell, bending laws to accommodate his own personal dependence on slavery. It is such an egregious episode that, throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the National Park Service (NPS) buried its memory—along with the building’s foundations— beneath, of all things, a public restroom. The site remained unrecognized until a coalition of historians, preservationists, and activists demanded that the site be commemorated, or perhaps even reconstructed. What they they got was a bit of both, a mélange of confusing interpretive contrivances wedged into one of Philadelphia’s busiest street corners, leaving visitors with an unclear impression of what any of it means
Back Matter
No full textThis is the back matter for the October 2017 issue of Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
John Laurance and the Role of Military Justice at Valley Forge
No full textIntroducing a fresh metric—general courts-martial per thousand fi t-for-duty troops—this article expands Valley Forge historiography by quantifying trial incidence in a forty-two-month context to suggest military justice played a signifi cantly greater role over the winter of privation than previously thought. Courts-martial discipline, the essay argues, served as General Washington’s fundamental instrument of command and control until drillmaster Baron von Steuben’s iconic parade-ground regimen took hold. As Washington’s unheralded “courtroom von Steuben,” Judge Advocate General John Laurance superintended rule of military law over eighty tattered Valley Forge regiments by diligently enforcing the 1776 Articles of War among private soldiers, offi cers, and civilians alike
Newly Available and Processed Collections at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania
No full textWhat follows are descriptions of some of the collections at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania that have either been acquired within the past year or that have been more fully processed and therefore are more accessible to researchers
The Adams Papers. Series II: Adams Family Correspondence. Volume 12: March 1797– April 1798. Edited by SARA MARTIN et al.
No full textEach time a member of the Adams family sat down and wrote a letter to another member of the family, they made a precious contribution to their national descendants. The correspondence among members of the family constitute a gift to the American people and to the historians and other scholars who study their lives and times. The editors and the Massachusetts Historical Society are to be warmly congratulated for the good work they have done in carrying forward the Adams Papers project
Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: The Origins of American Political Practice in Colonial Philadelphia.
No full textAt least since Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1832 tour of the United States, students of the early American republic have described that period as one in which private voluntary organizations proliferated. Jessica Choppin Roney’s Governed by a Spirit of Opposition locates the origins of American voluntary culture, and thus of widespread civic participation, in an earlier period
Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and the Historiography of Urban Public Education in Pennsylvania
No full textHISTORIANS OF PENNSYLVANIA have been interested in education since the beginning of the twentieth century. The earliest articles and books on this topic appeared long before the history of education became an established scholarly fi eld. One explanation for this anomaly may be that the Quakers who founded Pennsylvania opened schools almost immediately. In effect, William Penn and his contemporaries enmeshed schooling in the colony’s fabric. Among Penn’s successors, Anthony Benezet has attracted the most attention from historians of education because he operated outside of the mainstream, teaching girls, the poor, and African Americans. But it was a non-Quaker, Benjamin Franklin, who did more than anyone else to identify Pennsylvania with the history of education. Knowledge that could be applied, he believed, was the key to opportunity, prosperity, and the common good. The commonwealth has basked in the refl ected glow of this idea—as well as his work on behalf of homegrown learned institutions—ever since
The Reluctant President: Gaylord P. Harnwell and American University Leadership after World War II
No full textBSTRACT: This article examines the University of Pennsylvania’spresidential search of 1952–53, which led to the election of the physicistGaylord P. Harnwell, in light of other universities’ presidential searchesand literature on such searches during that era. It reveals the existence of acompetitiv e market for university leaders characterized by three commonthemes: how universities prioritized keeping their own rising stars; thegrowing power of the faculty in university governance, which translatedto pressure to hire an academic as university president; and how professorswho directed military-oriented research during World War II parlayed thatexperience into postwar administrative career
Pa’lante in Pennsylvania: Puerto Rican Educational and Cultural Organizing through Aspira Inc. of Pennsylvania
No full textAspira—meaning “aspire” in Spanish—was the first professionally staffed, private, nonprofit organization dedicated to the Puerto Rican community. As a youth development organization, it provided leadership training, academic support, and cultural heritage programming to its mainly Puerto Rican students, known as Aspirantes. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP) holds sixty-nine boxes of materials related to the Pennsylvania branch of the organization, a treasure trove of materials for those in terested in Latinx history, urban history, the history of education, or philanthropy from the 1960s to the present. Given the rise of the Latinx student population across the state and country, this material is particularly helpful in shedding new light on the longstanding contributions of East Coast Latinxs and their experiences with public schools