Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
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The New Psychology in the Modern University: James McKeen Cattell and William Pepper at the University of Pennsylvania, 1880–1891
No full textAs provost, William Pepper sought to transform the University of Pennsylvania into a “modern university” in the 1880s. He appointed James McKeen Cattell, who had studied experimental psychology at the University of Leipzig, as one of America’s frst professors of this emerging laboratory-based science. This article analyzes the course of events that led to this appointment, Cattell’s own experimental achievements while in Philadelphia, and, fnally, the reasons for his 1891 move to Columbia University. In doing so, it illustrates how and suggests why Pepper’s reform efforts remained only partially realized
Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century
No full textThis is a book review for the April 2016 issue of Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
Back Matter
No full textThis is the back matter for the April 2016 issue of Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
Dutchirican: The Growing Puerto Rican Presence in the Pennsylvania Dutch Country
No full textABSTRACT: Although Pennsylvania is the state with the fourth-largest population of Puerto Ricans, their history, particularly outside of Philadelphia, has received little attention. Puerto Ricans began to settle in the Pennsylvania Dutch Country due in part to farmers’ demands for labor in the 1940s and 1950s. Puerto Ricans moved to the area for reasons of their own, seeing the region as a place to pursue their economic progress and religious expression. Since the 1980s, the growth of the community has been rapid, chiefl y as Puerto Ricans have moved away from expensive housing in the New York metropolitan are
Pennsylvania Migrants in the Austrian State Archives and Hungarian National Archives: Dual Repositories for Migrants from a Dual Monarchy
No full textHundreds of thousands of migrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire came to Pennsylvania from the 1880s through the First World War, and east-central European archives contain untold amounts of material documenting their experiences. Immigration historians have long researched in federal, state, and local records in the United States to tell migrants’ stories, but they have less often made use of overseas documents about those same communities and individuals. Both the Austrian State Archives in Vienna and the Hungarian National Archives in Budapest are troves of Pennsylvania history. Austro-Hungarian offi cials collected information on many facets of migrants’ American lives and organizations, from churches and benefi t societies to social clubs and newspapers. In addition, several different branches of the Austro-Hungarian government documented their own work in the United States to fi nancially assist migrant institutions, investigate industrial accidents and labor confl icts, and sometimes even monitor individuals politically at odds with the home government. European sources thus not only expand our evidence for examining familiar themes in Pennsylvania’s industrial history, but they also speak to less familiar topics that connect Pennsylvania migrants to broader transnational and European political questions of mobility, nationalism, and citizenship
“This Scourge Of Confinement”: James Morton\u27s Experiences of Incarceration in the Antebellum United States
Full text linkANTEBELLUM PRISONERS WERE OBSCURE men and women. They appeared in historical records when they encountered the law that convicted them and the penitentiary that confned them. Off cial records stripped prisoners of their individuality by reducing them to a bundle of abstractions: name, age, sex, complexion, crime, length of sentence, place of conviction, distinguishing characteristics, and inmate number. Prisoners also appeared in annual reports presented by prison off cials to state legislatures, wardens’ daily journals, cellblock logs, punishment logs, and the meeting minutes of reform societies such as the Pennsylvania Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons. Through writing diaries, letters, poetry, and memoirs, prisoners reclaimed their individuality by presenting their own experiences in their own words. Viewing antebellum penitentiaries through prisoners’ eyes makes clear how prisoners shaped life inside the nation’s penitentiaries, interpreted incarceration, and were affected by the experience of incarceration
The Civil War Letters of Tillman Valentine, Third US Colored Troops
Full text linkTillman Valentine was twenty-seven years old when he enlisted with the Third US Colored Infantry on June 30, 1863. Standing fve feet four inches tall, with black hair, gray eyes, and a yellow complexion, the mulatto laborer from Chester County, Pennsylvania, bade farewell to his wife of seven years, Annie, and his children, Elijah (born February 13, 1858), Clara (born February 4, 1860), and Ida (born August 11, 1861). Tillman gave Annie “an affectionate good bye” that morning, as one longtime family friend remembered. The couple did not know it yet, but Annie was pregnant with their fourth child, Samuel, who would be born on March 3, 1864.
Book Review: On a Great Battlefield: The Making, Management, and Memory of the Gettysburg National Military Park, 1933-2013 by Jennifer M. Murray
Full text linkFew sites in the United States are more universally considered sacred than the battlefeld at Gettysburg. How that ground has been preserved, maintained, and interpreted, however, has not always met with universal approval. In On a Great Battlef eld, Jennifer M. Murray effectively demonstrates how succeeding generations have shaped the physical appearance of the battlefeld park and how the National Park Service has often clashed with local residents and special interest groups in interpreting the battle for its visitors
Book Review: The Ubiquity of Coal in the Mid-Atlantic
Full text linkTaking stoves such as Pine Grove Furnace’s ten-plate as his inspiration, Sean Patrick Adams links the domestic hearth of the average family living in one of the nation’s growing cities with the broader process of industrialization. In Home Fires: How Americans Kept Warm in the Nineteenth Century, he puts to rest the notion that the move from wood to coal for home heating was either a product of simple market forces or the result of a singular breakthrough technology, such as Ben Franklin’s famous “Pennsylvanian freplace” (which, it turns out, blew smoke into the room and required constant tending). Explaining the rise of the “industrial hearth,” as the author describes it, instead requires attention to the enormous capital and labor expended in transporting anthracite over hundreds of miles, the dirty and dangerous work done in iron works and coal mines, and “the bare-knuckle negotiations between colliers, railroads, wholesalers, and customers” (9). After overcoming the bias toward open fres, energy entrepreneurs faced technological hurdles in manufacturing effective appliances. These problems were not resolved until new transportation systems helped move the iron production process closer to retail customers. The substitution of fnicky anthracite for wood took several more decades to achieve and “required a sustained transformation of everyday household practices on par with the most radical changes that the Industrial Revolution brought to the workplace