Blog Author: curator

The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia will play a small role in this year’s FringeArts Festival with publication of our “City of Brotherly Love” theme essay, by Chris Satullo, in a commemorative booklet for the production 100% Philadelphia. As described by FringeArts:

Join us at the 2014 Fringe Festival for an unforgettable experience that’s part-theater, part-data analysis — and 100 percent Philadelphia. Developed in collaboration with FringeArts, German artist collective Rimini Protokoll’s 100% Philadelphia will bring 100 carefully selected Philadelphia citizens (non-actors) onstage to represent the city’s population of 1.5 million and our unique demographic imprint: More than 40 cast members will be African-American, half will be women, approximately 20 will be children — and that’s just the beginning. At times funny, uplifting and strikingly dramatic, 100% Philadelphia is always enlightening, a mirror of ourselves that will forever change the way we see our friends, neighbors, and strangers on the street.

For more information about the production and to buy tickets, visit the event website at Fringe Arts.

We are pleased to share the news that The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia has reached a new milestone: 350 topics online. Thanks to the many people who are making this project possible: authors, editors, reviewers, fact-checkers and page-builders, and the archival partners who provide illustrations. Our current phase of expansion is made possible by generous grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mayor’s Fund for Philadelphia, and Poor Richard’s Charitable Trust.

Topic #350 is Surveying (Colonial), by Michael Pospishil.  Stay tuned for more this summer!

In partnership with the National Archives at Philadelphia, we’re pleased to announce a new guide for teachers and students, “Comparing Primary and Secondary Sources,” which is newly published on the website for National History Day Philadelphia. Created to help students with their research for National History Day projects, the guide was prepared by Melissa Callahan, an experienced social studies teacher who is the education outreach coordinator for The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia and a graduate student in history at Rutgers-Camden. This work was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (MARCH), which produces The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia.

We are pleased to welcome the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the Encyclopedia’s Civic Advisory Board.  Staff members from the Museum’s Center for American Art participated in the Civic Partnership and Planning Workshop that launched the project, and we look forward to working with them next year on a public program to explore Philadelphia’s reputation as “Athens of America.” 

Looking for the latest word on Philadelphia?  We are pleased to offer a newly expanded bibliographic survey of scholarship, public history work, and public policy studies about Philadelphia published since 1982.  The survey is approximately one-third larger than the previous survey, with a significant expansion in entries related to public policy as well as updated coverage of scholarship published during 2009 and early 2010.  Our thanks to bibliographer Hillary S. Kativa for her work on the survey and to the University of Pennsylvania Press for making this project possible.

The editors of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia seek to make 50 additional assignments to complete our current phase of expansion. Now is the time to add your expertise to a resource used daily by teachers and students, journalists, scholars, and general readers.

To view the list of available assignments, link here:

Call for authors

To join more than 350 leading and emerging scholars who have already contributed to this peer-reviewed, digital-first project, let us know your choice of topics. Authors will have the opportunity to select feasible deadlines between January and March 2017 and will have the option of volunteering or receiving modest stipends. Prospective authors must have expertise in their chosen subjects demonstrated by previous publications and/or advanced training in historical research. To express interest, please send an email describing your qualifications and specifying topics of interest to the editor-in-chief, Charlene Mires, cmires@camden.rutgers.edu. No attachments, please. Graduate students, please include the name and email address of an academic reference.

The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia’s expansion is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mayor’s Fund for Philadelphia, and Poor Richard’s Charitable Trust. The scope of the project includes the city of Philadelphia and the surrounding region of southeastern Pennsylvania, South Jersey, and northern Delaware. 

Guidelines for writers:
https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/about/guidelines-for-writers/

Roster of authors:
https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/category/authors/

Editors and staff:
https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/about/editors/

The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia on Facebook offers an additional opportunity to follow new topics, join in discussion, and learn about our writers, editors, and civic partners. Link here to like us! Thanks to our digital media assistant Scott Hearn for creating our page as well as for managing our new Backgrounders feature and the Backgrounders Twitter feed.

Just published by Cornell University Press is Making Good Neighbors: Civil Rights, Liberalism, and Integration in Postwar Philadelphia, by Abigail Perkiss.  In addition to teaching history at Kean University, Perkiss lives in West Mount Airy and is the author of our essay on Northwest Philadelphia.

Here is the publisher’s description of the book:

In the 1950s and 1960s, as the white residents, real estate agents, and municipal officials of many American cities fought to keep African Americans out of traditionally white neighborhoods, Philadelphia’s West Mount Airy became one of the first neighborhoods in the nation where residents came together around a community-wide mission toward intentional integration. As West Mount Airy experienced transition, homeowners fought economic and legal policies that encouraged white flight and threatened the quality of local schools, seeking to find an alternative to racial separation without knowing what they would create in its place. In Making Good Neighbors, Abigail Perkiss tells the remarkable story of West Mount Airy, drawing on archival research and her oral history interviews with residents to trace their efforts, which began in the years following World War II and continued through the turn of the century.

The organizing principles of neighborhood groups like the West Mount Airy Neighbors Association (WMAN) were fundamentally liberal and emphasized democracy, equality, and justice; the social, cultural, and economic values of these groups were also decidedly grounded in middle-class ideals and white-collar professionalism. As Perkiss shows, this liberal, middle-class framework would ultimately become contested by more militant black activists and within WMAN itself, as community leaders worked to adapt and respond to the changing racial landscape of the 1960s and 1970s. The West Mount Airy case stands apart from other experiments in integration because of the intentional,organized, and long-term commitment on the part of WMAN to biracial integration and, in time, multiracial and multiethnic diversity. The efforts of residents in the 1950s and 1960s helped to define the neighborhood as it exists today.

James Gigantino, the author of our essay about Slavery and the Slave Trade, has published his new research about slavery and abolition in New Jersey in a book from the University of Pennsylvania Press, The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775-1865.

Congratulations, Jim!

Here is the publisher’s description of the book:

Contrary to popular perception, slavery persisted in the North well into the nineteenth century. This was especially the case in New Jersey, the last northern state to pass an abolition statute, in 1804. Because of the nature of the law, which freed children born to enslaved mothers only after they had served their mother’s master for more than two decades, slavery continued in New Jersey through the Civil War. Passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 finally destroyed its last vestiges.

The Ragged Road to Abolition chronicles the experiences of slaves and free blacks, as well as abolitionists and slaveholders, during slavery’s slow northern death. Abolition in New Jersey during the American Revolution was a contested battle, in which constant economic devastation and fears of freed blacks overrunning the state government limited their ability to gain freedom. New Jersey’s gradual abolition law kept at least a quarter of the state’s black population in some degree of bondage until the 1830s. The sustained presence of slavery limited African American community formation and forced Jersey blacks to structure their households around multiple gradations of freedom while allowing New Jersey slaveholders to participate in the interstate slave trade until the 1850s. Slavery’s persistence dulled white understanding of the meaning of black freedom and helped whites to associate “black” with “slave,” enabling the further marginalization of New Jersey’s growing free black population.

By demonstrating how deeply slavery influenced the political, economic, and social life of blacks and whites in New Jersey, this illuminating study shatters the perceived easy dichotomies between North and South or free states and slave states at the onset of the Civil War.

Just published by the University of Pennsylvania Press is Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn, by Jean R. Soderlund, who also is an associate editor of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia.  We hope you will join us in celebrating this important new book on October 22 at the Philadelphia History Museum.  Make sure to register in advance for a conversation with the author and an opportunity to view A Lost World, part of the Philadelphia: The Great Experiment documentary film series.

Here is the publisher’s description of Lenape Country:

In 1631, when the Dutch tried to develop plantation agriculture in the Delaware Valley, the Lenape Indians destroyed the colony of Swanendael and killed its residents. The Natives and Dutch quickly negotiated peace, avoiding an extended war through diplomacy and trade. The Lenapes preserved their political sovereignty for the next fifty years as Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, and English colonists settled the Delaware Valley. The European outposts did not approach the size and strength of those in Virginia, New England, and New Netherland. Even after thousands of Quakers arrived in West New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the late 1670s and ’80s, the region successfully avoided war for another seventy-five years.

Lenape Country is a sweeping narrative history of the multi­ethnic society of the Delaware Valley in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. After Swanendael, the Natives, Swedes, and Finns avoided war by focusing on trade and forging strategic alliances in such events as the Dutch conquest, the Mercurius affair, the Long Swede conspiracy, and English attempts to seize land. Drawing on a wide range of sources, author Jean R. Soderlund demonstrates that the hallmarks of Delaware Valley society—commitment to personal freedom, religious liberty, peaceful resolution of conflict, and opposition to hierarchical government—began in the Delaware Valley not with Quaker ideals or the leadership of William Penn but with the Lenape Indians, whose culture played a key role in shaping Delaware Valley society. The first comprehensive account of the Lenape Indians and their encounters with European settlers before Pennsylvania’s founding, Lenape Country places Native culture at the center of this part of North America.

We’re delighted to see our recently published essay about Admiral Wilson Boulevard, by Bart Everts, featured in the New Jersey edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Learn more about the author and the surprising history of the highway in Kevin Riordan’s column, “Camden’s Boulevard of Unfulfilled Dreams.”

The author of our essay about St. Patrick’s Day, Mikaela Maria, appeared on CBS3 news on March 17 to provide historical background about the holiday. Reporter David Spunt posted a portion of the interview and his additional tracking of St. Patrick’s Day in Philadelphia on the CBS3 website. (Reporters, contact us any time you need to reach our expert authors, and follow the @Backgrounders Twitter feed for additional context to the news.)

Congratulations to Inga Saffron of The Philadelphia Inquirer, who is the 2014 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Inga helped us launch the Encyclopedia with her theme essay on “Green Country Town,” which now anchors our growing coverage of topics related to the natural and built environment.