Help us grow! During the summer of 2012, The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia seeks volunteer authors to contribute essays related to the themes of City of Neighborhoods, the Cradle of Liberty, and the Workshop of the World. Prospective authors must have expertise in their chosen subjects demonstrated by previous publications and/or advanced training in historical research. For further information, visit our list of available topics.
Blog Author: cmires, page 2
Call for Volunteer Authors, Spring-Summer 2013
We are grateful to all of our volunteer authors and editors who are making The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia possible. Every day we receive hundreds of page views from information seekers, including teachers, students, and interested readers not just locally but also across the country and around the world. Our authors include the most prominent historians of Philadelphia as well as young scholars making their marks with new research and other subject experts.
For our next expansion, we seek volunteer authors to contribute essays related to the built and natural environment and regional events and traditions. We also seek volunteer authors to write about counties in the region, and some topics remain available to continue expansion of the themes of City of Neighborhoods, the Cradle of Liberty, and the Workshop of the World. For more information and to see a list of available topics, click here.
Check Us Out on “City’s Best”
AOL’s City’s Best captures the essence of our project in a post this week by Gerry Johnson:
Sure, it’s an encyclopedia, but don’t confuse this with an outdated dinosaur like Britannica, the relic from the ’80s that took up an entire wall in your grandfather’s living room. This project includes an online volume, making it relevant and accessible in today’s digital world and giving readers a voice in the content.
Johnson takes note of the energetic participation in the Greater Philadelphia Roundtable discussions, which are helping to shape the Encyclopedia’s contents. Next up is a discussion of Philadelphia as a “Holy Experiment,” on Thursday, April 14, at Friends Center, 1501 Cherry Street. To sign up, visit our Events page — and watch for the essay “Holy Experiment” on Sunday, April 10, in the Currents section of the Philadelphia Inquirer, on this web site, and on Newsworks.org.
City of Brotherly Love – Irony or Destiny?
This week we begin a year-long exploration of Philadelphia’s civic identity, and we hope to spark a widespread conversation with a series of thought-provoking essays published in partnership with the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and WHYY’s Newsworks.org. Often, these essays will be paired with distinctive works of art from the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. Across multiple online platforms, in the Sunday Currents section of the Inquirer, and through public events, we invite you to reflect on the famous phrases that have defined our city — first up, “The City of Brotherly Love.” At Newsworks.org, you’ll find the discussion underway with video interviews.
These activities also help us to build The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. We envision each of the thematic essays as a gateway for expanding layers of content, and we will invite participants in our public event series — The Greater Philadelphia Roundtable — to help us determine topics to represent each theme. To see what’s coming up in the year ahead, check out our events calendar.
Please join us for this unprecedented investigation of the ideas and themes that lie at the heart of our shared history. (If you need more incentive, our first event this Wednesday, March 23, will be followed by a reception co-sponsored by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities.) Our thanks to the Pennsylvania Humanities Council for support of the Greater Philadelphia Roundtable series, and to the many civic partners who have helped us to organize these events.
Comment period extended for the Knight News Challenge – you can help
Thanks to everyone who has added comments, questions, and suggestions to our proposal in the Knight News Challenge. The competition closes this Saturday, March 17, [update: Thursday, March 29], so please continue to participate – you may also reply to others who have posted their comments. Here’s the link:
http://newschallenge.tumblr.com/post/18812768763/backgrounder-blasts-from-the-past-for-busy-reporters
As you have seen from previous announcements, our proposal would expand the Encyclopedia project with news-related content and provide historical backgrounders to journalists, via Twitter. We think this will also interest teachers, policy makers, and everyone who seeks connections between the past and the present. Over the last couple of weeks, we have been experimenting with the Twitter feed, which is available to follow here:
https://twitter.com/#!/Backgrounders
Thank you for your participation – as always!
Delving into Philadelphia’s “Epic Fails” with WHYY
While so many this week are remembering the Titanic on the 100th anniversary of that epic disaster, WHYY turned its attention to “epic failures” in Philadelphia’s history. We helped by putting reporter Peter Crimmins in touch with Michael Zuckerman, the author of our “City of Firsts” essay, and our associate editor Stephanie Wolf. Their insights into such memorable events as the Bicentennial and Sesquicentennial were featured along with others’ comments about the Tram to Nowhere, the MOVE bombing, and other “epic failures.” What would you add? Visit Newsworks to join the discussion. (And keep coming back to the Encyclopedia – we will add essays on the Sesquicentennial and Centennial celebrations this summer.)
Green Country Town: Imagining the Future
One of our goals in the Encyclopedia project is to connect the past with the present, and another is to inspire forward-looking responses to public issues. These goals certainly were evident at our May 10 roundtable program on “The Green Country Town,” which began with this phrase from William Penn but also generated a lively discussion of ideas for the future. In addition to the topic suggestions we received for the Encyclopedia (now posted with our other topics nominations), our comment cards yielded a number of suggestions for city parks. Among them:
- Use parks to teach horticultural plant care.
- Make Logan Circle a pedestrian park again.
- Redesign Independence Mall.
- Use vacant land for temporary sculptures and parks.
- Close Kelly Drive to traffic.
- Connect green spaces in the city with signage or deliberate planting or physical connections between green/open spaces.
These are just a few of the ideas that emerged from the audience of nearly 100 people who attended the program, held at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. Watch for a complete summary of the evening’s discussion to be posted later this month — and visit our Events page to register for the next opportunity to help shape the Encyclopedia project. Thanks to all who made the “Green Country Town” roundtable such a great success.
Holmesburg Helps Us Make History
Thanks to our new friends in Holmesburg for hosting our first branch library information table. We collected many new ideas for the Encyclopedia as people in this active library came in to do homework, browse for new books and DVDs, and catch up with their neighbors. The suggestions we received are posted on our “Nominate a Topic” page, and the suggestion box will remain at the library for the rest of February. For more information sessions at branch libraries this month, check out our events list.
If you like us, please LIKE us
The deadline for comments to our Knight News Challenge proposal has been extended to March 29. Please see the links in the next post – it only takes two clicks to “like” us, and we also welcome comments, suggestions, and questions. This week we have more than doubled our “likes” – thank you! This is vital to our chances of moving to the next round of consideration.
Join the Encyclopedia List-Serv
We are pleased to announce the creation of a list-serv to build and sustain the growing community of interest in The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. Anyone who would like to receive periodic updates about the project is invited to join the list. To join, send an e-mail to Howard Gillette at hfg@camden.rutgers.edu or add a comment expressing your interest to this post.