From Indianapolis to Philadelphia

Photograph of students with speaker on video screen
Students from University High School of Indiana learned about Philadelphia and the Atlantic World through a video chat with Editor-in-Chief Charlene Mires. (Photograph by Christopher Hindsley)

Could there be a better city than Philadelphia for exploring “how a community or city modernizes yet maintains its roots from the past?” This question is at the heart of a January Term experience for students from University High School of Indiana, who have been reading selections from The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia to prepare for their January 17-20, 2023, visit to the City of Brotherly Love. The Encyclopedia’s editor-in-chief, Charlene Mires, spoke with the students by video prior to their trip.

Follow along with some of the students’ destinations with these essays:

Welcome to our young friends and their teachers from metro Indianapolis!

From Our Authors: New Book Examines the Story of Intentional Integration in West Mount Airy

Perkiss-bookJust 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.

From Our Authors: New Book on Slavery and Abolition in New Jersey

NJSlaveryBookJames 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.

From Our Editors: New Book Explores Delaware Valley Before William Penn

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:

Lenape CountryIn 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.

 

In Memoriam: Gary Nash

We are so saddened to learn the news of the passing of our good friend and colleague, Gary Nash, a consulting editor of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. While Gary spent his career in California at UCLA, he never lost touch with Philadelphia, the city where he was born. Among many other works of scholarship, Gary’s research opened new ways of understanding Philadelphia with Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania 1681-1726 (published in 1968), The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (1979), Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840 (1988), First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (2002), and many other books and articles.

An engaged scholar who promoted excellence in education and public history, Gary also played a pivotal role in significant Philadelphia projects. He amplified critical needs for inclusive history, particularly by intervening in the public interpretation of the Liberty Bell and the President’s House site to assure the recognition of enslaved Africans and the complexities of freedom in early America. And in 2007, he amplified the need for a comprehensive, public, and inclusive history of Philadelphia — The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, which continues as an active project today. In addition to serving as a valued adviser and advocate, he wrote essays about the Cradle of Liberty and the Liberty Bell.

To learn more about Gary Nash’s life and career, we invite you to read the tribute published by the UCLA History Department, linked here. Moreover, we encourage you to honor his life’s work by following his example of commitment to Philadelphia history.

In the Cradle of Industry & Liberty: A History of Manufacturing in Philadelphia – New Book by Encyclopedia Contributor

Philadelphia’s manufacturing history is the subject of a new book by archivist and historian Jack McCarthy, best known to readers of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia as the author of many of our music topics. In the Cradle of Industry & Liberty: A History of Manufacturing in Philadelphia, published for the Manufacturing Alliance of Philadelphia by HPN Books, traces local manufacturing from the colonial period to the transition to machine-based factory production methods, the development of manufacturing on a massive scale, and the dramatic downsizing in manufacturing that led to the city’s transition to a post-industrial, service-based economy. This month, McCarthy will talk about the topics of his book at a meeting of the Philadelphia Association of Tour Guides on January 11 and at the annual dinner of the Philadelphia Chapter of the Society for Industrial Archaeology on January 20.

In the News: Encyclopedia Author Featured on St. Patrick’s Day

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.)

Connecting the Past with the Present, Building Community, Creating a Legacy