Beverly C. Tomek is the author of Pennsylvania Hall: A ‘Legal Lynching’ in the Shadow of the Liberty Bell (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Colonization and Its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania (NYU Press, 2011). She earned a Ph.D. in history at the University of Houston and teaches at the University of Houston-Victoria.
With a deep abolitionist history and large and vibrant free Black population, Philadelphia and the surrounding region played a prominent role in the famed Underground Railroad. The loosely connected organization of white and Black people helped hide and guide enslaved people as they sought freedom in the North and Canada. According to one of the ...
MOVE, a controversial Philadelphia-based organization often associated with the Black Power movement, combined philosophies of Black nationalism and anarcho-primitivism to advocate a return to a hunter-gatherer society and avoidance of modern medicine and technology. The group’s very loud and public quest for racial justice, as well as its strong views on animal rights, led to ...
Immediately after passing the nation’s first gradual abolition law in 1780, Pennsylvania became a haven for enslaved people escaping from neighboring states, putting the state at odds with slaveholders throughout the South and causing tension with Maryland in particular. Though New Jersey also attracted escaping slaves, and whites in both states had mixed reactions to ...
As Pennsylvania and other northern states became havens for enslaved people who sought to escape bondage, free blacks and sympathetic whites organized Vigilance Associations, which operated Vigilance Committees (sometimes called Vigilant Committees) to protect fugitives and potential kidnap victims. After black abolitionist David Ruggles (1810-49) formed the first such organization in New York ...
The first successful women’s magazine and most widely circulated magazine in the antebellum United States, Godey’s Lady’s Book offered fashion illustrations and advice, literary pieces, and articles on current events and popular culture. Founded in Philadelphia in 1830 by Louis Antoine Godey (1804-1878) and edited for four decades by Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879), the magazine provided a ...
The Saturday Evening Post, one of the oldest magazines in the United States, originated in Philadelphia in 1821 as a four-page weekly newspaper printed on the same equipment as Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette. After switching to a magazine format in 1870, the Post grew in the twentieth century to reach more than a million readers each week with articles, commentary, fiction, and ...
Pennsylvania gained a reputation as the birthplace of American abolition soon after the American Revolution, but that status caused unrest as debates over slavery grew contentious in the antebellum years. The tension led to a number of riots, one of the most notable being the 1838 destruction of Pennsylvania Hall, a meeting place for antislavery groups on Sixth Street about two blocks north ...
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