Philadelphia-based writers and publishers produced literary magazines as early as the 1740s, and, through the nineteenth century, the city was home to a succession of influential publications that supported many local authors and contributed to the establishment of a national literary culture. However, Philadelphia’s greatest prominence in literary publishing was achieved through a series of ...
Founded in 1800, the Magdalen Society of Philadelphia was the first institution in the United States concerned with caring for and reforming “fallen women.” A good many women in nineteenth-century Philadelphia apparently preferred prostitution for a variety of reasons, notably as a means of support in order to achieve economic independence from an oppressive family ...
During the 1820s, seeking to compete with New York and Baltimore in tapping western markets, business and political leaders in Philadelphia pushed for a state-funded canal to link Philadelphia with Pittsburgh. The result, an innovative yet peculiar patchwork of canals and railways known as the Main Line of Public Works, succeeded in moving freight and ...
Since the earliest European settlement in the seventeenth century, but especially from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, large houses constructed by elites in the Philadelphia region provided agreeable places to live that demonstrated social status. As architectural fashion and geographic distribution changed, mansions served as conspicuous symbols for elite Philadelphians and were a ...
Although early industrialization in the eighteenth century took root mainly in urban centers, a substantial share of the Philadelphia region’s early manufacturing sprang up in small towns outside the young city. The explanation for that pattern lay in the region’s great rivers, the Delaware and Schuylkill. As early as the eighteenth century, enterprising settlers saw ...
As the country's largest city, Philadelphia was well situated to chart the young republic's changing geography. Using its capacity to attract all the manufacturing elements necessary for successful publishing—printers binders, colorists, engravers and others—Philadelphia became the home of the nation's first full-time geographical publisher and soon became the center of the American map ...
The March of the Mill Children, the three-week trek from Philadelphia to New York by striking child and adult textile workers launched on July 7, 1903, by Mary Harris “Mother” Jones (1837-1930), trained public attention on the scourge of child labor and energized efforts to end it by ...
Market Street, one of Philadelphia’s primary east-west thoroughfares, originated in the 1682 city plan devised by William Penn (1644-1718) and Thomas Holme (1624-95) as High Street, one hundred feet wide and located at the longitudinal center of the city. Penn’s knowledge of plague and a devastating conflagration in 1660s London prompted the width of the ...
Philadelphia has had a greater influence on Martin Luther King Jr. holiday traditions than any city other than King’s birthplace, Atlanta. Observed on the third Monday in January since 1986, the federal holiday commemorates King (1929-68) and his civil rights activism. Ceremonies at the Liberty Bell and a focus on community service are among Philadelphia’s contributions to the annual ...
The Mason-Dixon Line, which settled a border dispute dating back to the founding of Philadelphia, is the southern boundary of Pennsylvania. Originally surveyed by Englishmen Charles Mason (1728-86) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-79), the line separates Pennsylvania from Maryland and West Virginia along the 39º43ˊ N. parallel and bounds Delaware along an arc that extends from Maryland to the Delaware ...
On September 6, 1949, Howard Barton Unruh (1921-2009), a 28-year-old World War II veteran, murdered thirteen people in twelve minutes along the 3200 block of River Road in Cramer Hill, a working-class neighborhood of Camden, New Jersey. Dubbed the "Walk of Death" by the press at the time, the shooting stunned Camden and attracted widespread news coverage and ...
The Philadelphia mayoralty, almost as old as the city itself, has changed markedly since its inception. When the post was created in the eighteenth century, citizens put up their own money in order to avoid having to serve. By the early 2000s, in contrast, candidates and supportive political action committees poured millions into mayoral elections. Tracing the office’s transformation offers ...
The U.S. medical publishing industry got its start in Philadelphia in the early nineteenth century, and the Philadelphia region has maintained its preeminence in the industry ever ...
In colonial Philadelphia, physicians and other medical practitioners contended with a difficult disease environment. The best medical efforts of the day were often inadequate or even harmful in the face of chronic illness and epidemic ...
Memorial Day, the last Monday in May, has been observed in the Greater Philadelphia area since the 1860s. The springtime holiday is considered the United States’ first multiracial, multiethnic commemoration and the kickoff of the summertime season. However, Memorial Day’s meanings and origin stories have been debated since its creation, and the holiday’s roots have been both contested and ...
Philadelphia offered seventeenth-century Mennonite immigrants a gateway to the New World and their first permanent settlement in what would become the United States. Despite decades of migration to other parts of the country, Mennonites not only persisted in the city but also grew and diversified. By the early years of the twenty-first century, Mennonites in ...
Henry Chapman Mercer (1856-1930) began collecting the tools of preindustrial America in 1897, just as they were becoming irretrievable even from the junk pile. He called his collection “Tools of the Nation Maker” to reflect their purpose and function in everyday life and the construction of the nation. The collection became the centerpiece for the ...
On May 18, 1778, four hundred British officers and elite Philadelphians embarked on a regatta down the Delaware River. This aquatic procession kicked off the Meschianza, an extravagant fete to honor General William Howe (1729-1814) and his brother, Admiral Richard Howe (1726-99), on their departure from North ...
Philadelphians have pursued significant scholarly and popular interests in meteorology, the scientific study of the atmosphere, since the eighteenth century. Pioneering individuals, including Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) and Reuben Haines (1786–1831), tracked meteorological data, and scientific societies made the practice increasingly systematic by the late nineteenth century. Short-term ...
Despite taking place in the American Southwest and Central America, the Mexican-American War (1845-48) had significant ties to the Philadelphia area. As one of the most populous urban centers in the country, the Delaware Valley became a hotbed of activity for one of the most controversial wars in American history. War between the United States ...
Greater Philadelphia’s economic ties to Mexico date to the era of European colonization. However, substantial Mexican immigration to the region started only in the 1970s, in Chester County’s mushroom growing towns, and in the 1990s in Philadelphia. Still, Mexicans became the region’s second-largest immigrant group in the early twenty-first century and were the largest immigrant ...
The Immaculata College women’s basketball teams of the early 1970s, known as the Mighty Macs, won the first three national tournaments of the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) in 1972, 1973, and 1974. Basketball brought the Immaculata community together, and Immaculata’s success showcased the high quality of basketball played by Philadelphia’s Catholic schools. ...
For centuries, the American military valued Philadelphia because of its size, manufacturing capability, and location. Bases and other military facilities in the region contributed to the United States’ national defense while also serving as economic engines for surrounding areas, creating jobs not just on the installations but also in surrounding communities. Closures, conversely, led to ...
As the social and political center of colonial Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and the surrounding region served as a microcosm for the complex and often convoluted history of the colonial and early national militia. The role of Philadelphia militia also illustrates the nature of militia units during the American Revolutionary War. The first militia in the region ...
The Philadelphia region historically produced fewer missionaries than other areas of North America. Through at least the early twentieth century New Englanders and southerners dominated the organized efforts of Christian churches to send out evangelists to convert others to the ...
The Model Cities program was the last major urban aid initiative of the Great Society domestic agenda of President Lyndon Johnson (1908-73). The legislation called for the coordination of federal services to redevelop the nation’s poorest and least-served urban communities. In 1967, North Philadelphia was designated for renewal under this program. Rather than serving to unify policies, ...
Modern Chivalry is a rich American novel, penned by the army chaplain, editor, Pennsylvania lawyer and judge, state legislator, and writer Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1748-1816), published in installments from 1792 to 1815. A social and political satire, it features two main characters who engage in humorous, competing impulses ridiculing the substance of life in the new republic, while examining ...
Although an unemployed Philadelphia salesman, Charles Darrow (1889-1967), was long credited as the creator of the world’s most popular board game, the origins of Monopoly stretch several decades before Parker Brothers purchased the rights from Darrow in 1935 and beyond the iconic streets of Atlantic City featured in the game. The proper history of Monopoly began in the early 1900s when a ...
Monument to Six Million Jewish Martyrs, at Sixteenth and Arch Streets at the start of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, is an 18-foot, 5-ton bronze sculpture by Nathan Rapoport (1911-1987). Dedicated on April 26, 1964, it was the first public monument memorializing victims of the Holocaust in North America and the only such monument in Philadelphia. In 2018, the surrounding triangular site, ...
The Morans, a multi-generational family of American artists, lived and worked in Philadelphia during the second half of the nineteenth century. Some contributed to the development of Philadelphia’s art world while others learned their trade locally then left to pursue professions elsewhere. Landscapes and seascapes were prominent among their subjects, although some of the Morans painted figural ...
In the eighteenth century, the Moravian church grew from a small group of Protestant dissenters in Germany to a global church with its most important American center at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, about fifty miles northwest of Philadelphia. The Moravians were best known for their experiments in communal living and their global missions, including a number of missions to Native Americans. In 1762, ...
Despite eras of suspicion and the relocation of many its members to the West during the nineteenth century, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as the LDS Church or Mormon Church) not only persisted in the Philadelphia region but also grew and spread, especially in the early twenty-first century. Strong evidence of such growth was the rise of a new temple in Center City ...
Established in the crucible of the American revolutionary era, Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church is recognized as the genesis of black religious organizing ...
Honored in various capacities since the late nineteenth century, Mother’s Day has deep connections to religion, war, feminism, and consumerism. For over a century, the meaning and purpose of Mother’s Day has been used and contested to celebrate individual mothers, enfranchise women, boost congregation numbers, and sell goods, among other ...
For more than sixty years, West Mount Airy, nestled in the northwest corner of Philadelphia, has earned a reputation as a national model of racial integration. In the years following World War II, when many American neighborhoods were experiencing rapid racial transition, homeowners in West Mount Airy worked to understand and put into practice the ideals of an integrated society. Through ...
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 ...
The Mummers Parade, an institution in Philadelphia since 1901, brought together many of the loosely organized groups of folk performers who roamed the streets each year between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day. Known variously as mummers, shooters, belsnickles, fantasticals, and callithumpians, these masqueraders traced their roots to immigrants from England, Sweden, and Germany who ...
Philadelphia’s fascination with Egyptian mummies began modestly, but by the end of the nineteenth century the city held some of the largest collections of mummies in the United States. Although some mummies had only a transient stay in Philadelphia or were lost to the ravages of time, many remained in museums to teach later generations ...
Murals in the Greater Philadelphia region, like those in the United States at large, belong to an extraordinarily diverse set of histories and genealogies, from indigenous rock carving to decorations for private houses to paintings in public buildings and community initiatives. Philadelphia-area murals have spanned this diverse heritage, including three particularly important mural movements: ...
A tumultuous, racially polarized Election Day in Philadelphia set the stage for the October 10, 1871, murder and martyrdom of Octavius V. Catto (b. 1839), an African American leader who struggled against segregation and discrimination in transportation, sports, politics, and ...
Founded in 2000, Philadelphia's Museum of the American Revolution was established with the intent of providing a single museum experience capturing the full story of the nation’s origins. While highlighting the promises of freedom, self-governance, and equal rights, the museum explored the contradictions within the American Revolution in all its ...
The Musical Fund Society, an important predecessor to the Philadelphia Orchestra, formed in 1820 to promote professional and amateur musical talent in Philadelphia and to aid indigent musicians and their families. Its active role in advancing the careers of exceptional performing musicians and composers continued into the twenty-first century, making the Musical Fund Society the ...
Philadelphia became the leading center of musical instrument making in colonial America and the early republic, reflecting the importance of music in everyday life. Early Philadelphia’s many German inhabitants, unlike the Quakers, openly embraced both secular and sacred music. Philadelphia became particularly noted for producing keyboard instruments and dominated American piano manufacturing ...
Islam, a religion founded by the Prophet Muhammad in the early seventh century in the Arabian Peninsula, has had a presence in the greater Philadelphia region since the colonial era, but the number of Muslims locally did not grow significantly until after the 1960s. By the 2010s, when Muslims in the United States numbered more ...
In 1849, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, following trends in medical education and research, created a museum of anatomy and pathology. After Thomas Dent Mütter (1811-59) donated his world-class collection in 1858, the expanded institution became the Mütter Museum—one of the best medical collections in the city and in the country. Together, as their ...
“My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free,” written in Philadelphia in 1759 by Francis Hopkinson (1737–91), is generally considered the first secular song written by a native-born American. Hopkinson, then a young graduate of the College of Philadelphia, later became a leading figure in Philadelphia music as well as a prominent patriot, signer of the ...
During the antebellum period, when Philadelphia was home to one the North’s largest free African American communities, the city’s Black leaders launched the national Colored Convention movement to address the hostility, discrimination, exclusion, and violence against African Americans by whites in northern cities. The national Colored Conventions held from 1830 to 1864 brought together ...
Created in 1988 by the Constitution Heritage Act, the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia played a role in debates about the future of the Independence Mall area of Independence National Historical Park as a tourist draw and as a historic site that represented American national identity even before it was built. From its opening in 2003, the NCC used exhibits, programs, and performance ...
Created in 1942 by a Philadelphian born in slavery, the annual National Freedom Day commemoration each February 1 calls attention to the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which ended slavery, and the continuing struggle for African American justice and ...
The roots of the National Guard can be traced to Philadelphia and congressional action during the city’s decade as the nation’s capital. The contributions and shortcomings of the colonial militia during the War of Independence, combined with cultural and political mistrust of standing military forces, spurred Congress to define how the United States would defend itself from foreign and ...
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