The American Civil Liberties Union, a national legal organization dedicated to the defense and preservation of civil liberties in the United States, has been organized in the Philadelphia region since 1951, when chapters formed in Pennsylvania and New Jersey as part of a move toward establishing branches throughout the nation. Both chapters played a role in the civil liberties history of the ...
The Armstrong Association of Philadelphia was a social-service organization established early in the twentieth century to assess and address the needs of the African American community. Through its efforts to improve education, housing, and health, the organization addressed social and economic issues facing African Americans. Founded in 1908, the association formed as a branch of ...
The Children’s Aid Society of Pennsylvania was founded in 1882 by a group of predominantly women volunteers to address social issues plaguing the city of Philadelphia, such as drunkenness, child homelessness, and rampant crime. Child welfare advocate Helen W. Hinckley led the charge, assisted by Cornelia Hancock (1840–1928), who had volunteered as a nurse in ...
In the 1790s the Democratic-Republican Societies emerged and helped to establish the precedent in the United States for political organization and government opposition at the local and regional level. In April 1793, in Philadelphia, the capital of the United States, Peter Muhlenberg (1746-1807) and Michael Leib (1760-1822) founded the first of these societies, the German Republican Society of ...
The Free Society of Traders, a joint-stock company founded by a small group of English Quakers in 1681, was organized with the intention of directing and dominating the economic life of colonial ...
Freemasonry, one of the oldest fraternal societies in the world, arrived in America with migrants from England to Philadelphia, Boston, and other places in the British colonies. The fraternity in the Philadelphia area became one of the strongest of all American grand lodges and created one of the finest examples of Masonic architecture in the ...
Friends Neighborhood Guild, a Quaker-founded settlement house and neighborhood center in North Philadelphia, for more than a century has helped residents confront urban issues by offering services, participating in neighborhood redevelopment, and acting as a broker for interactions across ethnic and class ...
In 1970, Philadelphian Maggie Kuhn (1905-95), a white middle-class woman and frustrated victim of mandatory retirement at age 65, formed an anti-ageist organization called the Gray Panthers. From challenging mandatory retirement to critiquing ageist media depictions of older Americans, the Gray Panthers fought to recreate the image, expectations, and roles of middle-class retirees in American ...
Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Americans started establishing historical societies to collect and preserve historical materials. In 1815, Philadelphia became the fourth U.S. city to host a historical society, the American Philosophical Society’s Historical and Literary Committee. The city’s religious tolerance and central location made it a natural location for religious and ...
Established in 1824 to gather and protect historical materials, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP) developed from a learned society and gentlemen’s club into a professional institution with a robust publication program and an extensive research library. Over the decades, the society also expanded its activities to support education and public history programs and coordinate ...
The Women’s National Indian Association and the Indian Rights Association, both founded in Philadelphia in the late nineteenth century, led the way in setting a national agenda concerning the plight of Native Americans. They continued a local tradition of reform movements promoting rights and ...
In the early 1900s thousands in greater Philadelphia belonged to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)—a militant, leftist labor union. Local 8, which organized the city’s longshoremen, was the largest and most powerful IWW branch in the Mid-Atlantic and the IWW’s most racially inclusive branch. The organization and its ideals lived on, revived in recent decades by activists in ...
In Philadelphia in 1727 Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) founded the Junto as a club for “mutual improvement,” inviting acquaintances to meet weekly to discuss intellectual and moral issues. From these discussions emerged inspiration for many Philadelphia institutions including the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, a fire company, and the University of ...
The Knights of Labor, the first national industrial union in the United States, was founded in Philadelphia on December 9, 1869, by Uriah Stephens (1821-82) and eight other Philadelphia garment cutters. Intended to overcome the limitations of craft unions, the organization was designed to include all those who toiled with their hands. By mid-1886 nearly one million laborers called themselves ...
On June 12, 1780, Esther De Berdt Reed (1746-80), penned a broadside entitled “Sentiments of an American Woman” in order to rouse her fellow women to participate in the Revolutionary cause. As a result, dozens of women responded to Reed’s call, forming the Ladies Association of Philadelphia, a group of upper-class women who led a door-to-door campaign raising money for Washington’s ...
With a handful of like-minded associates, the twenty-one-year-old Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) formed a self-improvement club in 1727. By reading, conversing, and improving their minds, members of the Junto believed they would also improve their circumstances, their social position, and their community. Four years later, much the same group institutionalized edification and self-improvement by ...
Philadelphia’s literary societies typically have combined the social with the intellectual and artistic, with ongoing shifts in the balance between the two. As descendants succeeded the founding members, they prized the relationships and traditions handed down over generations, perhaps more than the original literary pretext of the organization. Philadelphia has often been described as a ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Founded in 1787 as the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, the Pennsylvania Prison Society quickly became a leading advocate for the humane and salutary treatment of the incarcerated. From the restructuring of the Walnut Street Jail in the eighteenth century, to the construction and oversight of the Eastern State Penitentiary in ...
Founded in 1860, the Philadelphia Sketch Club became one of the oldest and longest continually operating American sketch clubs. Open to amateurs, students, and professionals, it became integral to Philadelphia’s artistic history. Initially founded as a weekly workshop by Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) students and alumni, who sought drawing training and criticism, ...
Philadelphia, long considered the “cradle of liberty” in America, was also the “cradle of political parties” that emerged in American politics during the 1790s, when the city was also the fledgling nation’s ...
The Socialist Party had a wide-ranging impact on the Philadelphia region, from its influence in garment unions, to free speech battles during the First World War, to the administration of the industrial city of Reading in Berks ...
As industrialization began changing the nature of work and society in the United States during the 1820s and 1830s, workers concerned with their low wages, long hours, and the growing power of employers organized to fight for what they believed to be the true ideals of the republic. During this period, Philadelphia workers organized trade ...
The Union League of Philadelphia, organized in 1862 as a political club for the support of the Union cause during the Civil War, developed into the premier urban social club of Philadelphia. Over time, it also became an important supporter of Republican political candidates and policies locally and nationally, acquired a significant collection of art and sculpture, and established various relief ...
Military veterans began organizing in the Philadelphia area during the waning days of the Revolutionary War. As the Continental Army disbanded, its veterans often met at City Tavern and the first general meeting of America’s first veterans’ organization, the General Society of the Cincinnati, occurred there on May 4, 1784. Just as regularly, however, veterans ...
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 Whig Party thrived in the Philadelphia region from its founding in 1834 through its demise twenty years later. The party, which emerged from the National Republicans in opposition to Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) and his Democratic Party, claimed the Whig name from the patriots of the American Revolution. Whigs controlled Philadelphia government through electoral victories and circulation of ...
The woman’s club movement began throughout the United States in the late nineteenth century. Although initially focused on self-improvement, women’s clubs in the Philadelphia region as in the nation quickly extended their goals to include community activism. Drawing upon contemporary assumptions about the inherent differences between men and women, leaders of the club movement argued ...
The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), an international anti-war group organized in the aftermath of World War I, had a strong presence in the Philadelphia region due to the area’s Quaker and pacifist heritage. The Pennsylvania state branch of the league formed in January 1920 with 250 members. Throughout the 1920s, the branch grew to about five thousand ...
The Working Men’s Party of Philadelphia emerged in 1828 out of discontent with societal and workplace changes since the turn of the century. It formed out of the workingmen’s movement of the late 1820s and sought broad reforms. Although short-lived, the effort contributed significantly to injecting politics with working-class issues, many of which became prominent ...
Connecting the Past with the Present, Building Community, Creating a Legacy