Workshop of the World Copy
As the population of the region was shifting economic and technical advancement also prompted vast changes. Learn more ( Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries ) How will they know? How will future generations of Philadelphians have any inkling that their city once thrived as a premier manufacturing center, the fine products issuing from its shops, mills, and plants prized by customers around the nation and the world?
There are few traces left of this history—abandoned factory buildings here and there—and the acres and acres of empty lots that form the landscape of decaying neighborhoods that once brimmed with industrial sites and jobs give no clues. The curious onlooker might ask: What was here? What happened? Delving into the past is to find that the decline of Philadelphia manufacture is directly related to its rise, flip sides in effect of the same coin: of the strengths and weaknesses of a particular kind of industrial system that graced the city, one that rested by and large on the production of quality goods.
A rich agricultural hinterland, an enterprising merchant community, and ready markets for the products processed and crafted in the city transformed Philadelphia into a major commercial entrepôt within a half century of its founding by William Penn in 1681. By the time that delegates convened in Philadelphia in 1776 to write the Declaration of Independence, the city had become second only to London in both the volume and value of the goods that entered and left its port. Philadelphia’s commercial fortunes plummeted, however, in the early nineteenth century as the city lost trade to its chief rival, New York. Rather than enter a long-term period of economic stagnation, Philadelphia fortunately embarked on a new direction that would mark its history for the next 150 years: prospering as a major manufacturing center.
Chronicling Philadelphia’s rise to industrial supremacy is difficult since no single invention, businessperson, event, or circumstance can be designated as a prime mover. Thousands of initiatives occurred as a steady mushrooming of varied enterprise. The individual efforts do add up to a whole, and at least four features characterized Philadelphia’s industrial structure in its heyday.
During World War II, a Philadelphia worker gauges a ship propeller on a lathe at Baldwin Locomotive Works, which also produced tanks and locomotives for the war effort. (1942 photograph, Office of War Information, Library of Congress.)
First is product diversity. Never a one or two-industry city, Philadelphia became known for its fine textiles and garments, boots and shoes, hats, iron and steel, metal items, machine tools and hardware, locomotives, saws, rugs, furniture, shipbuilding, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, glass, cutlery, jewelry, paints and varnishes, printing and publishing, medical instruments, and so much more.
Second is diversity of work settings. Goods were made in homes, craft shops, sweat shops, small manufactories with hand and foot-driven machinery, water and steamed-powered mills, and multidimensional plants. In their manufacture, some products even passed through several of these settings from initial processing of raw materials to final finishing.
Third is specialization in processes and products. Philadelphia manufacturers did not prosper by competing with mass producers of goods in other parts of the country, but rather by operating in niche markets fashioning high-quality wares or by concentrating in single aspects of production (in textiles, for example, separate establishments emerged respectively to spin special fibers, weave fine clothe and dye elaborate fabrics). Even in the case of Philadelphia’s famous (but relatively few) large firms, such as Baldwin Locomotive, Stetson Hat, and Midvale Steel, specialty production remained the hallmark. Baldwin rarely made two engines alike, meeting particular orders of rail carriers for locomotives with highly specific dimensions and powers; Stetson produced the finest of felt and straw hats and sold them in beautifully-made boxes with silk insides and adorned with the renowned Stetson logo; and Midvale produced a specialty grey steel and took orders for specialty castings and forgings (unlike its other Pennsylvania rivals, U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel).
Fourth is the prevalence of small-to-medium-sized, family-owned-and-managed manufacturing concerns that were reliant on highly skilled workforces. Large, corporate enterprises with armies of mass assembly workers did not form a part of Philadelphia’s economic skyline.
A number of factors contributed to Philadelphia’s particular industrial history. An abundance of skilled labor allowed for specialty production. The absence of a powerful river-way with waterfalls initially limited the building of large-scale, fully mechanized factories. Philadelphia custom producers further chose not to compete with manufacturers of cheap, standardized products in other cities; their small size afforded a flexibility that allowed them to shift into new product lines and profit in niche markets. Finally, Philadelphia’s elite tended to invest in banks, canal and railroad construction, and mining rather than in local industry; this created a capital scarcity for manufacture in the city, another limit on large-scale ventures, and a vacuum that enterprising native-born and immigrant skilled men could fill in establishing their relatively small custom manufactories.
Although the first use of the label “Workshop of the World” cannot be precisely determined, by the first decade of the twentieth century, the phrase was regularly attached to Philadelphia in journals and books and in the pronouncements of business and civic leaders. However, the success and prosperity that marked Philadelphia industry crested in the 1920s when declines occurred in textile and garment manufacture and in shipbuilding—although new production of radios and electrical appliances sustained employment. The Great Depression saw retrenchments everywhere as unemployment at its peak reached more than 40 percent of the city’s work force. Military orders during World War II then boosted production, but a massive enduring decline in industrial jobs occurred thereafter. At a postwar height in 1953, 359,000 Philadelphians were employed in manufacture, 45 percent of the city’s entire labor force; in our own times, the number of industrial jobs has dramatically fallen to below 30,000, 5 percent of the total. These figures reflect the greater deindustrialization of the United States, though the downward spiral for Philadelphia far exceeded the nation as a whole; since the early 1950s, overall manufacturing jobs have declined from a high of 19.4 million to 14 million, from 32 percent of all employment to 10 percent.
As Philadelphia’s industrial ascent had a particular cast, so did the descent. Philadelphia did not lose manufacturing jobs because national corporations purchased and liquidated the facilities of local firms to undo competition; nor because financiers breezily bought, broke up and sold firms to make paper profits; nor because of foreign competition and the flight of businesses to low-wage areas in the U.S. and abroad—as happened in other American cities and regions over the course of the twentieth century. Rather, Philadelphia’s manufactories closed their doors because of changes in consumerism. Synthetic fibers, for example, wiped out Philadelphia’s famed silk hosiery trade; parquet flooring and wall-to-wall shag carpeting decimated the city’s tapestry rug industry; men stopped wearing fine felt hats to the detriment of Stetson; and cheap hardware merchandized by Sears Roebuck and other mass distributors cut deeply into the sales of the magnificently crafted and durable saws of the Disston Saw Company.
Mass production and marketing systems promoting shifts in consumer preferences to inexpensive disposal products proved the death knell of Philadelphia industry as the city’s custom manufacturers—slow, unable or unwilling to react—failed to compete with standardized producers of goods elsewhere in the county and across the globe. The loss was great not just for the city and its citizens; greater awareness and respect for workmanship and quality was lost as well.
Walter Licht is Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include Getting Work: Philadelphia, 1840-1950 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992).
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Sugar and Sugar Refining
Fueled by extensive trade with sugar islands in the Caribbean, Philadelphia became a leading center of sugar refining in colonial America. Although the city lost its dominance of the industry to New York by the end of the eighteenth century, local sugar refining continued to expand, particularly under the Pennsylvania Sugar Refining Company (“Penn Sugar”). The rise of national sugar conglomerates and increasing production of sugar extracted from sugar beets proved to be ⇒ Read More
France and the French
Philadelphia’s long connection with France and the Francophone world took shape over several centuries. French settlers, visitors, expatriates, and refugees contributed significantly to Philadelphia’s early sociopolitical development. Over the years, Philadelphia received refugees from the French Revolution and French-speakers from the Caribbean and Africa who made lasting cultural contributions. Philadelphians celebrated Bastille Day, erected a ⇒ Read More
Mercer Museum
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 ⇒ Read More
Lauren Cooper
Lauren Cooper is the Interpretive Planner at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. She completed a master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania, and has worked at cultural institutions throughout Philadelphia.
Greater Philadelphia Region
Variously defined as key elements of its identity have shifted over time, the Greater Philadelphia region has been an especially dynamic and unusually fragmented entity compared to other U.S. metropolitan areas. The region not only crosses multiple state lines; it is further divided into hundreds of extremely small communities, many of which date back to ⇒ Read More
Historical Commission votes to remove Marconi Plaza Columbus statue
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Courthouses (County)
The prominent locations of courthouses in the architectural landscape of Philadelphia and the surrounding region mirrored their positions as cornerstones of civic life. By the eighteenth century, courthouses with clock towers and cupolas defined city squares and communal networks. As democracy and citizenship expanded in the years that followed, pressures on the courts rose accordingly ⇒ Read More
Polish Settlement and Poland
A few aristocratic Polish emigres—the Revolutionary War hero Thaddeus Kosciusko (1746-1817), for example—found their way to Philadelphia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Large-scale Polish immigration to the Philadelphia region, however, began only after the Civil War, reaching its climax in the years immediately preceding World War I. Between 1870 and 1920, at ⇒ Read More
Black Futures Campaign is crowdfunding to buy Dox Thrash house
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Children’s Theater
In Philadelphia, the theater capital of the United States until New York overtook it in the 1830s, an array of children’s theater activity has long sparked creativity and imagination, informed, and educated young people with live performances. Early staged productions for the entire family increasingly gave way to child-specific theater combining education with entertainment. In the twentieth century, the children’s theater company grew to include commercial and non–commercial professional productions, non–professional ⇒ Read More
Main Line of Public Works
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 ⇒ Read More
Philadelphia Pepper Pot
Philadelphia pepper pot, a spicy stew-like dish comprised of tripe, other inexpensive cuts of meat, vegetables, and an abundance of spices and hot peppers, is related to the pepper pot soup of the Caribbean region. By the early nineteenth century, the dish had developed characteristics making it uniquely Philadelphian. Philadelphia pepper pot became popular throughout ⇒ Read More
Basketball (Professional)
Professional basketball has a long history in the Philadelphia region, from the first professional league, formed in 1898, to the National Basketball Association (NBA). The city produced memorable teams, including the Warriors and 76ers, and Hall of Fame players such as Wilt Chamberlain (1936-99) and Dawn Staley (b. 1970). Philadelphia teams and players from the Philadelphia region contributed ⇒ Read More
Gray Panthers
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 society. Inspired by social ⇒ Read More
Civil War Museum of Philadelphia
Founded in 1888 by veteran officers of the Civil War, the Civil War Museum of Philadelphia was a monument to those who fought to preserve the United States in the face of rebellion. Originally known as the War Library and Museum, the institution operated in several sites in Philadelphia before settling in a townhouse near ⇒ Read More
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Theresa Altieri Taplin
Theresa Altieri Taplin earned an M.A. in history from Villanova University. She is a Certified Archivist and museum professional in Philadelphia.
City Councils (Philadelphia)
Since Philadelphia’s founding, a council or—for over a century—councils have been central to the work of municipal government. But the way councils have been chosen, the roles they have performed, and the composition of the people who have served on them have changed markedly since the start of the eighteenth century. From the unrepresentative “closed ⇒ Read More
Aeronautics and Aerospace Industry
From the aeronauts of the early republic to the jets, missiles, and rockets of the Cold War era, the growth and development of the aeronautical and aerospace industry in the Philadelphia region has exemplified a gradual shift from amateur pursuits to a more formalized industry and infrastructure. Across several centuries, the city and surrounding suburbs ⇒ Read More
Pietism
Pietism was the source for much of the early religious vitality and diversity in Philadelphia. Between 1683 and 1800 thousands of Pietists crossed the Atlantic Ocean looking for a place where they could follow their conscience in religious matters. Pennsylvania became an attractive destination thanks to the goodwill fostered by William Penn’s missionary journey to ⇒ Read More
Cumberland County, New Jersey
Cumberland County, New Jersey, located on the Delaware Bay about thirty-five miles south of Philadelphia, was formed from the southeastern part of Salem County in 1748. Its location and natural attributes led to a three-faceted economy that bridged centuries: rich farmland supported agriculture; two tidal rivers and the Delaware Bay provided a maritime economy; and ⇒ Read More
Musical Instrument Making
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 from 1775 until ⇒ Read More
Former Mayor Goode: Philly must apologize for MOVE bombing 35 years ago
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Emily Krichbaum
Emily Krichbaum is an Ohio-based writer and historian whose Ph.D. dissertation was about the Gray Panthers. She has published work on Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the Older Women’s League, and other subjects.
Virginia B. Price
Virginia B. Price is a public historian based in the Washington, D.C., area. She received her M.A. from the College of William and Mary and a Master of Architectural History from the University of Virginia.
German Reformed Church
From the beginning of the eighteenth century, the German Reformed Church played a role in developing the religious landscape of southeastern Pennsylvania. Along with other Reformed churches, the German Reformed Church provided a spiritual home for German immigrants and their children that, over time, also served as a medium for adapting to American culture even ⇒ Read More
Darin D. Lenz
Darin D. Lenz, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of History at Fresno Pacific University.
Caroline Golab
Caroline Golab is a cultural geographer and historian specializing in urbanization and immigration. Her Immigrant Destinations (Temple University Press 1977) is a seminal work that demonstrates the correlation between immigrant populations and industrial work patterns within and across America’s cities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is a former Commonwealth Lecturer specializing in Pennsylvania ⇒ Read More
Mummers leader says he wants to work with Mayor Kenney to keep parade
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Time running out to save historic ‘MLK House’ in Camden
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Lorene Cary makes stage debut with ‘My General Tubman’
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$10M grant for Circuit Trails project will connect cyclists in Montco to Morris Arboretum
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Top Ten Topics for 2019
Happy new year! Join our most frequent users by visiting the top ten most-read topics in The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia during 2019: 10. Broad Street Bullies, by Karen Guenther 9. Immigration 1870-1930, by Barbara Klaczynska 8. Yellow Fever, by Simon Finger 7. Native American-Pennsylvania Relations, 1681-1753, by Michael Goode 6. March of the Mill ⇒ Read More
City to Mummers judges: Please be nicer
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Colonial Revival
During the late nineteenth century, a time of great tension, new immigration, and accelerating industrialization, white Euro-Americans sought comfort in the past, specifically the Colonial and Revolutionary eras. In their romanticized interpretation, the founding era was defined by simplicity, domestic industry, and unity—qualities in direct contrast to the tumultuous Civil War and its aftermath. They ⇒ Read More
Great Wagon Road
Following routes established by Native Americans, the Great Wagon Road enabled eighteenth-century travel from Philadelphia and its hinterlands westward to Lancaster and then south into the backcountry of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. In search of affordable farmland and economic opportunity, thousands of Scots Irish, Germans, and others left the Philadelphia region to establish farms, ⇒ Read More
Moravians
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 ⇒ Read More
Turnpikes
From their earliest introduction in Pennsylvania in the late eighteenth century to their modern incarnations as high-speed highways, turnpikes have expanded Philadelphia’s reach to points west and linked the region with other commercial centers and suburbs of the eastern seaboard. Beginning with the first turnpike in the United States, a sixty-two-mile paved toll road from ⇒ Read More
Dinosaurs and Paleontology (Study of Fossils and Prehistoric Life)
The Philadelphia area has played a major part in paleontology, the study of past life through fossils, yielding discoveries that have helped to illuminate millions of years of existence. In the early 1800s, Philadelphia became the birthplace of vertebrate paleontology, the study of ancient back-boned animals, and the Academy of Natural Sciences became a hub ⇒ Read More
Milestone: 650 Topics Published
We’re pleased to announce that The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia has reached a new milestone of 650 topics published online. The 650th topic, published on December 27, 2019, is Turnpikes, written by the encyclopedia’s Editor in Chief, Charlene Mires. Our publishing during 2019 was supported by generous contributions by individual donors, including those who gave ⇒ Read More
Austin Wisser
Austin Wisser graduated with a Master of Arts in the Applied History Program from Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania and holds a bachelor’s degree in teaching seventh to twelfth-grade social studies from the same university. He is the author of “In Defense: One German-Language Newspaper’s Promotion of German-American Culture and Ideals During World War I,” published ⇒ Read More
Poetry and Poets
Philadelphia boasts a rich history of poetry—poetry that describes intimate life experiences as well as an evolving history of immigration and colonization, urban growth and decline. Indeed, from the colonial era to the twenty-first century, poetry often stood at the center of civic life, fully engaged with the public sphere. The poetry of Philadelphia, reflecting ⇒ Read More
Trenton, New Jersey
The state capital of New Jersey and the seat of Mercer County, Trenton parlayed its strategic location on the Delaware River into becoming one of the most productive industrial sites in the Greater Philadelphia region. A small city of only 7.65 square miles located halfway between Philadelphia and New York, Trenton conveyed its considerable status ⇒ Read More
Fever 1793 (Novel)
Published in 2000, Fever 1793 is a young adult novel that tells the story of a 14-year-old girl named Mattie Cook, who fights to survive the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 in Philadelphia. The historical novel by Laurie Halse Anderson (b. 1961) depicts 1793 America through the eyes of Mattie, who, when the fever hits ⇒ Read More
Megan Walter
Megan Walter is completing her M.A. in English at Rutgers University-Camden. While in elementary school, she wrote her first-ever book report on Fever 1793 and the historic significance of the epidemic. After receiving her B.A. in English Education, she assigned the novel to her own students while teaching high school English at a public school ⇒ Read More
Elegy (for MOVE and Philadelphia)
In “Elegy (for MOVE and Philadelphia),” Philadelphia poet and playwright Sonia Sanchez (b. 1934) questions the paradoxical nature of a city that seemingly set itself and its people ablaze. Written in response to the 1985 police bombing of the radical group MOVE and the subsequent fire that occurred on the 6200 block of Osage Avenue, ⇒ Read More
Uncertain future as Puerto Rican community faces gentrification in Norris Square
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Wells Fargo will pay Philadelphia $10M to settle discriminatory lending lawsuit
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Laurene Munyan
Laurene Munyan is a high school English teacher in southern New Jersey. She is currently a M.A. candidate studying English at Rutgers University-Camden.
Fire Escapes
Introduced in the nineteenth century, fire escapes supplemented interior stairways to allow people on the upper floors of buildings to escape in case of fire. Fire escapes can be portable or fixed on or in buildings, and they have taken many forms. Philadelphia enacted the first municipal law mandating fire escapes on all sorts of ⇒ Read More
Occupy Philadelphia
For fifty-six days between October 6 and November 30, 2011, local activists participated in Occupy Philadelphia—a leaderless, decentralized movement against social and economic inequality. Their action joined an international wave of dissent against political and economic corruption that ranged from anti-austerity protests in Europe to the Arab Spring demonstrations throughout North Africa and the Middle ⇒ Read More
Reading Terminal Market
Opened to the public in 1893, Reading Terminal Market came into being amid the chaotic, but transformative, industrial and commercial forces that swept through late nineteenth-century Philadelphia. A descendant of the market-oriented atmosphere and culture entrenched primarily along High (subsequently Market) Street since the colonial era, the Reading Terminal weathered myriad commercial, labor, and legal ⇒ Read More
Ceramics
Once on par with other industries that gave Greater Philadelphia its reputation as the “Workshop of the World,” ceramic production played a key role in the region’s economic and artistic significance. Innovative makers and entrepreneurs produced a spectrum of utilitarian pottery and refined luxury goods, making visible the shifting patterns of consumption, taste, and technology ⇒ Read More
Sara E. Wermiel
Sara E. Wermiel is a historian of building construction and the construction industry. She has a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her book, The Fireproof Building: Technology and Public Safety in the Nineteenth-Century American City (2000), treats the history of structural fire protection in buildings.
Shopping in Center City is actually thriving amid fears of ‘retail apocalypse’
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Evelyn Gonzalez
Evelyn Gonzalez is a Professor of History at William Paterson University of New Jersey. She has written essays for The Encyclopedia of New York City and The Encyclopedia of New Jersey and is the author of The Bronx (Columbia University Press, 2004).
Seventh-day Adventists
Seventh-day Adventism, one among several uniquely American-born Christian traditions, resulted from the religious fervor and innovations of the Second Great Awakening (c. 1795-1830), which generated schisms in established churches and plantings of new religious associations across the United States, including Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley region. The Adventist movement began as an offshoot of the ⇒ Read More
Wanamaker Organ
Originally designed for the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904, the organ purchased by John Wanamaker (1838-1922) for his unprecedented Philadelphia department store at Thirteenth and Market Streets expanded over time to produce the sound power of three symphony orchestras. Regarded as the largest playable instrument in the world, the Wanamaker Grand Court Organ remained ⇒ Read More
Tyler Hoffman
Tyler Hoffman (Ph.D., English, University of Virginia) is Professor of English at Rutgers University-Camden. He is the author of Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry (2001), Teaching with The Norton Anthology of Poetry: A Guide for Instructors, 5th and 6th editions (2005; 2018), American Poetry in Performance: From Walt Whitman to Hip Hop (2011); ⇒ Read More
Jawn
Jawn is a neutral, all-purpose noun used to reference any person, place, situation, or object. In casual conversation, it takes the place of the word thing. Contrary to popular belief, jawn did not entirely originate in Philadelphia, but developed locally as a variant pronunciation of joint in African American vernacular English. The meaning of jawn ⇒ Read More
Lawnside, New Jersey
Located approximately nine miles from Philadelphia and with a population of 2,995 as of 2010, Lawnside, New Jersey, has been one of only a handful of jurisdictions in the United States that has maintained a primarily African American population throughout its existence. Formed out of the experience of slavery, the community evolved during the twentieth ⇒ Read More
Penn Museum reimagines its galleries with a modern view
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Emily Bailey
Emily Bailey is Assistant Professor of Christian Traditions and Religions in the Americas at Towson University, Towson, Maryland.
Should New Jersey limit the number of Atlantic City casinos?
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Breanna Ransome
Breanna Ransome graduated with her Master of Arts in English from Rutgers University–Camden in May 2019.
Wilmington, Delaware
Located thirty miles southwest of Philadelphia, Wilmington is Delaware’s largest city and the New Castle County seat. It originated as a colonial trading area and ferry crossing and later became one of the country’s most vital industrial and chemical-producing centers. With the decline of manufacturing near the close of the twentieth century, the city emerged ⇒ Read More
Philadelphia Contributionship
As North America’s longest continuously operating fire insurance company, The Philadelphia Contributionship for the Insurance of Houses from Loss by Fire (The Contributionship) affected the physical and economic development of Philadelphia and the region while simultaneously establishing modern insurance underwriting standards. Through its insurance operations, The Contributionship promoted fire safety, lent money for home mortgages, ⇒ Read More
John E. Smith III
John E. Smith III is a 2018 graduate from Temple University’s Center for Public History. He is the Assistant Archivist at the Chester County Archives in West Chester, Pa.
Caitlin Walker
Caitlin Walker is a graduate student at Rutgers University–Camden, focusing on linguistics and aspires to earn a Ph.D. and work in academia.
Danielle Lehr Schagrin
Danielle Lehr Schagrin is the former Education Program Coordinator at Pennsbury Manor, the reconstruction of William Penn’s country estate. She completed an internship with the Colonial Williamsburg Teacher Institute and holds an M.A. in History with a concentration in public history from Lehigh University.
Penn Center
Deemed one of the boldest planning projects undertaken by the Philadelphia City Planning Commission during the mid-twentieth century, Penn Center replaced the Pennsylvania Railroad’s infamous “Chinese Wall” viaduct and Broad Street Station in Center City with modern civic spaces and commercial structures. The complex, which grew to comprise thirteen buildings stretching from Market Street and ⇒ Read More
Food cart owners say City Hall is pushing them out of Philly
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’30 Americans’ brings contemporary black art to the Barnes
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Jason Romisher
Jason Romisher is a Canadian historian whose M.A. thesis, “Youth Activism and the Black Freedom Struggle in Lawnside, New Jersey,” explores the topics of African American high school student activism and black power in a self-governing African American community. He is working on a research project about Helen Hiett, an American scholar, journalist, and Second ⇒ Read More
Why is poverty increasing in Northeast Philly?
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Historic Underground Railroad stop saved from brink of collapse
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Nationalities Service Center
The Philadelphia branch of the International Institute, renamed the Philadelphia Nationalities Service Center in 1963, opened in June 1922 and initially operated under the auspices of its sponsor, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). Like the four to five dozen other International Institute branches in operation by the 1920s, the Philadelphia effort aided immigrant women ⇒ Read More
West Philly neighborhood gets new fitness center, thanks to cop who gives back
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Most of a dangerous toxic chemical at PES now neutralized–but risk remains
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Mütter Museum
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 ⇒ Read More
Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Philadelphia Museum of Art—originally known as the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art—developed from collections exhibited in 1876 at the Centennial Exhibition in Fairmount Park. Modeled on the South Kensington Museum in London, the new institution sought through both collections and classes to teach design so that goods produced in Philadelphia would be ⇒ Read More
Andrew McNally
Andrew McNally received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 2017. His dissertation explored the history of the international understanding movement in U.S. education.
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Penn Museum)
The Penn Museum—officially the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology—originated in 1887 through the combined efforts of university scholars, administrators, and Philadelphia philanthropists. Created as part of a broader movement to expand, modernize, and professionalize the university, throughout its history the museum also performed a public role of bringing ancient and far away ⇒ Read More
Camden County, New Jersey
Formed in 1844 from parts of what had been Gloucester County since 1686, Camden County maintained throughout its history a prominent role in the greater Philadelphia region, sustaining its close association with the city of Philadelphia and serving a central role in the social and economic life of South Jersey. Always a diversified area, the ⇒ Read More
Multiple police officers shot in North Philadelphia
Coverage by Billy Penn and WHYY
Timothy J Potero
Timothy J. Potero is a practicing attorney and M.A. candidate in Rutgers-Camden’s Public History Program.
Fashion District Philadelphia: Everything that will be open at launch of former Gallery Mall
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‘Mud Row’ tells the story of black history in West Chester’s east end
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
U.S. bankruptcy judge approves $65 million loan for PES refinery
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Miss America pageant leaving Atlantic City for Connecticut
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ICE to deport Irish father of three after decade in Montco
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Netroots Nation draws 3,000 to Philly for annual progressive convention
WHYY story by Jake Blumgart
Train Derailments and Collisions
Since the earliest days of railroads, collisions and derailments have been a constant danger for both passengers and railroad workers. Large-scale disasters have been relatively rare in the Philadelphia region, despite its important role in railroad operation and development. However, news coverage, public outrage, and government intervention resulting from rail accidents around the country forced ⇒ Read More
I’d Rather Be in Philadelphia
The expression “I’d rather be in Philadelphia” is derived from a fictional epitaph that locally-born entertainer W.C. Fields (1880-1946) proposed for himself in Vanity Fair magazine in 1925: “Here lies W.C. Fields. I would rather be living in Philadelphia.” By implying that Philadelphia would be slightly preferable to the grave, the joke tapped a vein ⇒ Read More
Leonard Lederman
Leonard Lederman earned his master’s degree in history at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.
Future PES refinery uses call into question cleanup plans there
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1776
The story of American independence comes to life in the musical 1776, which dramatizes the debates, drafting, and signing of the Declaration of Independence by the Second Continental Congress. The musical, which debuted on Broadway in 1969 and became a film in 1972, highlights Philadelphia as the site of the fateful decisions made at the ⇒ Read More
Philadelphia Sketch Club
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, ⇒ Read More
Glassmakers and Glass Manufacturing
Glassmaking was one of Philadelphia’s earliest industries. Although it never became a major part of the city’s economy to the extent that industries such as textiles and metalworking did, a number of large glass manufacturers operated in and around Philadelphia from the early eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. The industry went into decline within the ⇒ Read More
Naomi Slipp
Naomi Slipp is Assistant Professor of Art History at Auburn University in Montgomery, Alabama, has a Ph.D. from Boston University (2015), and publishes on Thomas Eakins, art and medicine, and the history of science. She worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 2005-8 and 2014-15.
Hahnemann closure will be a public health emergency, nursing union says
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Philadelphia Fire
The seventh novel by African American writer John Edgar Wideman (b. 1941), Philadelphia Fire is a complex fictional account of the MOVE bombing, the 1985 tragedy in which Philadelphia police used explosives to dislodge the Afrocentric, back-to-nature group MOVE from its West Philadelphia compound. The violent assault resulted in the loss of eleven lives, including ⇒ Read More
Amid tax break fight, residents show top N.J. official the ‘real’ Camden
WHYY story by Nicholas Pugliese
High school soccer in Chester returns after 30 years
WHYY story by P. Kenneth Burns
American Revolution libraries to merge into one historical powerhouse
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
Philly putting ‘dozens’ more cops on the street as murders, shootings rise
WHYY story by Aaron Moselle
Philadelphia Cream Cheese
Although not made or invented locally, Philadelphia Cream Cheese reflects the region’s agricultural history and reputation as a purveyor of fine foods. Established by a New York distributor of dairy products in 1880, the brand came to be owned by the Kraft Heinz Company of Pittsburgh and Chicago. Nevertheless Philadelphia, printed in blue capital letters ⇒ Read More
Kenney says ‘no’ to debate with Republican challenger
WHYY story by Tom MacDonald
Eagles’ Chris Long announces retirement after 11 NFL seasons
Associated Press via WHYY
Islam
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 ⇒ Read More
New horticultural center at Overbrook School for the Blind seeds a connection to nature
WHYY story by Catalina Jaramillo
Society Hill’s Dilworth House condo tower receives final city approval
PlanPhilly story via WHYY
David M. Krueger
David M. Krueger, who earned his Ph.D in religion from Temple University, is an independent historian of religion and serves as a scholar consultant on religious pluralism for the Dialogue Institute.
L&I apologizes to Temple food trucks, will work with vendors on overnight plan
Billy Penn story via WHYY
Is Flyers’ decision to erase Kate Smith a sign of the modern NHL?
WHYY story by Avi Wolfman-Arent
200-year-old plant remains found in a Bartram’s Garden attic
WHYY story by Emily Scott
Railroad Suburbs
As railroads reached outlying villages and the countryside around Philadelphia during the nineteenth century, railroad companies and other enterprising real estate developers created fashionable residential enclaves, new suburban towns, and vast semirural estates. These developments enabled prosperous Philadelphians to live apart from the city while still enjoying its amenities and maintaining their positions in the ⇒ Read More
Historic Preservation
Through more than three centuries of building and rebuilding settlements, towns, and cities, the region centered on Philadelphia and spanning southeastern Pennsylvania, South Jersey, and northern Delaware became a living museum of American architectural history. The fate of structures ranging from log cabins and colonial mansions to courthouses, warehouses, and the famed Independence Hall often ⇒ Read More
WHYY acquires local news site Billy Penn
WHYY story by Avi Wolfman-Arent
Alexandra Jordan Thelin
Alexandra Jordan Thelin is a Ph.D. student in History and Culture at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, and specializes in fashion history, visual culture, and art.
Northeast Philly, suburbs become poorer as inner city gentrifies
PlanPhilly story via WHYY
Knocking on doors in search of Philadelphia’s jazz history
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
City Council bill targets Philadelphia food trucks
WHYY story by Jake Blumgart
Strike averted at Community College of Philadelphia
WHYY story by Avi Wolfman-Arent
New: Teaching With The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia
We have learned a great deal from the students and educators who have turned to The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia to explore local, regional, and United States history. In return, we now offer a brief guide, Teaching With The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. The guide offers assignment tips, outlines correlations between encyclopedia essays and typical ⇒ Read More
40 years later, the prospect of Three Mile Island-related evacuation remains daunting
StateImpact story via WHYY
Celebrating tradition–and a southeastern Chinese god’s birthday–in Philly
WHYY story by Ximena Conde
Call for Authors: 2019-20
During 2019-20, our goal is to complete the remaining priority topics for the The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, which is nearly 600 topics strong and growing. Writing for The Encyclopedia adds to an unparalleled public information source for the region and establishes authors as the go-to authorities on their subjects. This year’s assignments will help to ⇒ Read More
Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793
Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793, published in 1799 by Philadelphia native Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), became one of the most influential works of American and Philadelphia Gothic literature. The novel recalls the yellow fever epidemic (August–October 1793), which transformed Philadelphia into a place of chaos. Such late-summer epidemics were common across North ⇒ Read More
Kristi Collemacine
Kristi Collemacine is an English M.A. candidate at Rutgers University-Camden, where she is a part-time lecturer. She also teaches at the Community College of Philadelphia.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a comedy series that premiered on the FX cable television channel in August 2005, follows a group of five friends as they engage in narcissistic and questionable schemes from their Irish bar, Paddy’s Pub, fictionally located at Dickinson and Third Street in South Philadelphia. Created by executive producer Rob McElhenney ⇒ Read More
Center City
Forming a core of civic, commercial, and residential life since Philadelphia’s seventeenth-century founding, Center City has been a continually evolving experiment in urban living and management. The roughly rectangular area of about 2.3 square miles between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, from Vine Street to South Street, occupies the territory of the original 1682 city ⇒ Read More
Wieland; or, the Transformation: An American Tale
Wieland; or, the Transformation: An American Tale by Charles Brockden Brown is considered to be one of the first examples of a distinctly American Gothic novel, characterized by its use of sensational violence and intensity. Published in 1798, it was the first of four novels Brown wrote over a span of only eighteen months. Only ⇒ Read More
Skate Parks and Skateboarders
During the 1980s, Philadelphia and its surrounding communities emerged as a mecca for the sport of skateboarding. The region developed more than twenty skate parks, and local professional skateboarders achieved international fame over the next four decades. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, approximately 105,000 of Philadelphia’s 1.5 million residents skateboarded. Despite occasional opposition ⇒ Read More
Orchard Window (The)
Painted in 1918 by Philadelphia artist Daniel Garber (1880-1958), The Orchard Window depicts the interior of Garber’s studio in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and features his 12-year-old daughter Tanis sitting in a sun-dappled window seat, reading a book. This large oil painting on canvas has been highly regarded as a prime example of Pennsylvania Impressionism, a ⇒ Read More
DHS orders emergency removal of children at Glen Mills
Associated Press via WHYY
Philly musicians bring Bach to commuters to honor composer’s 334th birthday
WHYY story by Ximena Conde
An Invitation: Support Scholarship,
Build Community, Create a Legacy
Thank you, everyone who supported our successful one-day fund-raiser on Rutgers Giving Day. Your support will enable us to continue to employ students as fact-checkers and digital publishing assistants, so that The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia can continue to grow. If you missed the opportunity or wish to encourage others to give, please link here ⇒ Read More
What happened when Philly closed 30 schools? New study offers answers
WHYY story by Avi Wolfman-Arent
Philadelphia’s deadliest road is inching toward speed cameras
PlanPhilly story via WHYY
Bakeries and Bakers
Baking, one of the earliest businesses in Philadelphia, did not become a major part of the local economy until the late nineteenth century. It remained a viable industry throughout the region’s history, however, ranging from small neighborhood bakeries to large baking companies with national product distribution. Philadelphia supported several commercial bakers from the beginning. A ⇒ Read More
Local man wins protections for iconic cast-iron subway entrances
PlanPhilly story via WHYY
Williams, Butkovitz challenge Philly Mayor Kenney
WHYY story by Ryan Briggs
SEPTA announces accord with striking transit officers
Associated Press via WHYY
Grocery Stores and Supermarkets
Local grocery stores, along with churches, elementary schools, and often saloons, have defined and anchored urban and suburban neighborhoods. General grocery stores first appeared in Philadelphia and the surrounding area in the early nineteenth century and increased in number after the Civil War as populations exploded in industrial cities like Camden and Philadelphia and their ⇒ Read More
Horticulture
The history of horticulture in Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley has been primarily a story of exploration, beautification, and preservation. Due to the relatively mild climate and fertile soils of the region, Native American groups practiced horticulture long before the arrival of Europeans. Colonists brought gardening traditions from their homelands and ushered in a new ⇒ Read More
Montco Republican candidates square off in primary debate
WHYY story by Dave Davies
Eliza Butler
Eliza Butler is a Core Lecturer in Art History at Columbia University. Her research centers on the intersection of landscape, natural history, and material culture in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century North America.
Return of the Greater Philadelphia Roundtable
Many will recall the program series that launched The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia — the Greater Philadelphia Roundtable. This spring we are pleased to again invite you to a series of conversations about our region’s history and contemporary issues. Sanctuaries: Past Into Present Throughout American history, people have come to the Philadelphia region seeking opportunity, ⇒ Read More
Without protection, N.J.’s flood-prone back bay towns risk $1.5 billion damage annually
WHYY story by Joe Hernandez
Philly History Museum’s future may lie with Drexel
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
High-rise hotel coming to site of former Midtown II diner in Center City
PlanPhilly story by Darryl C. Murphy via WHYY
LOVE (Sculpture)
The sculpture commonly known as “the LOVE statue,” first placed in Philadelphia’s John F. Kennedy Plaza for the 1976 Bicentennial, was not the only sculpture of its kind—by the twenty-first century, it was not even the only sculpture of its type in Philadelphia. Yet LOVE, by Robert Indiana (1928-2018), came to be embraced by Philadelphians ⇒ Read More
The push for playgrounds brings people together
WHYY Community Conversation, story by Taylor Allen
Society Hill residents lose zoning fight against high-rise
PlanPhilly story by Jake Blumgart, via WHYY
Cody Schreck
Cody Schreck is a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee pursuing a master’s degree in Public History, Museum Studies and Non-Profit Management. He also works as a Research Assistant for The Encyclopedia of Milwaukee.
Gospel Music (African American)
Long an important center of African American musical life, Philadelphia played a key role in the development of black gospel music. One of the seminal figures in developing the gospel style, Charles Albert Tindley (1851-1933), moved to Philadelphia during the Great Migration of the early twentieth century and became a well-known gospel songwriter. As the ⇒ Read More
Cherry Hill Mall offers co-working space with a twist
WHYY story by Tom MacDonald
SEPTA awards design contract for King of Prussia rail project
WHYY story by Darryl C. Murphy
Catharine Dann Roeber
Catharine Dann Roeber is associate professor of decorative arts and material culture at the University of Delaware and the author of the PhD dissertation Building and Planting: Material Culture, Memory, and the Making of William Penn’s Pennsylvania, completed at the College of William and Mary in 2011.
For Girard College’s MLK Day of Service, a focus on solutions to gun violence
WHYY story by Emily Scott
Roosevelt Boulevard: The deadliest road in Philly
WHYY Radio Times
J. Bret Maney
J. Bret Maney is Assistant Professor of English at the City University of New York. He lived in West Philadelphia, not far from the site of the MOVE bombing, while completing his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania.
Lawrence L. Mullen
Lawrence L. Mullen is a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing candidate at Arcadia University.
Despite high poverty, why fewer people live on Philly’s streets than in other big cities
WHYY story by Aaron Moselle
SEPTA’s 30th Street Station getting $37M remake with underground connection
WHYY story by Ryan Briggs
Garment Work and Workers
Garment work was once one of Philadelphia’s largest industries. Clothing and textiles (a category including hosiery, a Philadelphia specialty) employed more than 40 percent of the city’s paid workforce by 1880. Starting in the first third of the nineteenth century, the garment industry became a center of labor activism, experiencing periodic strikes and union organizing ⇒ Read More
O Little Town of Bethlehem
One of the best-known hymns of the Christmas season, “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” originated in 1868 as a poem written for the Sunday School of the Church of the Holy Trinity on Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square. The words by Rector Phillips Brooks (1835-93) and music by church organist Lewis H. Redner (1831-1908) resonated themes of ⇒ Read More
At Philly archive’s new home, redlining mural charts dismal chapter of city history
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
Restored to former glory, The Met opens on North Broad Street
WHYY story by Jennifer Lynn
Shrines
People of faith have long revered significant religious sites, making pilgrimages for special devotion to locations that often developed into formal shrines–places regarded as holy because of their associations with sacred persons, relics, or events. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Roman Catholic churches and other faiths in the Philadelphia area established a number of shrines, ⇒ Read More
What happened when City Council and new Philly school board met for the first time
WHYY story by Avi Wolfman-Arent
Historic congregation takes Philly Marathon runners to church
WHYY story by Darryl C. Murphy
Philly adds electric bikes to Indego fleet
PlanPhilly story via WHYY
Hundreds rally to support trans men and women in Philly
WHYY story by Jarrett Lyons
The Gallery: Past, Present, and Future
WHYY Podcast
Philadelphia’s Holocaust memorial, America’s oldest, gets a facelift
WHYY story by Avi Wolfman-Arent
Christina Larocco
Christina Larocco is editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography and scholarly programs manager at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
Controversial school mascot could disappear from Bucks County school district
WHYY story by Aaron Moselle
Bucks County Quakers honor ‘forgotten slaves’ buried in unmarked graves
WHYY story by Darryl C. Murphy
Fabric Row
A textile and garment district emerged during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on South Fourth Street, between Catharine and Bainbridge Streets in South Philadelphia, as immigrants transformed the neighborhood into a Jewish Quarter. Fabric businesses survived the Great Depression and remained prosperous for more than a century, employing generations of garment workers. Some shops ⇒ Read More
Trump speaks to electrical contractors in Philadelphia
WHYY story by Dave Davies
Almost century-old statue toppled along Boathouse Row
WHYY story by Tom MacDonald
As Philly honors former mayor with street sign, protests assail Goode’s MOVE legacy
WHYY story by Jake Blumgart
Biden name will welcome millions of travelers to Delaware
WHYY story by Mark Eichmann
Oyster Creek, nation’s oldest nuclear power plant, shutting down
WHYY story by Justin Auciello
Pulling the plug on Electric Factory: Rock club sold, name retired
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
Danielle D’Amelio
Danielle D’Amelio is an M.A. student at in the Department of English at Rutgers University-Camden.
Saws and Saw Making
Philadelphia ranked as one of the nation’s foremost saw manufacturing centers for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Large-scale saw making began locally in the early nineteenth century, and by midcentury a number of major saw manufacturers operated in the city, including the world’s largest, Henry Disston’s Keystone Saw Works. Disston created a unique ⇒ Read More
Community Colleges
Two-year, public colleges—commonly known as community colleges—first appeared in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. Situated at the intersection of secondary and higher education, they were local institutions that offered both general studies and vocational training. Referred to as junior colleges before the 1950s, they owed their inspiration to Benjamin Franklin ⇒ Read More
In a year of labor pains and gains, Philly union members march
WHYY story by Tom MacDonald
STDs are up in Philadelphia, around the nation
WHYY story by Darryl C. Murphy
New plans for Chinatown development show a lush park
WHYY story by Jake Blumgart
NOAA: Below-normal Atlantic hurricane season is now more likely
WHYY story by Justin Auciello
Montco approves plan for 800 miles of bike paths
WHYY story by Sara Hoover
Rizzo statue to move in 2 to 3 years, Kenney says
WHYY story by Tom MacDonald
WSFS to acquire Philadelphia’s Beneficial Bancorp in $1.5 billion deal
Delaware Business Now via WHYY
Birds fans fill the stands for Super Bowl champion Eagles’ first open practice
WHYY story by Shai Ben-Yaacov
Encyclopedia’s Expert on Root Beer History Featured in Segment on 6ABC
The author of our essay about root beer, Theresa Altieri Taplin, has been interviewed for a segment on 6ABC about a new root beer float offered by Bassett’s Ice Cream at the Reading Terminal Market. Watch the segment here, and prepare to be hungry!
Street Numbering
Philadelphians, having pioneered the gridiron street layout in North America, also led the way in street numbering. The grid had been in place for more than a century by the time citizens began to experiment with ways to number the buildings that lined their streets in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But by ⇒ Read More
Trenton-Mercer airport expansion plans worry neighbors in Pa. and N.J.
WHYY story by Maya Aphornsuvan
Got at least $40K? You could bid on historic copy of Franklin’s ‘Join or Die’ cartoon
WHYY story by Tom MacDonald
St. Katharine Drexel’s tomb moving to Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul
WHYY story by Sara Hoover
A master plan for Society Hill proposes new design guidelines–and downzoning
WHYY story by Jake Blumgart
Philadelphia Folk Festival
Seeking to contribute to the folk revival that reached its peak in the United States during the mid-1960s, folklorist Kenneth S. Goldstein (1927-95) and radio DJ Gene Shay (b. 1935) organized the Philadelphia Folk Festival in 1962. During a hiatus of the similar Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island, Goldstein and Shay sought to demonstrate ⇒ Read More
Silver Linings Playbook
The 2012 film Silver Linings Playbook, directed by David O. Russell (b. 1958) and based on the novel by Collingswood, New Jersey, native Matthew Quick (b. 1973), experienced overnight success when it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and earned the highly sought-after Audience Award. Filmed in and around Philadelphia, the movie showcases the ⇒ Read More
Margaret Poling
Margaret Poling is a Teaching Assistant and M.A. candidate studying English at Rutgers University-Camden.
Elisabeth Woronzoff
Elisabeth Woronzoff earned her Ph.D. in American Culture Studies from Bowling Green State University. Her research focuses on American history and culture, gender studies, and music. She wrote her master’s thesis on the Smiths, and Morrissey published a chapter in the book Morrissey: Fandom, Representations and Identities. She currently develops curriculum for personalized learning projects ⇒ Read More
Philly’s Bastille Day tradition goes out with a bang
WHYY story by Jonathan Wilson
Philadelphia is flashpoint for Liberian human rights advocates
WHYY story by Darryl C. Murphy
Paper and Papermaking
Home to the first paper mill in the British American colonies, Philadelphia was the nation’s primary papermaking center through the early nineteenth century. The region lost its national preeminence in papermaking in the late nineteenth century, but it continued to host important makers of paper and paper products. Skilled papermakers, including William Rittenhouse (1644–1708), a ⇒ Read More
At first meeting, new Philly school board turns to old hand for leadership
WHYY story by Avi Wolfman-Arent and Dale Mezzacappa
Hopes for rebirth at former Delaware auto plant
WHYY story by Mark Eichmann
Underground Railroad
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 ⇒ Read More
Philadelphia History Museum closes indefinitely
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent
In 1938, the City of Philadelphia amended its charter to create a museum that would collect the city’s material culture and display it for the public. The institution, long known as the Atwater Kent Museum, took its name from radio manufacturer A. Atwater Kent (1873-1949), who purchased and donated the former Franklin Institute building on ⇒ Read More
Mabel Rosenheck
Mabel Rosenheck is a writer, lecturer, and historian in Philadelphia. She received her Ph.D. in media and cultural studies from Northwestern University.
Two new casinos open early in Atlantic City
Associated Press via WHYY
Philly SRC departs with busy meeting
WHYY story
Philadelphia (Film)
As a form of cinematic activism, Philadelphia (1993) attempted to reform the public understanding of AIDS in a time when ignorance and fear of the disease fueled prejudice and hate. The film is not merely set in the city of its title, but in a large part, the people of Philadelphia performed it. Extras who ⇒ Read More
After 40 years, Debbie Africa of MOVE Nine released from prison
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
Damiano Consilvio
Damiano Consilvio is a Ph.D. student at the University of Rhode Island and studies the ways in which digital technologies can enhance the practice of textual editing. His book project, Ethan Frome: A Digital Scholarly Edition, is forthcoming.
Centennial Commons carves out space for East Parkside neighbors to connect
PlanPhilly story by Ashley Hahn via WHYY
Mayors (Philadelphia)
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. ⇒ Read More
Silk and Silk Makers
Philadelphia’s silk industry began in earnest in the early nineteenth century. There had been efforts since the early eighteenth century to cultivate the silk worm and establish silk-making operations in the region, but they had proven unsustainable or were carried out on a small scale. Philadelphia’s first successful silk manufacturer began operating in 1815, and ⇒ Read More
Philly school district nearing new accountability rules for charters
WHYY story by Avi Wolfman-Arent
Pew report: Immigrants give Philly a population boost
WHYY story by Laura Benshoff
Hurricanes are moving more slowly, which means more damage
NPR story via WHYY
Bucks County, Pennsylvania
Bucks County, one of three counties established in 1682 by William Penn (1644-1718), originally stretched northward along the Delaware River all the way to the Delaware Water Gap and westward past Allentown. Even after shrinking dramatically when Northampton and Lehigh Counties were carved from its territory in 1752, the county still encompassed multiple regions that ⇒ Read More
Putting the brakes on Lincoln Drive’s raceway
PlanPhilly story by Meir Rinde via WHYY
Former Underground Railroad stop in Montco at center of preservation fight
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
Philly Shipyard laying off 275 amid slump in vessel orders
WHYY story by Bobby Allyn
Philadelphia Orchestra begins European tour, including first stop in Israel in 25 years
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
Designed for green play, a Philly schoolyard wins recognition
PlanPhilly story by Catalina Jaramillo, via WHYY
Delaware Bay
The Delaware Bay does not often get the historical acknowledgement received by its estuarine neighbor, the Delaware River, but it exerted equal weight in shaping the Philadelphia region’s cultural and economic development. Over seven hundred square miles in size and bordered by New Jersey and Delaware, the Delaware Bay is one of America’s premier maritime ⇒ Read More
Michael J. Chiarappa
Michael J. Chiarappa is Professor of History at Quinnipiac University and co-editor (with Brian C. Black) of Nature’s Entrepot: Philadelphia’s Urban Sphere and Its Environmental Thresholds (Pittsburgh University Press, 2012).
Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (The)
Over eighteen years, from 1771 until his death, Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) composed an unfinished record of his life’s tribulations and successes. Written in simple, often humorous language, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin offered readers in the new United States an accessible, exemplary narrative of American upward mobility. An integral thread in the fabric of Franklin’s ⇒ Read More
Rachel Lewis
Rachel Lewis is enrolled in the Rutgers University-Camden Graduate School, where she is pursuing her master’s degree in English and New Jersey Teacher Certification in secondary education of English.
Subaru opens its doors in Camden, thanks to generous N.J. tax break
WHYY story by Joe Hernandez
Pharmaceutical Industry
Philadelphia played a key role in the birth of the American pharmaceutical industry in the early nineteenth century, and the region remained a major pharmaceutical center into the early twenty-first century. Home since the colonial period to many of America’s leading scientific, educational, and medical institutions, Philadelphia was well-positioned to support the emergence of a ⇒ Read More
Soccer
Soccer has been played in the Philadelphia area since the late nineteenth century. The rules of Association football, known in the United States as soccer, were formulated in England in 1863. Various forms of football were played in Philadelphia before that time and after, but the first game of soccer in the city “under proper ⇒ Read More
L&I commissioner: Boarding houses aren’t going away
WHYY story by Jake Blumgart
Ed Farnsworth
Ed Farnsworth, a member of the Society for American Soccer History, was managing editor of the Philly Soccer Page from 2010 until 2017. A graduate of Temple University (B.A. in American Studies and Political Science) and Drexel University (M.S. in Library and Information Science), his work has appeared at the Philly Soccer Page, Philly.com, TheCup.us, Society for American ⇒ Read More
American Friends Service Committee
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and coiner of the phrase “speak truth to power,” was founded in Philadelphia by members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Spring 1917, shortly after the United States declared war on Germany on April 6. Over the following century, AFSC embodied ⇒ Read More
Mayor Kenney picks his starting nine for new Philly school board
WHYY story by Avi Wolfman-Arent and Dale Mezzacappa
Thank You for Supporting the Encyclopedia Builders!
On March 21 during Rutgers Giving Day, scholars, students, community members, and staff came together to support The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, produced by the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (MARCH) at Rutgers-Camden. The dedication of all who donated and promoted our cause through social media is truly inspiring. Your generous contributions will be ⇒ Read More
New bike lanes coming to Fairmount Park and West Philly
WHYY/PlanPhilly story by Jake Blumgart
Guy Aiken
Guy Aiken holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies (American Religions) from the University of Virginia and is a postdoctoral fellow at Villanova University. He has published several articles, including “The American Friends Service Committee’s Mission to the Gestapo” in Peace & Change, and “Educating Tocqueville: Jared Sparks, the Boston Whigs, and Democracy in America” in ⇒ Read More
An Invitation: Support Scholarship,
Build Community, Create a Legacy
Wednesday, March 21 is Giving Day. Join a community of scholars, students, and history lovers, and make a gift to support The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. We need your help! The Encyclopedia is a digital resource produced by the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (MARCH) at Rutgers-Camden. It offers the most comprehensive, authoritative reference ⇒ Read More
Coalition gets data to help cut Philadelphia’s recidivism rate
WHYY story by Aaron Moselle
Found in South Philadelphia, an Underground Railroad station
WHYY story by Jake Blumgart
In Cobbs Creek, a home for the dead gets new life
PlanPhilly via WHYY
Textile Manufacturing and Textile Workers
Textile manufacturing began in Philadelphia soon after the city’s founding in 1682 and grew to be one of its chief industries. By the turn of the twentieth century Philadelphia was one of the world’s greatest textile manufacturing centers, with tens of thousands of workers making a wide range of products. The industry declined dramatically in ⇒ Read More
Bridgeton, New Jersey
Bridgeton, the governmental seat of Cumberland County, originated in the late seventeenth century as a fording place at the upper tidal reach of the Cohansey River, a tributary of the Delaware Bay. Located seven direct miles from the bay (though twenty by meandering river), and about forty miles south of Philadelphia, Bridgeton drew on water ⇒ Read More
13,500 PA homes still without safe heating source this winter
WHYY story by Amy Sisk
Like Us? Help Us Reach the Next 1,000
At The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, we have a lot to celebrate this month. We have the long-awaited Super Bowl victory, now added to our page about professional football. One of our co-editors, Howard Gillette, has been selected to receive the 2018 Visionary Historian Award from the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. In addition, throughout ⇒ Read More
Few arrests, untold numbers of fans, lots of love add up to epic Eagles celebration
WHYY story by Aaron Moselle
Slovaks and Slovakia
Slovak migration to the Philadelphia region was no less a part of the Slovak experience in the United States than the larger Slovak migrations to Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, or Chicago. Although much smaller and often overlooked in larger migration accounts, Slovak-speaking workers contributed to Philadelphia’s reputation as a “Workshop of the World” through their contribution to ⇒ Read More
Penelope S. Watson
Penelope S. Watson, AIA, is a principal at Watson & Henry Associates, where she has worked as preservation architect for over thirty years. She has an undergraduate degree from Mt. Holyoke College, a professional degree from the Boston Architectural College, and a master’s degree in Preservation Studies from Boston University.
Oldest nuke plant in the U.S. closing a year ahead of schedule
Associated Press story via WHYY
Top Ten Topics for 2017
As we begin a new year, we invite you to revisit the most-read topics of 2017. Did your favorite make the list? 10. Medicine (Colonial Era), by Martha K. Robinson 9. March of the Mill Children, by Gail Friedman 8. Department Stores, by David Sullivan 7. Row Houses, by Amanda Casper 6. Immigration (1870-1930), by ⇒ Read More
LGBT businesses seek share of contracts Philly awards to minorities
WHYY story by Bobby Allyn
Plays and Playwrights
Upon first glance, it may seem odd that in Philadelphia, the intellectual heartland of the American Enlightenment, the first drama did not play until April 1754, over seventy years after the city’s founding. That play, The Fair Penitent by Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718), was licensed for twenty-four performances, with the warning that the license would be ⇒ Read More
Fearing drug traffickers in Mexico, family takes sanctuary in N. Philly church
WHYY story by Laura Benshoff
Call for Authors, Editors, and Advisers:
Winter-Spring 2018
With nearly 600 topics already online, The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia is seeking authors to help complete priority subject categories. To view available assignments, link here for the list of topics. To join more than 400 leading and emerging scholars who have already contributed to this peer-reviewed, digital-first project, let us know your choice of ⇒ Read More
Kenny Roggenkamp
Kenny Roggenkamp is an adjunct professor of English at the County College of Morris in Randolph, New Jersey, and an alumnus of Villanova University’s English Department.
Mennonites
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 ⇒ Read More
Devin C. Manzullo-Thomas
Devin C. Manzullo-Thomas is lecturer in the humanities and director of the E. Morris and Leone Sider Institute for Anabaptist, Pietist, and Wesleyan Studies at Messiah College and a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Vietnamese Scholars Visit The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia
The editors, authors, and staff of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia are honored to welcome scholars from Vietnam on November 29. Under the auspices of the Social Science Research Council, the delegation has come to the United States to learn about encyclopedia projects in preparation for producing an Encyclopedia of Vietnam. Read more about the ⇒ Read More
Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul
Established in 1846, the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul at Eighteenth and Race Streets became the principal church and center of Catholic life for the clergy and faithful of the Philadelphia archdiocese. During a turbulent era of immigration and anti-Catholic nativism, Bishop Francis Patrick Kenrick (1796-1863) desired a “common church of the whole ⇒ Read More
International Peace Mission Movement and Father Divine
The International Peace Mission Movement, an American communitarian religion founded in the early decades of the twentieth century, established a significant presence in Philadelphia under the leadership of its African American minister, the Reverend Major Jealous Divine, better known as Father Divine (1879?-1965). As an American sectarian religious innovator, Father Divine reached the height of ⇒ Read More
Leonard Norman Primiano
Leonard Norman Primiano is Professor of Religious Studies at Cabrini University in Radnor, Pennsylvania. He is co-developer with Will Luers of “The Father Divine Project,” an online research database and multimedia interpretive documentary about the Peace Mission Movement.
Wendy Wong Schirmer
A historian of Early America and U.S. foreign relations, received her Ph.D. from Temple University. She is working on a book project that examines the relationship between print culture, neutrality in the Early Republic, and the politics of slavery.
J.A. Reuscher
J.A. Reuscher is an Associate Librarian with the Pennsylvania State University Libraries and holds degrees in history and library science.
Eying expansion, Philly charter school creates incubator for start-ups
WHYY story by Avi Wolfman-Arent
Oyster Creek nuclear plant in N.J. may close before planned 2019 shutdown
WHYY story by Phil Gregory
Woodmere offers new look at Violet Oakley, whose murals stand timeless at Pa. Capitol
NewsWorks story by Peter Crimmins
A huge fundraising event for the Voorhees animal shelter returns Saturday
WHYY story by Jana Shea
New report on Pa. charter school growth finds ‘stranded costs’ linger five years later
WHYY story by Kevin McCorry
Celebrating a century of Philly’s iconic Parkway — and looking down the road
WHYY interview by Dave Heller
Irma swells begin arriving at the Jersey Shore
WHYY story by Justin Auciello
Judge tosses challenge to tradition of parking in the middle of south Broad Street
PlanPhilly story by Jake Blumgart via NewsWorks
Vaux High School reopens as part of Sharswood Revival
WHYY story by Aaron Moselle
South Jersey paint factory caused ‘cancer cluster,’ lawsuit alleges
WHYY story by Joe Hernandez
Delaware airport gets $5.4 million for new taxiway
WHYY story by Mark Eichmann
Local NAACP wants Delaware Confederate monument removed
WHYY article by Zoë Read
Lois Fernandez, founder of Odunde Festival, dies at age 81
WHYY story by NewsWorks Staff
The charter bump: Philly researcher finds charters boost public schools … in NYC
WHYY story by Avi Wolfman-Arent
Group forms to block subsidies for N.J.’s aging nuclear power plans
WHYY article by Phil Gregory
Advocates, N.J. lawmakers seek fully staffed nursing board to expedite licensing, certification
WHYY story by Phil Gregory
Uncertainty in federal funds for heating assistance could affect thousands in Pa.
WHYY article by Kyrie Greenberg
Violent Crime is down in Norristown, but its unsafe reputation remains
WHYY story by Laura Benshoff
Missing Saint Pantaleon statue found in South Philly
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
Can new federal plan really bring high-speed rail to Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor?
PlanPhilly article by Alon Levy
Hundreds pack Fitler Square nursery to disagree over proposed protected bike lane pilot
PlanPhilly story by Jim Saska
Environmental Movement
With its industrial past and expanses of natural resources, the Greater Philadelphia region teemed with activity during the environmental movement of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the years following World War II, people across the United States began to demand new measures to assure their health and safety. The resulting environmental movement, ⇒ Read More
Irish (The) and Ireland
Contacts between the Philadelphia region and Ireland began in the late seventeenth century, shortly after the creation of Penn’s colony. Long a part of the urban fabric of Philadelphia, Irish Catholics endured nativist assaults of the Bible Riots of 1844 and did not see one of their own become mayor until James H. J. Tate, ⇒ Read More
Greeks and Greece (Modern)
Philadelphia’s encounter with Modern Greece dates from the Greek War of Independence in 1821, and thousands of Greek immigrants arrived in the region beginning at the turn of the twentieth century. In the post-World War era, the upward social mobility of the children of the Greek immigrants ensured a continued strong relationship between Philadelphia’s region ⇒ Read More
Market Street
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 ⇒ Read More
Eastern State Penitentiary to host Trump inspired retelling of Bastille Day
WHYY story by Kimberly Haas
Mexican-American War
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 ⇒ Read More
Independence Seaport Museum
The Independence Seaport Museum, originally called the Philadelphia Maritime Museum, addressed the lack of written history of the Port of Philadelphia by collecting, documenting, and exhibiting the region’s nautical legacy. Founded in 1960 by attorney, civic leader, and maritime collector Joseph Welles Henderson (1920-2007), the museum focused on the maritime history of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, ⇒ Read More
Subway Concourses
Originally built by the Philadelphia Transit Company in the early twentieth century, the underground concourses in Center City Philadelphia played a crucial part in the construction of subway tunnels and then expanded into a network of private and publicly owned pedestrian walkways and storage facilities. In 1912, the City of Philadelphia assumed active development of ⇒ Read More
Samantha Smyth
Samantha Smyth studies history at Temple University.
Machining and Machinists
Hundreds of machine shops, large and small, built and maintained Philadelphia’s position as the “Workshop of the World” through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the city and beyond, especially in Conshohocken, Pottstown, Phoenixville, Chester, and Camden, machining made the Delaware Valley a hub of foundries, craft shops, mills, workshops, and manufactories. During the latter ⇒ Read More
Hurricanes and Tropical Storms
The Greater Philadelphia area’s position near the Atlantic Ocean has made it vulnerable to hurricanes and tropical storms, especially along the Delaware and New Jersey shores, and to flooding from storm surges along the Delaware River. The majority of storms to hit the region have been tropical storms, because hurricanes have tended to weaken over ⇒ Read More
Black Power
Black Power, a movement significant to the black freedom struggle in Philadelphia, came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s through the combined efforts of local and national organizations including the Church of the Advocate, the Black Panther Party, the Black United Liberation front, and MOVE. Before and after Stokely Carmichael (1941-98) of the national ⇒ Read More
Poverty
Urban areas in the United States have always attracted destitute persons, including immigrants and internal migrants fleeing even worse poverty and harsher conditions elsewhere. Philadelphia and its environs were no exception, having had a reputation as “the best poor man’s country” reaching as far back as the city’s founding in 1682. Despite the area’s vibrant ⇒ Read More
Liberty County
City and state politicians representing Northeast Philadelphia, deeply unsettled by the shifting economy and demographic makeup of the city in the 1980s, proposed seceding to create “Liberty County,” a separate, suburban municipality to ostensibly address taxpayers’ demands for improved municipal services. The primary impetus for such a radical step, however, was reaction to Philadelphia’s first ⇒ Read More
Historic Districts
Throughout the Philadelphia area, in communities large and small, concentrations of buildings, landscapes, and natural features that collectively reflect the region’s cultural and historical development have been documented and recognized as historic districts. Often described as areas where the “whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” historic districts have been at the core ⇒ Read More
Prisons and Jails
In the late 1700s, on the heels of the American Revolution, Philadelphia emerged as a national and international leader in prison reform and the transformation of criminal justice practices. More than any other community in early America, Philadelphia invested heavily in the intellectual and physical reconstruction of penal philosophies, and the region’s jails and prisons ⇒ Read More
Delaware River Waterfront Corporation’s first president looks back and ahead
WHYY interview by Dave Heller
Zoning (Philadelphia)
From its inception, zoning became a fraught subject. By empowering neighborhood groups and local politicians with power over land use in their communities, zoning brought such groups in Philadelphia and elsewhere into contest with developers, industrial concerns, and sometimes with other people who wanted to move into their neighborhoods. The policy generated results both noble, ⇒ Read More
Montgomery County, Pennsylvania
The early Europeans who settled in what would become Montgomery County in the eighteenth century tended prosperous farms, forges, and mills. They depended on the Philadelphia market to sell their products and on its port to connect them to the wider colonial world. Subsequent generations built a dense transportation network that linked county laborers, suppliers, ⇒ Read More
Alexander Kitroeff
Alexander Kitroeff is an Associate Professor of History at Haverford College. His research and publications focus on the history of the Greek diaspora.
Hospitals (Economic Development)
As the twenty-first century began, hospitals and academic medical centers played a central role in the economies of many major U.S. cities, including Philadelphia. As centers not only of patient care but also of scientific research and, often, sources of urban redevelopment, urban medical institutions created jobs in deindustrialized cities and spurred the spatial, social, ⇒ Read More
Reshuffling resources and tapping enthusiasm, Philly launches kids health initiative
WHYY story by Tom MacDonald
Salem County, New Jersey
Before Philadelphia’s founding, Salem, New Jersey, was the first English Quaker colony along the Delaware River. Established in 1675, the city of Salem had early prominence and served as a port of entry, but was soon overshadowed by Philadelphia. Although eighteenth-century settlement in Salem County consisted primarily of farmers and craftsmen, the proximity of the ⇒ Read More
Doylestown, Pennsylvania
Located a mile north of the Routes 611-202 convergence, thirty-five miles north of Center City Philadelphia, Doylestown has served as the government center of Bucks County for over two centuries. Once a small village surrounded by farms, Doylestown developed into a bustling borough with a thriving downtown, a university, two museums, and commuter rail that ⇒ Read More
Mount Holly Township, New Jersey
Mount Holly, New Jersey, established by Quakers in 1677 and known variously in its early history as Northampton and Bridgetown, became the county seat for Burlington County through an act of legislation in 1793. Three years later the Burlington County Court House, similar in style to Philadelphia’s Congress Hall, opened to serve as the official ⇒ Read More
Project Milestone: 550 Topics Online
The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia has been growing rapidly this summer, and we are pleased to announce that the project has reached a new milestone: 550 topics published online. The 550th essay to be published is Dispensaries, by Steven J. Peitzman, a longtime contributor who participated in one of our early Greater Philadelphia Roundtable programs, ⇒ Read More
Jewelers Row
Jewelers Row in Center City Philadelphia emerged in the 1880s and over time became home to more than two hundred jewelry retailers, wholesalers, and craftsmen. Many of these businesses were owned by the same families for generations. By the twenty-first century, Jewelers Row had become regarded as the oldest diamond district in the United States, ⇒ Read More
Alexandra L. Straub
Alexandra L. Straub is a Ph.D candidate in History at Temple University, where she studies American environmental history.
South Asians
South Asian migration to Greater Philadelphia arrived in small numbers through the 1800s from the group of seven countries including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and Myanmar. This large region shared a history of British colonization until as late as 1965, and different migration patterns and political histories made community life unique ⇒ Read More
Dogfighting
The cruel practice of dogfighting has thrived in the shadows of the Philadelphia region for more than 150 years. Most commonly, young men have matched dogs against one another in remote locations and blighted neighborhoods for money and bragging rights. The process of training and culling weak dogs as well as the fights themselves have ⇒ Read More
Rock Music and Culture (Late 1960s to Present)
Although Philadelphia was a national trendsetter in rock and roll in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it lost its preeminence in the mid-1960s as tastes changed and the music moved in new directions. While a new home-grown style of African American soul music emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s that once again ⇒ Read More
Once again, the Oval+ temporarily puts the ‘park’ in the Ben Franklin Parkway
PlanPhilly story by Samantha Maldonado, via NewsWorks
Dogs
For as long as people have inhabited Philadelphia and the surrounding area, dogs probably have been present, too. As the first domesticated animal, dogs possess a long, complicated past with humans, likely dating back between fifteen thousand and thirty thousand years. Domesticated canids accompanied human migrants to the Americas around 10,000 to 12,000 BCE. Over ⇒ Read More
Gas Stations
The widespread adoption of the passenger automobile during the twentieth century altered the physical landscape of Greater Philadelphia and the United States. By the late 1910s, gas stations began to serve Philadelphia drivers seeking fuel for occupational and recreational travel. Since consumers could not visually determine the quality of gasoline, petroleum companies distinguished themselves from ⇒ Read More
Cold War
The period of international political and military tension known as the Cold War (1947-91) had military, political, and cultural implications for Greater Philadelphia. The region served as a first line of defense for a conflict that depended more on missiles than forts, and it provided the nation with an arsenal, a shipyard, and a source ⇒ Read More
Dispensaries
Free clinics known as dispensaries served the “working poor” of European, British, and American cities from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Paid or volunteer physicians saw patients on site or at their homes in the dispensary’s district, caring for both minor ailments and more serious diseases. The Philadelphia Dispensary for the Medical Relief ⇒ Read More
Brickmaking and Brickmakers
The city of Philadelphia was built with bricks, giving it an appearance many neighborhoods retained into the twenty-first century. An abundance of local clay allowed brickmaking to flourish and bricks to become the one of the most important building materials in the region. Because it could be accomplished with just a few rudimentary tools, brickmaking ⇒ Read More
After grilling by Council, Philly district answers questions about suburbanites in city schools
WHYY story by Avi Wolfman-Arent
PSFS
Philadelphia Saving Fund Society, known as PSFS, was the first savings bank in the United States, founded in 1816. For most of its history, PSFS emphasized practicality in its operations, architecture, and community orientation. The historic organization added a modern accent to the Philadelphia skyline in 1932, when it opened a new, International-style building at ⇒ Read More
Philadelphia Navy Yard
The history of the Philadelphia Navy Yard has been one of constant struggle, repeatedly staring down imminent closure only to be saved at the last second by stalwart local politicians or a timely military conflict. Fondly remembered as the outfitter of the first American fleet, builder of the first warship under the Constitution, launcher of ⇒ Read More
Sarah K. Filik
Sarah K. Filik is a graduate of Rutgers College and obtained an M.A. in Art History from the University of Delaware. She has been a board member of the Sayreville (N.J.) Historical Society for several years.
Holly Genovese
Holly Genovese is a Ph.D. student in history and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Temple University. Her interests are in incarceration, public history, and Black Power. She is Contributing Editor at Auntie Bellum Magazine and a contributor at Book Riot, Rabble Lit, and the Us Society for Intellectual Historians blog. Her writing has been ⇒ Read More
Nativism
While Philadelphia has not been alone in experiencing sharp undercurrents of nativism, virulent rhetoric and periodic waves of violence aimed at the foreign-born have often wracked the city. Clashes between nativists and immigrants between the 1720s and the 1920s helped to set the boundaries of the city as well as define the limits of American ⇒ Read More
Nuclear Power
Mirroring a nation-wide wave of commercial interest in nuclear power plants in the 1950s and 1960s, the Philadelphia Electric Company (PECO) and other energy companies in Greater Philadelphia jumped at the opportunity to develop relatively inexpensive electricity for the region. Nuclear power plants began servicing the region’s electrical grid in 1967. However, as was the ⇒ Read More
Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania
Dating to 1682, Philadelphia County’s founding coincided with the origin of the city. Although the county faded from view after its consolidation with the city in 1854, it remained important for understanding Philadelphia’s urban development, local government, and long battles for political reform. When founding Pennsylvania, William Penn (1644-1718) followed long-established precedent by dividing his ⇒ Read More
Civil Rights (African American)
Black Philadelphians have fought for civil rights since the nineteenth century and even before. Early demands focused on the abolition of slavery and desegregation of public accommodations. The movement gained greater power as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth and the World War I-era Great Migration brought tens of thousands of African Americans ⇒ Read More
Bonny Beth Elwell
Bonny Beth Elwell is a Salem County historian and genealogist, serving on the board of several historical organizations. She works as the editor of the Elmer Times newspaper, the Library Director of the Camden County Historical Society, and is the author of Upper Pittsgrove, Elmer, and Pittsgrove (2013) and other publications.
Christopher A. Wheeler
Christopher A. Wheeler is a research economist and manager of data analysis at the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs. He is the author of a 2014 study for the Senator Walter Rand Institute for Public Affairs at Rutgers-Camden, Poverty Dynamics in South Jersey: Trends and Determinants, 1970–2012.
Paul A. Jargowsky
Paul A. Jargowsky is Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Center for Urban Research and Education at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. He is the author of Poverty and Place: Ghettos, Barrios, and the American City and The Architecture of Segregation.
Jonathan Hall
Jonathan Hall is an environmental historian, specializing in the history of animals in the nineteenth century. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Montana.
Pacific World (Connections and Impact)
Historians have often situated Philadelphia in three geographic contexts: on the western edge of the “Atlantic World” during the colonial era, as an eastern metropole for hinterlands and the receding frontier to the west, and in the mid-Atlantic region between the North and South of the United States. These geographic frames all make sense, given ⇒ Read More
Urban horse riding club inspires latest Barnes exhibit
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
Weekly Entertainment Guide – Freedom Blast!
WHYY story by Robin Bloom
Philly DA Seth Williams pleads guilty, resigns
WHYY story by Bobby Allyn
Fashion
Fashion played an important role in Philadelphia’s development as a center for retail and manufacturing. Philadelphians imported and promoted the latest European styles while producing garments and accessories of comparable style and quality. Area retailers played a pivotal part in fostering consumer culture in the nineteenth century and set industry standards for the nation. Despite ⇒ Read More
Anglican Church (Church of England)
The Anglican Church came to Philadelphia under the terms of the 1681 Pennsylvania charter, which welcomed all who “acknowledge one almighty God.” In 1695, thirty-nine Anglicans formed Philadelphia’s Christ Church, the first Anglican congregation in Pennsylvania, and requested a minister from the bishop of London, who oversaw the Church of England in the colonies. Members ⇒ Read More
Deafness and the Deaf
Documentation of the lives of deaf individuals in the Philadelphia region, and elsewhere, is limited. Historic accounts depict desperate individuals roaming the streets or begging. Prior to the advent of public schools for the deaf, only elite deaf individuals received private tutoring. In the early nineteenth century, Philadelphia philanthropists, religious figures, educators, merchants, and policymakers ⇒ Read More
Armories
Armories served as military training and recruiting sites, arms depots, headquarters, and social clubs for the nation’s citizen-soldiers. Early armories in Philadelphia were simply rented spaces in commercial buildings. After the Civil War, permanent structures for the exclusive use of the Pennsylvania National Guard supplanted these ad hoc armories as business interests responded to labor ⇒ Read More
Penn State study: Vapers report less dependence, addiction than cigarette smokers
WHYY story by Anne Hoffman
Dancing Assembly
Established in the winter of 1748-49, the Dancing Assembly of Philadelphia— also known as “The Assembly” or “The Assemblies”— originated as an occasion for elite men and women to gather for social dancing in carefully matched pairs. Modeled after the English “assembly,” a type of formal social gathering most famously held in Bath and London, ⇒ Read More
Stanley Keith Arnold
Stanley Keith Arnold is associate professor of history at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of Building the Beloved Community: Philadelphia Interracial Civil Rights Organizations and Race Relations, 1930-1970.
Scots Irish (Scotch Irish)
Pennsylvania’s Scots Irish, a hybrid people of Scots and Irish ancestry, were the most numerically predominant group within an Irish diaspora migration that brought between 250,000 and 500,000 Irish immigrants (most of them Protestants from Ulster and predominately Presbyterians) to America between 1700 and 1820. Philadelphia was one of their principal destinations. As the prototypical ⇒ Read More
Historical Society of Pennsylvania
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 ⇒ Read More
Boyz II Men Boulevard is more than a street name for Philadelphia natives
WHYY story by Sara Hoover
Site for marker memorializing MOVE tragedy still not pinned down
WHYY story by Aaron Moselle
Toy Manufacturing
Philadelphia helped define the toy industry in the United States with simple yet engaging toys that became beloved by generations. Although social, cultural, and economic changes produced challenges for the industry, a few iconic toys stood the test of time and continued to promote imagination, creativity, and discovery for people of all ages. Philadelphia’s first ⇒ Read More
SPHAS
In 1917, a group of Jewish high school graduates in Philadelphia formed a basketball team that competed against other local teams. Affiliated with the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA) at first, the team soon became known as the SPHAS (South Philadelphia Hebrew Association) after the YMHA withdrew its sponsorship because it considered the sport too ⇒ Read More
Philadelphia complying with immigration regulations, city tells U.S.
WHYY story by Tom MacDonald
Dutch (The) and The Netherlands
From seventeenth-century Dutch settlements in the Delaware Valley to twenty-first century business connections, the greater Philadelphia area has had longstanding and meaningful ties with the Netherlands. Not to be confused with the more numerous Pennsylvania Dutch—who are in fact German, or Deutsch, speakers—Nederlanders helped shape Philadelphia through migration and cultural, social, and economic exchange. The ⇒ Read More
Lawrence Kessler
Lawrence Kessler holds a Ph.D. in history from Temple University and is a postdoctoral fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine.
Musical Fund Society
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 ⇒ Read More
Philadelphia Housing Authority relocating headquarters to North Philly
WHYY story by Aaron Moselle
Jim Saksa
Jim Saksa is a reporter for WHYY’s PlanPhilly.
CEO of Philadelphia Orchestra to step down in December
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
Why the Red Knot birds live and die by what happens here
WHYY story by Bill Barlow
Judith Ridner
Judith Ridner is an associate professor of history at Mississippi State University. She is the author of A Town In-Between: Carlisle, Pennsylvania and the Early Mid-Atlantic Interior (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) and The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania (to be published in 2017 by Temple University Press for the Pennsylvania Historical Association).
Philly teachers overwhelmingly approve new contract
WHYY story by Avi Wolfman-Arent and Dale Mezzacappa
How much lead is hiding in Philly’s former industrial neighborhoods?
WHYY interview by Dave Heller
Chester County, Pennsylvania
As one of the original counties established by William Penn (1644-1718), Chester County was only modestly influenced by Philadelphia in its early development because after 1789 it shared no border with the city. Although the Pennsylvania Railroad linked the county’s central valley to Philadelphia in the mid-nineteenth century, it remained a largely rural landscape whose ⇒ Read More
Woman Suffrage
While the Philadelphia region often led the way on progressive reforms, by the twentieth century, woman suffrage was not among them. The region boasted a number of early woman suffrage advocates, and women in New Jersey had the right to vote during the early years of the republic, but by the late nineteenth century, Pennsylvania ⇒ Read More
Women’s Clubs
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 ⇒ Read More
Fariha Khan
Fariha Khan is the Associate Director of the Asian American Studies program at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also teaches courses on South Asians in the U.S. and Asian American Communities, as well as Muslim Identity in America
Ross A. Newton
Ross A. Newton received a Ph.D in History from Northeastern University. His current book manuscript explores Anglicans in colonial and revolutionary Boston, Massachusetts, and their connections within the larger British Atlantic World.
Plan to install replicas of early Water Works sculptures approved by Art Commission
PlanPhilly story by Julia Bell via NewsWorks
With $2.5 M, seeking to discover Philly’s next classical generation
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
Freedom Train
On September 17, 1947, a seven-car train arrived in Philadelphia’s Broad Street Station carrying 130 articles of American history, including documents, prints, pictures, and flags, intended to represent this history’s most important legacy: freedom. After its launch in Philadelphia, the Freedom Train went on a 29,000-mile journey to three hundred communities throughout the United States, ⇒ Read More
Catherine Murray
Catherine Murray is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Temple University.
Orphanages and Orphans
Philadelphia’s earliest orphanages grew out of social projects intended to help impoverished families. As early the first decades of the eighteenth century, city officials created organizations such as the Overseers of the Poor (later the Guardians of the Poor) to provide relief to those, such as the elderly, widows with children, and orphans, who faced ⇒ Read More
Opera and Opera Houses
Opera has played an important role in Philadelphia arts and entertainment since the mid-eighteenth century. The city has long been a key center for opera and holds several important distinctions in opera history, including being the site of the first serious opera performances in America, birthplace of the first major American opera composer, and home ⇒ Read More
Charter Schools
Privately run but publicly funded charter schools became an important part of the educational landscape in Greater Philadelphia by the beginning of the twenty-first century. Their advocates across the country argued that they were an antidote to politicized and unwieldy public school systems and a way to move decision-making out of the hands of government ⇒ Read More
Activists question public subsidies used for North Broad hotel project
PlanPhilly story by Jake Blumgart via NewsWorks
Amanda Sherry
Amanda Sherry is a museum professional in the greater Philadelphia region.
As summer heat hits Philadelphia, Odunde Festival brings South Street to life
WHYY story by Emily Cohen
Smoking is often the hardest ‘vice’ to quit
WHYY story by Morgan Springer
Armstrong Association of Philadelphia
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 ⇒ Read More
Thrift
Philadelphia became a national center for the thrift movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a high concentration of progressive individuals and institutions promoted values of frugality, industry, and stewardship as a means for poor and working-class people to improve their circumstances. Espoused by white middle-class society, the thrift movement declined when ⇒ Read More
Library Company of Philadelphia
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 establishing the ⇒ Read More
Botany
Beginning in the eighteenth century with the botanical enthusiasts who explored the world around them as part of a larger interest in natural history, botany became an integral part of the Philadelphia region’s national and international reputation. It brought scholars and enthusiasts from across the globe to study and explore Philadelphia’s collections and gardens, influenced ⇒ Read More
Pop-up exhibit in Philly’s Kensington neighborhood puts focus on gentrification
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
Camden council leader wins mayoral race
Associated Press via WHYY
Magdalen Society
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 ⇒ Read More
Whig Party
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 ⇒ Read More
Zara Anishanslin
Zara Anishanslin is Assistant Professor of History and Art History at the University of Delaware and the author of Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2016). Erica Lome served as research assistant for this essay.
Koreans and Korea
Although a few Koreans came to Greater Philadelphia in the early twentieth century to study in universities, Koreans became one of the top ten new immigrant groups in the region by 1970. The new U.S.-Korea relationship formed during the Korean War led to increased exchanges between the two countries, and the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization ⇒ Read More
Children’s Aid Society of Pennsylvania
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 ⇒ Read More
Philly bridge reconstruction on track to finish a year early
WHYY story by Tom MacDonald
Free Black Communities
In the nineteenth century, Philadelphia and the region surrounding it came to contain free black communities that by most measures were the most vibrant, dynamic, and influential in the United States. Free African Americans relied on each other to confront the persistent power of slavery and white supremacy in Philadelphia and the region. At the ⇒ Read More
Matt Trowbridge
Matt Trowbridge is a graduate of Rutgers University-Camden (2015) and is pursuing his Master’s in Library and Information Science at Rutgers’ School of Communication and Information.
Marie Conn
Marie A. Conn is Professor of Religious Studies at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia. She holds a doctorate in Theology from the University of Notre Dame. Her books include C. S. Lewis and Human Suffering: Light among the Shadows, and Noble Daughters: Unheralded Women in Western Christianity, 13th to 18th Centuries.
Getting inside William Penn’s head for once a decade cleaning
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
As Norris Square changes, Las Parcelas puts down new roots
PlanPhilly story by Catalina Jaramillo via NewsWorks
Kenneth Finkel
Kenneth Finkel, professor (teaching/instructional) in the History Department at Temple University, served as curator of Prints and Photographs at the Library Company from 1977 to 1994. He is a regular contributor at the PhillyHistory blog.
Lincoln Drive
The 4.1 miles of Lincoln Drive that link Philadelphia’s northwest neighborhoods to Center City was built in three distinct segments over the course of five decades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At its south end, a winding mid-nineteenth-century section along the Wissahickon Creek was originally constructed to provide access to water-powered industrial ⇒ Read More
Boarding and Lodging Houses
Distinguished by its ubiquitous row houses and high rates of home ownership, Philadelphia has been long been known as a “city of homes.” But for much of its history, it also has been a city of boardinghouses. “Boarding” and “lodging” houses did not enter the local lexicon until the late eighteenth century, but the practice ⇒ Read More
Bicycles
Since the nineteenth century, bicycles have enamored the American public as tools of transportation, sport, exercise, and joy. The Philadelphia area has been intimately connected with the development of the two-wheeled, human-powered machine from its early appearance in North America to the adoption of bike-share programs and the blazing of interstate trail networks in the ⇒ Read More
Bartram’s Garden
Located on the west bank of the Schuylkill River, Bartram’s Garden, considered the oldest surviving botanic garden in North America, has served as a monument to the storied history of Philadelphia’s botanical endeavors and to the genius of John Bartram (1699–1777) and his descendants. Established as a family farm and garden by John Bartram in ⇒ Read More
Clocks and Clockmakers
Clockmaking in colonial and early republican Philadelphia and its environs was considered an intellectual profession requiring great artisanal skill and scientific knowledge. Among rural communities surrounding the city, the mathematical precision and mechanical intricacy of the profession put it at a superior rank to the crafts of blacksmithing and carpentry. Clockmakers like David Rittenhouse (1732-96) ⇒ Read More
Classical Music
Classical music stands apart from vernacular (or “folk” music) and from “popular” music (in the form of simplified commercial entertainment) in its complexity of structure and high level of performance requirements. Philadelphia established a major position in American classical composition and performance in the early nineteenth century, and maintained that position through its premier professional ⇒ Read More
Free Library helps aspiring entrepreneurs hit just the right pitch
WHYY story by Kimberly Haas
National Register of Historic Places (Sites)
The Philadelphia region’s early settlement and political and industrial dominance throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries left a tremendous physical presence on the landscape, both above and below ground. Many of these places have been added to the National Register of Historic Places, a list of buildings, neighborhoods, objects, structures, and sites throughout the ⇒ Read More
Sharece Blakney
Sharece Blakney is a graduate student in American History at Rutgers-Camden.
Ahead of Memorial Day, Americans’ confidence in the military unwavering
WHYY interview by Dave Heller
Project Milestone: 500 Topics Online
This week The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia reached 500 essays online — a major milestone for the project. The editors extend thanks to all of the authors, editors, project partners, and staff members who have contributed their time and talents to creating this unparalleled resource for understanding the Philadelphia region’s history and experience. Topic #500 ⇒ Read More
Telephones
The telephone revolutionized communications by allowing messages to be transmitted instantly to nearly anywhere in the world. Following the public debut of the device at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, Philadelphia became home to many of telephony’s milestones and a center of telephone innovation, promoted by pioneers and supporters including inventor Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) ⇒ Read More
Police Athletic League
Since 1914, police officers in urban areas have seen the need for better relations between the police and local youth as a means of reducing crime and promoting wholesome play under proper supervision. In that spirit, the first Police Athletic League (PAL) in the greater Philadelphia area formed in North Philadelphia in 1947 “to build ⇒ Read More
Nursing
The history of nursing in the Philadelphia area is one of long and storied traditions. Men and women have often nursed their sick families and friends at home, which for millennia represented the best, safest, and most comforting site for treatment and care. Bringing a stranger into that home to provide nursing care was a ⇒ Read More
Judith Goode
Judith Goode is Professor Emerita of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Temple University. Since 1970, she has been doing ethnographic research exploring immigration, class, and ethnic relations in neighborhoods within Greater Philadelphia. She has served on the boards of several community-based organizations and she has contributed to public anthropology through op-ed pages and radio and ⇒ Read More
New pop-up art exhibit focuses on city’s history of revolution
Story by WHYY staff
Philly police headquarters moving to former Inquirer building on North Broad
WHYY story by Tom MacDonald
Clare Sauro
Clare Sauro is Director and Chief Curator of the Robert and Penny Fox Historic Costume Collection at Drexel University. She holds an M.A. in Museum Studies: Costume and Textiles from the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Wendy Gamber
Wendy Gamber is the Robert F. Byrnes Professor in History at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of three books: The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930, The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America, and The Notorious Mrs. Clem: Murder and Money in the Gilded Age.
Newspapers (Suburban)
In the decades following World War II, the dramatic demographic, industrial, and retail decentralization that transformed the United States into a suburban nation also caused a major restructuring of the American newspaper industry. The massive influx of people and commerce into the suburbs led to rapid growth for numerous vibrant and profitable suburban daily and ⇒ Read More
Tamara Gaskell
Tamara Gaskell is Public Historian in Residence at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities and co-editor of The Public Historian. Previously, she was editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography and Pennsylvania Legacies, while director of publications at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and an assistant editor of the Selected Papers of ⇒ Read More
Cory Kegerise
Cory Kegerise is the Community Preservation Coordinator for Eastern Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Office. A native of Berks County, he lives in Philadelphia and holds a master’s degree in Historic Preservation from the University of Pennsylvania.
Red Arrow Lines
The Red Arrow Lines of the Philadelphia Suburban Transportation Company (1936-70) became a national model and local brand of marketable mass transit in the 1950s, when few private companies still built, managed, owned, and operated suburban public transportation services, let alone profited from them. At a time when motor-vehicle commuting forced most transit proprietors into ⇒ Read More
South Street (Song)
“South Street,” a hit song for the Philadelphia vocal group the Orlons in 1963, celebrates an iconic Philadelphia thoroughfare and is among a select group of songs that came to define the city in popular culture in the late twentieth century. The song’s catchy opening line—“Where do all the hippies meet? South Street, South Street”—became ⇒ Read More
Call for Authors: Summer-Fall 2017
As The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia surpasses 500 topics online, the editors seek to make additional assignments to help complete important content areas. To view the list of available assignments, link here: Call for authors To join more than 325 leading and emerging scholars who have already contributed to this peer-reviewed, digital-first project, let us ⇒ Read More
Italians and Italy
Although ties between Italy and Greater Philadelphia stretched back generations, it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that Italian migration increased to the extent of forming visible points of settlement in the area. Over time, loosely connected clusters of Italians in various neighborhoods, mainly in South Philadelphia, coalesced into a singular ⇒ Read More
Michelle Smiley
Michelle Smiley is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College. Her dissertation considers the history of photography and its technological development in the United States.
Art of Cecilia Beaux
The elegant portraits of Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942) found unanimous critical acclaim in Philadelphia, Paris, and New York. Her modern style of painting combined the best of academic training, European sophistication, and experimentation. Beaux successfully negotiated the gender separatism of the late nineteenth century while she gained international renown, allowing her to become the first full-time ⇒ Read More
With the click of a button, birders become citizen scientists
WHYY story by Paige Pfleger
Bradley Flamm
Bradley Flamm is the Director of Sustainability at West Chester University, an academic who has taught at Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania, a transportation planner, and a resident of Northwest Philadelphia.
Mummies
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 ⇒ Read More
New Jersey may ban chewing tobacco statewide in schools
WHYY story by Phil Gregory
In Philadelphia, Haitians celebrate heritage and seek continued U.S. protection
WHYY story by Laura Benshoff
Andrew Diemer
Andrew Diemer is Assistant Professor of History and Director of Metropolitan Studies at Towson University. He is author of The Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African Americans in the Mid-Atlantic Borderland, 1817-1863 (University of Georgia Press, 2016).
Lehigh Valley
Over the centuries, strong ties of transport, investment, and culture grew between the Greater Philadelphia region and the Lehigh Valley. The valley was carved by retreating glaciers twenty thousand years ago and maintained by its namesake river running from the Pocono Mountains, through Blue Mountain, south and east into the Delaware River. Only in recent ⇒ Read More
Sarah Chesney
Sarah Chesney is a historical archaeologist who earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from the College of William and Mary in 2014. She has worked on several landscape archaeology projects in Philadelphia, exploring the intersection of archaeology, landscape, and early modern science. Her publications include “The Root of the Matter: Searching for William Hamilton’s Greenhouse at ⇒ Read More
West Chester, Pennsylvania
Boosted by its strategic location some twenty-five miles from Philadelphia, West Chester, Pennsylvania, grew and prospered for most of its history as the county seat of Chester County. Pressured by mid-twentieth-century suburbanization, the borough lost its commercial and residential dominance and even its role as county seat somewhat diminished as the growth of the surrounding ⇒ Read More
Amtrak engineer surrenders on charges in fatal crash
Associated Press via WHYY
MOVE
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 ⇒ Read More
Design of Cities
Published in 1967, Design of Cities assessed urban development from the ancient through the modern periods while highlighting many redevelopment projects in postwar Philadelphia. Written by urban planner Edmund Bacon (1910-2005) and replete with photographs, sketches, maps, and his insights, the book appeared during a time when urban renewal, historic preservation battles, racial tensions, and ⇒ Read More
Maia Cucchiara
Maia Cucchiara is an Associate Professor of Urban Education at Temple University. She is the author of Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities: Who Wins and Who Loses When Schools Become Urban Amenities (University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Council considers how to encourage electric vehicle ownership after suspending previous program
PlanPhilly story by Jim Saksa via NewsWorks
Delaware County, Pennsylvania
Carved out of Chester County in 1789 (with the remainder of that county lying to its southwest), Delaware County long served as a distinct but close neighbor to the City of Philadelphia. Linked to the Philadelphia port from the eighteenth century onward, the eastern part of the county, including Chester and its neighboring municipalities along ⇒ Read More
Fallon Samuels Aidoo
Fallon Samuels Aidoo, Ph.D., a transportation and land use planning practitioner, scholar, and educator, advises designers, managers, and sustainers of transportation services and spaces–from streets and shuttles to terminals and trails. She is co-author of the Newark River Access Guide (2013), a resource for reinvestment in transportation to and along the Newark, New Jersey, riverfront ⇒ Read More
Literary Societies
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 ⇒ Read More
Twist (The)
“The Twist,” an early 1960s dance hit by Philadelphia singer Chubby Checker (real name Ernest Evans, b. 1941), ushered in a new way of dancing and solidified Philadelphia’s role as a major trendsetter in popular music in this period. Released in the summer of 1960 by Philadelphia-based Cameo Parkway Records, “The Twist” reached number one ⇒ Read More
Stefano Luconi
Stefano Luconi teaches History of the Americas at the University of Florence and specializes in Italian immigration to the United States, with special attention to Italian Americans’ transformation of ethnic identity. His publications include From Paesani to White Ethnics: The Italian Experience in Philadelphia (State University of New York Press, 2001) and The Italian-American Vote ⇒ Read More
S. J. Wolfe
S.J. Wolfe is senior cataloguer and serials specialist at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts where she has worked since 1982. She has studied Egyptian religion and culture for over 60 years, turning her research specifically on the historical aspects of the mummies as artifacts in American museums. She is the author of many ⇒ Read More
West Philly gentrification means upheaval for these longtime residents
WHYY story by Katie Colaneri
Philadelphia Maritime Exchange
In 1875, a group of influential maritime and business leaders who recognized the importance of the Port of Philadelphia’s standing with respect to other North American ports formed the Philadelphia Maritime Exchange. The goal of the exchange was to position Philadelphia as a premier port in North America by increasing the city’s direct trade with ⇒ Read More
Dream Garden
Dream Garden, a glass mosaic designed by Maxfield Parrish (1870–1966) measuring fifteen feet in height and forty-nine feet in length, caused a public sensation twice in Philadelphia’s history. The first time was in 1916 when it was installed in the foyer of the Curtis Publishing Company in Philadelphia, six months after a national debut at ⇒ Read More
Rain, fear can’t dampen Cinco de Mayo in Kennett Square
WHYY story by Laura Benshoff
Exploring the past, future of Philly neighborhoods during annual Jane’s Walk
WHYY story by Brad Larrison
Site Visit: Orinoka Civic House and walking tour with NKCDC
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
Social Dancing
Dancing has been popular in Philadelphia since the city was founded, in spite of religious opposition, especially from Quakers. Far from succumbing to religious criticism, social dancing gained in importance as a way for socially ambitious Philadelphians to demonstrate their gentility. For most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, well-to-do families gathered for formal balls ⇒ Read More
A hotel room in Philadelphia would cost more under a new council bill
WHYY story by Tom MacDonald
Genealogy
In the Delaware Valley and the United States, the study of genealogy transformed from a pursuit of the elite in the nineteenth century into the most democratic field of historical research. The search by genealogical researchers for materials of importance that assist with pedigree building, family histories, and searches for heirs has resulted in the ⇒ Read More
New mural to honor Philly native Ed Bradley of ’60 Minutes’
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
Mexicans and Mexico
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 ⇒ Read More
Holly Caldwell
Holly Caldwell received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Delaware, where she wrote her dissertation on the medicalization of deafness and deaf education reform at Mexico’s Escuela Nacional de Sordomudos (National School for Deaf-Mutes). She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of History at Chestnut Hill College and has also taught at Susquehanna University.
Lucy Davis
Lucy Davis is a research and digital publishing assistant for The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia.
WWI re-enactment at Fort Mott State Park
WHYY story by Jana Shea
For the first time, historic prison offers tours of the hospital
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
Extravaganzas and inconveniences: Philly becoming host with the most
WHYY story by Jennifer Lynn
Woodbury, New Jersey
Located on the Woodbury Creek in the northwestern part of Gloucester County, Woodbury formed as a result of the first Quaker family to settle the area, in 1683. Initially a lightly populated farming community, the village eventually became the seat of Gloucester County and over time emerged as an important center for transportation, manufacturing, and ⇒ Read More
Big crowds, hometown hero, loud boos give NFL Draft a distinctly Philly feel
WHYY story by Jay Scott Smith
123 years old and running strong, Penn Relays open Thursday
WHYY story by Jennifer Lynn
Patricia D’Antonio
Patricia D’Antonio is the Carol E. Ware Professor in Mental Health Nursing, Director of the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, and Chair of the Department of Family and Community Health at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. She is also a senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute ⇒ Read More
Saying farewell to the last remaining grove of English Elms in the country
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
In South Jersey, a familiar fight to save a historic African-American cemetery
WHYY story by Dana DiFilippo
Chesco residents urge officials to reject development plan for contaminated site
NewsWorks story via StateImpact Pennsylvania
Camden metro area sees highest year-over-year job growth nationwide
WHYY story by Joe Hernandez
Eugenics
In 1883 Francis Galton (1822–1911), an English statistician and sociologist, invented a term for his decades-long genealogical investigations into “fit” and “unfit” families: eugenics, the scientific study of being well-born. While Galton tended to focus on the fit, in the United States, enthusiasts for eugenics more often focused on those deemed biologically unfit. Elwyn, Pennsylvania, ⇒ Read More
Kim Sajet
Kim Sajet is director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Prior to joining the Smithsonian, she was president and CEO of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. She has also held leadership positions with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Bartram’s Mile trail aims to connect SW Philly neighbors to river and city beyond
PlanPhilly story via NewsWorks
Magazines, Literary
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 ⇒ Read More
Terry L. Potter
Terry L. Potter is the Director of the J. Welles Henderson Archives & Library at the Independence Seaport Museum. She holds a Master’s Degree in American History from Rutgers University, Camden.
Philadelphia making effort to recycle, reuse — and avoid landfill
WHYY story by Tom MacDonald
Cynthia Haveson Veloric
Cynthia Haveson Veloric, M.A., is a research assistant in the American Art Department at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She has recently published articles on Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Alexander Stirling Calder, Hutchings California Magazine, and Martin Johnson Heade.
Edge Cities
Edge cities, as they came to be called, emerged on the peripheries of older urban centers in the last part of the twentieth century. As defined by journalist Joel Garreau (b. 1948), they contained at least five million square feet of leasable office space, 600,000 (or more) square feet of leasable retail space, “more jobs ⇒ Read More
ENIAC
Developed in Philadelphia during World War II, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) made history as the world’s first general-purpose, nonmechanical computer. Unveiled at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering in 1946, the ENIAC consisted of 40 nine-foot-high cabinets containing 18,000 vacuum tubes, 10,000 capacitors, 6,000 switches, and 1,500 relays. Unlike ⇒ Read More
Freemasonry
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 ⇒ Read More
Roman Catholic Parishes
Parishes stand at the center of Roman Catholic religious life. Since the arrival of Catholicism in the Philadelphia region in the early eighteenth century, parishes have shaped Catholics’ sense of communal identity by functioning as both the administrative unit of a diocese and the primary site of Catholic worship. Developing into expansive complexes that often ⇒ Read More
Whiz Kids
The 1950 Philadelphia Phillies baseball team, which surprisingly won the National League pennant but lost to the New York Yankees in the World Series, gained the nickname the “Whiz Kids” from Newspaper Enterprise Association sports editor Harry Grayson (1894-1968) during spring training in Clearwater, Florida. The team had a roster dominated by young players, including ⇒ Read More
Grace Schultz
Grace Schultz earned an M.A. in History with a concentration in Public History from Temple University and is an Archives Technician at the National Archives at Philadelphia.
Some Philly residents aren’t happy about extended NFL visit
WHYY story by Tom MacDonald
Brent Ruswick
Brent Ruswick is an Assistant Professor of History at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. His historical research—including the monograph Almost Worthy: The Poor, Paupers, and the Science of Charity in America, 1877–1917 (2012)—concentrates on how professional communities defined and treated social deviancy in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. He also publishes and teaches in ⇒ Read More
Inner Suburbs
Presenting a varied and complicated patchwork of both thriving and distressed communities, Philadelphia’s inner suburbs developed during different eras to serve different purposes and populations. European influence predated the Revolutionary War with English, Swedish, Dutch, and Welsh settlers establishing tight-knit farming communities in what were then outlying areas of William Penn’s Philadelphia. During the eighteenth ⇒ Read More
Vintage Base Ball season opener in Hammonton on Saturday
WHYY story by Jana Shea
U.S. Veterans Affairs secretary visits Wilmington VA hospital
WHYY story by Zoe Read
Can the New Jersey Lottery save the pension fund?
WHYY story by John Reitmeyer
Historical marker coming to site of MOVE debacle
WHYY story by Dave Davies
New Jersey debates whether cat declawing is cruel
WHYY story by Jana Shea
Hotels and Motels
As one of the busiest and most influential port cities in colonial and later independent America, Philadelphia became an early leader in hotel development and continued to elevate industry standards throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hotels presented travelers with a desirable alternative to staying in private residences, and luxury hotels became signifiers of a ⇒ Read More
Arthur Murphy
Arthur Murphy earned his Master’s Degree in Public History from Rutgers University-Camden and will enter Rutgers Law School in Camden in the fall of 2017.
Smoking and Smoking Regulations
The origins of smoking tobacco in the Philadelphia region can be traced to the era before European colonization and evolved from pipes and cigars to the commercialization of cigarettes beginning in the late nineteenth century. Philadelphia-area farmers grew tobacco, local manufacturers produced cigars and cigarettes, and the N.W. Ayer advertising agency helped Camel cigarettes become ⇒ Read More
What’s happened since New Jersey took over Atlantic City in November?
WHYY story by Joe Hernandez
Communities with casinos in Pennsylvania concerned about possible funding changes
WHYY story by Lindsay Lazarski
Oh, Dem Golden Slippers
“Oh, Dem Golden Slippers,” the unofficial theme song of the Philadelphia Mummers Parade, is both an enduringly popular song and a revealing example of the complex, multilayered interplay between black and white music in America. Written by African American songwriter James Bland (1854–1911) as a parody of a Negro spiritual, “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers,” published ⇒ Read More
Council hearing examines evictions, substandard housing, and possible solutions
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
N.J. launches pilot program to protect Pine Barren’s intermittent ponds from off-road vehicles
WHYY story by Justin Auciello
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 ⇒ Read More
SEPTA transit fares to go up starting July 1st
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
National Museum of American Jewish History exhibit links 1917 to today’s debate on immigration
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
Furnituremaking
From the founding of Philadelphia in 1682 until the late 1800s, a vibrant community of cabinetmakers plied their skills alongside specialists in carving, chair making, and turning. Others who worked with wood included carpenters, coopers, shipwrights, and wheelwrights. These tradesmen were as diverse as the city itself, and their complex webs of language, ethnicity, religious ⇒ Read More
Burlesque
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Philadelphia became one of the central nodes of American burlesque, a genre with origins in the ribald Victorian “travesties”—theatrical parodies of well-known operas that relied upon risqué and absurd humor. Distinct from its English counterpart, American burlesque incorporated elements of minstrelsy and, especially by the end of ⇒ Read More
Convents
Convents—communities of women devoted to religious life—in the Greater Philadelphia area played a significant role in the education of youth and in social services for communities from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first century. Although some regional Catholic convents moved or closed during this time, the Philadelphia area remained strong in Catholic identity because of ⇒ Read More
Delaware River Basin Commission
The four-state compact that established the Delaware River Basin Commission was a breakthrough innovation in addressing the interrelated land and water impacts of natural resources spanning political jurisdictions. For the first time, the federal government and several states joined as equal partners in a single agency to regulate and develop the watershed of an entire ⇒ Read More
Timothy Olewniczak
Timothy Olewniczak is an independent researcher who earned a Master’s Degree in History from the University at Buffalo. He is the author of an article about alcohol prohibition in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies.
Crowds (Colonial and Revolution Eras)
Social and economic elites dominated formal politics in Pennsylvania and New Jersey during the colonial and revolutionary eras, but ordinary people, often those who were ineligible to vote, helped shape the political culture. To support or oppose economic conditions and policies imposed by imperial, provincial, and local legislators, they periodically engaged in public celebrations, civil ⇒ Read More
Competing visions for ‘social impact’ development at 8th and Race
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
Vyta Baselice
Vyta Baselice is a Ph.D. student in American Studies/Historic Preservation at the George Washington University, where she studies the intersecting histories of architecture, urbanism, materials, labor, and race. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Modernizing Magic: Portland Cement and the Material Construction of America,” employs critical theory and ethnographic methodologies to investigate the production and consumption of ⇒ Read More
Single Tax Movement
During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Philadelphia helped give birth to the single tax movement, one of the country’s more influential, if less well-remembered, reform movements. The idea of a “single tax” on the unimproved value of land, rather than on productive activities, was popularized by Henry George (1839-97), a native of Philadelphia. The ⇒ Read More
William Pannapacker
William Pannapacker holds a Ph.D. in American Civilization from Harvard University and is the DuMez Professor of English at Hope College. He is the author of Revised Lives: Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Authorship and numerous articles and reviews on American literature and culture.
Veronica Willig
Veronica Willig has a B.A. in International Studies from Arcadia University. She has worked as Hilary Parson Dick’s research assistant for two years and serves as an AmeriCorps Community Projects Coordinator with YouthBuild Philadelphia Charter School.
Danielle DiVerde
Danielle DiVerde has a B.A. in International Studies and Spanish from Arcadia University. She has worked as research assistant to Hilary Parsons Dick for three years and is a Lead Customer Service Representative and Latin America Specialist at MEJDI Tours.
Hilary Parsons Dick
Hilary Parsons Dick is an Associate Professor of International Studies at Arcadia University. She completed her Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2016, she was a Wenner-Gren Hunt Fellow, during which time she completed her first book, Words of Passage: Discourse, National Belonging, and the Imagined Lives of Mexican Migrants (forthcoming, spring 2018, The University of ⇒ Read More
Works Progress Administration (WPA)
In response to the rising tide of unemployment nationally, and after the short-lived Civil Works Administration (CWA) failed to stem that tide, Congress in May 1935 created the Works Progress Administration (WPA), one of the “alphabet soup” of economic recovery programs enacted as part of the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945). Later ⇒ Read More
Adopting new approach helps Camden job-training organization better serve youth
WHYY story by Anne Hoffman
Governor Christie’s final budget calls for using Lottery funds for pensions
WHYY story by John Reitmeyer
Julia A. Ericksen
Julia A. Ericksen is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Temple University, a competitive ballroom dancer, and author of Dance with Me: Ballroom Dance and the Promise of Instant Intimacy (NYU Press, 2011).
Kenney budget puts $90 million toward Penn’s Landing park capping I-95
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
Erich M. Huhn
Erich M. Huhn earned his B.A. in History and Secondary Education at Rider University and M.A. in History from Seton Hall University. His research focuses on the socioeconomic shifts that occurred in nineteenth and early twentieth century America with a specific focus on New Jersey and the history of Freemasonry.
U.S. political climate stressful for many, poll finds and Philly-area therapists confirm
WHYY story by Anne Hoffman
Christopher England
Christopher England has taught U.S. history at Georgetown University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his Ph.D. from Georgetown University, where he wrote his dissertation on the single tax movement.
My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free
“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 ⇒ Read More
Toni Pitock
Toni Pitock received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Delaware. Her manuscript in process explores the economic culture of Philadelphia’s Jewish commercial community from its emergence in 1736 until the early 1820s.
Proposed ‘Pinelands’ pipeline faces crucial vote on Friday
WHYY story by Tom Johnson
Television Shows (About Philadelphia)
The Philadelphia region has provided a backdrop for numerous television programs, including shows by creators from the region. Although the programs often were shot in other places, like New York or Los Angeles, the Philadelphia setting provided important references and details. In some cases, stories called for posh suburbs, such as those on the Main ⇒ Read More
Timothy Kent Holliday
Timothy Kent Holliday is a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studies the history of gender, sexuality, and the body in early America.
Militia
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 ⇒ Read More
SEPTA proposes new buses for University City, Roosevelt Blvd.
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
Thomas Rzeznik
Thomas Rzeznik is an Associate Professor of History at Seton Hall University and co-editor of the quarterly journal American Catholic Studies. He is also author of Church and Estate: Religion and Wealth in Industrial Era Philadelphia (Penn State Press, 2013).
General Trades Union Strike (1835)
The first general strike in the United States occurred in Philadelphia in 1835 when the short-lived General Trades’ Union (GTU) of the City and County of Philadelphia led a citywide general strike to demand a ten-hour workday. The successful action set a precedent followed by other labor organizations in the nation later in the nineteenth ⇒ Read More
Philly approves one new charter school, rejects another two
WHYY story by Avi Wolfman-Arent
Lotteries
Lotteries have a long and controversial history in the Philadelphia region. Since the early eighteenth century, random drawings of numbers have funded charities and clubs, paid for roads and schools, settled estates, distributed land, and promoted various private and state-run initiatives. Lotteries have drawn multitudes of customers seeking cash and other prizes, but over three ⇒ Read More
Sanctuary cities bill clears Pennsylvania Senate
WHYY story by Emily Previti, WITF
Page Talbott
Page Talbott is Principal, Talbott Exhibits and Planning, and until July 2016 was president and CEO of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. During her fifteen years as consulting curator for Moore College of Art and Design, she studied and wrote about the artists of The Philadelphia Ten, many of whom attended the school when it ⇒ Read More
Philadelphia Ten
When an exhibition of 247 paintings opened on February 17, 1917, at the Art Club of Philadelphia, 220 S. Broad Street, it heralded the birth of the Philadelphia Ten (also known as The Ten), an evolving all-women’s group of painters and sculptors that exhibited together for nearly thirty years. Soon their exhibitions became an annual ⇒ Read More
SEPTA pulls 40 Market Frankford railcars after cracks discovered
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
Greek War for Independence
During the Greek War for Independence (1821-28), when the Greeks of the Morea (Peloponessus) rose in rebellion after almost four centuries of Ottoman rule, Philadelphians helped to arouse public sentiment and sympathy in favor of the Greeks, raised money and provisions to aid the cause, and lobbied their representatives to recognize Hellenic independence. In Philadelphia ⇒ Read More
Angelo Repousis
Angelo Repousis received his Ph.D. from Temple University and teaches there as an Adjunct Assistant Professor of History.
Horses
Horses played a critical role in Philadelphia’s growth and development as an industrial city, but over time their role as prime movers gradually diminished, and after the mid-twentieth century their role was primarily recreational. Although horses have become associated with the countryside or the American West, American cities had large, concentrated populations of horses well ⇒ Read More
Eastwick starts community-oriented planning process hoping to rewrite the history of urban renewal
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
A common cause; from Standing Rock to Sweet Water, New Jersey’s Pilgrim Pipeline
WHYY story by Dana DiFilippo
Report: Philly needs billions to rehab sagging schools
WHYY story by Avi Wolfman-Arent
Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans
The centuries-long relationship between the Philadelphia region and Puerto Rico unfolded in four interrelated areas: economic links, political channels, personal networks, and cultural exchange. Several dynamics shaped those connections over time. Colonialism, first under Spain and later the United States, set the broad context for trade relations and government policies. Individual reactions to those policies ⇒ Read More
SEPTA shows off projects in the works at capital budget open house
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
Listen to the Mocking Bird
Written in 1855 by a Philadelphia songwriter who was inspired by the whistling of a street musician, “Listen to the Mocking Bird” was one of the most popular songs of the nineteenth century. It sold millions of copies of sheet music and was sung (and whistled) throughout the United States and parts of Europe. Philadelphia ⇒ Read More
Handful of West Philly properties designated historic, including wee district
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
Spanish-American War
Although often regarded as a minor conflict, the Spanish-American War (1898) made a major impact on Greater Philadelphia. As a populous urban center, Philadelphia and its immediate environs contributed a substantial number of troops to the United States’ volunteer army but also provided an outlet for those dissenters who decried warfare. In addition, the war ⇒ Read More
Megan C. McGee Yinger
Megan C. McGee Yinger earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Penn State University-Harrisburg. She is working on a project that explores how American media prepare for and cope with natural and man-made disasters.
Activists relate to King’s shift from dreamer to radical
WHYY story via the Errin Haines Whack, Associated Press
Automobile Racing
Motorsports developed into a popular leisure activity in the Philadelphia area during the twentieth century. Originally an activity enjoyed by wealthy car owners, the advent of the Model T Ford allowed local technophiles to build their own race cars and compete in regional races. By mid-century, drivers raced at fairground horse tracks and purpose-built speedways ⇒ Read More
Cycling (Sport)
The Philadelphia area’s connections to the sport of cycling have spanned nearly 200 years, reflecting its rise, decline, and resurgence in the United States. The region’s history of road, track, and all-terrain races began before the invention of the modern “bicycle” and continued into the twenty-first century with new variations of the sport and the ⇒ Read More
The Rise of the Market City — Event Featuring Encyclopedia Contributor
The first event of the spring semester for Penn Urban Studies will feature a talk by Timothy P.R. Weaver, the author of the essay about Enterprise Zones and Empowerment Zones in The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. Weaver, who is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, will speak about his book, Blazing ⇒ Read More
Will Philly’s new fair housing plan advance without pressure from HUD?
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
Historical Societies
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 ethnic societies. ⇒ Read More
Pennsylvania Prison Society
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 ⇒ Read More
Project Milestone: 450 Topics Online
With the help of so many writers, editors, project partners, and financial supporters, The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia has reached a new publishing milestone of 450 topics online–an increase of more than 150 topics from this time a year ago. The distinction of being topic No. 450 goes to the new essay about Norristown, Pennsylvania, ⇒ Read More
Icahn surrendering Trump Taj Mahal casino license
WHYY story via the Wayne Parry, Associated Press
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 ⇒ Read More
Philadelphia mounted unit taking part in Trump inaugural parade
WHYY story by Tom MacDonald
Iron Production
Long before western Pennsylvania dominated the American iron and steel industries, southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey became the epicenter of colonial iron production. In a little over forty years beginning in 1716, Pennsylvania ironmasters erected nearly fifty furnaces and forges for producing iron stock and goods, and by 1840 the region’s national preeminence had ⇒ Read More
Norristown, Pennsylvania
Founded in 1784 as the county seat of Montgomery County, Norristown sits on three hills that slope down to the Schuylkill River fifteen miles northwest of Center City Philadelphia. Its riverfront location and abundant waterpower helped the town prosper throughout the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth. In the second half of the twentieth ⇒ Read More
Railroad Strike of 1877
The first nationwide strike in the United States occurred in the summer of 1877 as rail workers and their supporters throughout the nation protested conditions under corporate control. While Philadelphia largely escaped the turmoil that erupted in other cities as authorities worked vigorously to quash labor opposition, the city’s National Guard regiment nonetheless became entangled ⇒ Read More
Working Men’s Party
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 ⇒ Read More
Public Media
Philadelphia participated early and actively in the founding and development of public broadcasting, which expanded across the twentieth century to encompass radio, television, and digital platforms. Public media organizations have given voice to local concerns, provided forums for diverse opinions, and offered programming not found in commercial broadcasting. Precedents for public broadcasting originated in the ⇒ Read More
Milder Mummers strut into 2017
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
Top Ten Topics for 2016
The most-visited topics for 2016 reflect the issues of the presidential year, topics of interest for students and teachers, and some perennial Philadelphia favorites. The most-read topic of the year is:Political Parties (Origins, 1790s) 2. City of Brotherly Love 3. Immigration and Migration (Colonial Era) 4. Native American-Pennsylvania Relations (1754-89) 5. Immigration (1870-1930) 6. Nativist ⇒ Read More
Philly’s iconic boathouse row lights up for Hanukkah
WHYY story by Katie Colineri
New multi-use platform coming to Philadelphia City Hall courtyard
WHYY story by Tom MacDonald
New path for Eastwick opens up one year after termination of urban-renewal agreement
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
After sensitivity training, will Mummers rein in raucous antics?
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
Paul A. Kopacz
Paul A. Kopacz is the recipient of a master’s degree in history from Villanova University.
Kwanzaa celebrates 50 years of honoring African-American culture
WHYY story by Jay Scott Smith
Area near Drexel in West Philly wins big school grant
WHYY story by Tom MacDonald
Philadelphia’s disappearing low-cost rental housing revealed in Fed gentrification study
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
From Campbell’s test kitchen to America’s tables, N.J. chef’s green bean casserole an enduring favorite
WHYY story by Rob Zawatski
Ice Hockey (Professional)
In February 1966, the National Hockey League decided that the future was now. Responding to forces transforming other professional sports leagues, such as the growth of televised coverage and the expansion of franchises to the West Coast of the United States, the NHL decided to expand its static lineup of “Original Six” franchises in Eastern ⇒ Read More
Alison Kreitzer
Alison Kreitzer is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of American Civilization at the University of Delaware. She is writing a dissertation about dirt track automobile racing in the mid-Atlantic region.
A 1940s documentary about housing and poverty in Philadelphia, and progress since then
WHYY story by Jessica Kourkounis
Redlining
Redlining, the practice of basing access to capital and financial services on neighborhood characteristics such as race and ethnicity, had destructive effects on older, nonwhite areas of Philadelphia. Especially in areas of South, West, and Lower North Philadelphia that form a ring around downtown, banks and other lending institutions issued proportionally fewer mortgages than in ⇒ Read More
Brenda Gaydosh
Brenda Gaydosh is an Associate Professor of History at West Chester University. Her research focuses on varied aspects of the Catholic Church—from a biography about Nazi-era German Provost Bernhard Lichtenberg to current research on the Christian bishops in the DDR.
Casino signs four-year deal to sponsor Mummers Parade
WHYY story by Tom MacDonald
Cricket
The rise, fall, and rebirth of the sport of cricket in the Philadelphia region reflected political, social, and economic change. Cricket once flourished in the city, which produced some legendary players known throughout the cricketing world. The rise of other leisure activities supplanted the game, however, until a moderate resurgence in the late twentieth and ⇒ Read More
Revolutionary Delaware: Independence in the First State – New Book by Encyclopedia Contributor
The American Revolution in Delaware is the subject of a new book by Kim Rogers Burdick, who also is the author of the essay about the gunpowder industry in The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. According to the History Press, the publisher of Revolutionary Delaware: Independence in the First State: In 1776, Delaware declared independence from both ⇒ Read More
Plan to extend Urban Enterprise Zone in five cities nears N.J. Senate vote
WHYY story by Phil Gregory
Fairmount Park Houses
From the mid-eighteenth century, prominent Philadelphians looking for a rural, healthy, scenic environment built small mansions, or villas, along the Schuylkill River, one of two major waterways that define Philadelphia’s geography. In the early nineteenth century, the city began to acquire properties along the Schuylkill, including these villa houses. These purchases culminated in the 1855 ⇒ Read More
Mansions
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 salient ⇒ Read More
New Year’s Traditions
New Year’s celebrations in the Philadelphia region have often included parties, formal wear, fireworks, and parades as part of a two-day, secular celebration from December 31 to January 1. The changing of a calendar year from one to the next has long been cause for commemoration and reflection, and the city’s diverse communities have shaped ⇒ Read More
Tomato Pie
Served by Italian bakeries in South Philadelphia since the early twentieth century, the tomato pie became known by many names: church pie, square pizza, red pizza, granny pizza, and red pie. Although made in a rectangular or square shape similar to Sicilian-style pizza, tomato pie within the city and surrounding region remained distinct from contemporary ⇒ Read More
Princeton Battlefield truce preserves most of tract from development
WHYY story via the Peter Crimmins
West Philadelphia
One of the single largest sectors of the city of Philadelphia at almost fifteen square miles between the Schuylkill River to the east and Delaware County to the west, West Philadelphia at its peak, in the early twentieth century, attracted an influx of new residents to its verdant, suburban-feeling neighborhoods. But over the course of ⇒ Read More
United States Colored Troops
During the American Civil War (1861-65), Philadelphians raised eleven regiments of the United States Colored Troops (USCT). This division of the United States Army, consisting of black soldiers led by white officers, provided much-needed manpower for federal forces in the final two years of the war. When the Civil War began, many African Americans across ⇒ Read More
TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)
In spring 1974, “TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)” became a hit song for Philadelphia International Records, the local record label renowned for its “Philly Soul” sound of the 1970s. Written by Philadelphia International’s owners and chief songwriter/producers, Kenny Gamble (b. 1943) and Leon Huff (b. 1942), and recorded in late 1973 by MFSB with the ⇒ Read More
Vincent Fraley
Vincent Fraley is communications manager for the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and writes the Philadelphia Inquirer’s weekly history column, Memory Stream.
Jarrett Walker’s philosophy of public transit as means to freedom
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
City Merchant (The); or, The Mysterious Failure
The novel The City Merchant; or, The Mysterious Failure, written by John Beauchamp Jones (1810-66), captures the height of Philadelphia’s anti-abolitionist movement and its emotional force and toll on the city, while at the same time transcending its locale to comment on the dynamics of market capitalism in early nineteenth-century America. The City Merchant chronicles the ⇒ Read More
Ann Norton Greene
Ann Norton Greene is a historian of environmental and technological history in the History and Sociology of Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania, with expertise in animal history and energy history. Her book, Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America, analyzes the use of horses in creating modern industrial society in late nineteenth ⇒ Read More
Call for Authors: 2016-17
The editors of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia seek to make 50 additional assignments to complete our current phase of expansion. Now is the time to add your expertise to a resource used daily by teachers and students, journalists, scholars, and general readers. To view the list of available assignments, link here: Call for authors ⇒ Read More
On the Trail: A History of American Hiking — New Book by Encyclopedia Contributor
We are pleased to share the news of a new book by Silas Chamberlin, author of the essay about recreational trails in The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. His book, On the Trail: A History of American Hiking, is a history of American hikers and their role in creating the nation’s trail system. According to Yale ⇒ Read More
What’s at stake if Toomey and Trump cut funding to Philly?
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
Affordable housing ‘gap period’ requirement goes before N.J. Supreme Court
WHYY story by Joe Hernandez
Document Links for Teachers and Students
Close readers may have noticed an addition to some of our essay pages: a special section of links for teachers and students preparing for next spring’s National History Day competition. We hope you all enjoy exploring these historical documents curated by our educational outreach coordinator, Melissa Callahan, through a partnership with the National Archives at ⇒ Read More
Lisa Minardi
Lisa Minardi is executive director of Historic Trappe and the Lutheran Archives Center at Philadelphia. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of American Civilization program at the University of Delaware, where she is studying the German community of early Philadelphia for her dissertation. Her publications include numerous books and articles on Pennsylvania furniture, ⇒ Read More
National Guard
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 ⇒ Read More
Philly’s Mural Arts reaches out to prisoners as it shapes installation on criminal justice
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
Robert Gamble
Robert Gamble is a lecturer of history at the University of Kansas. He researches the history of regulation, capitalism, and urban space and has published articles on the antebellum secondhand trade and colonial peddlers in the Mid-Atlantic.
Jurassic World has blockbuster opening weekend at Franklin Institute
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
Locomotive Manufacturing
For over one hundred and twenty years, railway locomotives were built in Greater Philadelphia. From the pioneering manufacturers of steam locomotives in the Spring Garden section of the city in the 1830s to the sprawling plant of the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Delaware County in the twentieth century, the products, the companies, and the buildings ⇒ Read More
Murals
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: Beaux-Arts ⇒ Read More
Shining the light on police corruption in Philadelphia through transparency
WHYY story by Dana DiFilippo
Proposal would extend the life of five N.J. Urban Enterprise Zones
WHYY story by Joe Hernandez
‘Jake’s Law’ would nudge every N.J. county to build a playground accessible to all kids
WHYY story by Joe Hernandez
Veggies take the spotlight with leftover recipes from chefs Jacoby and Landau
WHYY story by Kimberly Haas
Deindustrialization
The Philadelphia region’s long-held reputation as the “workshop of the world,” though richly deserved, did not prevent it from suffering the same loss of manufacturing firms and jobs that devastated the economies of other manufacturing centers. Local products ranged widely, from locomotives and ships to silk hosiery, wool carpets, machine tools, hand tools, lighting fixtures, ⇒ Read More
Reminder Days
On July 4, 1965, thirty-nine individuals gathered outside Independence Hall to picket for homosexual rights. This event, one of the earliest organized homosexual rights demonstrations in the United States, sought to remind the public that basic rights of citizenship were being denied to homosexual individuals. Reprised each year through 1969, the year of the Stonewall ⇒ Read More
Civil Defense
Because of Greater Philadelphia’s position as a political, cultural, and economic hub, the region’s residents have often found their daily lives deeply affected by times of national crisis. Civil defense, generally defined as local voluntary programs designed to protect civilian life and property during times of conflict, has taken many forms: militia, home defense, civilian defense, ⇒ Read More
Contractor Bosses (1880s to 1930s)
As Philadelphia expanded physically after its 1854 consolidation of city and county, building contractors wielded a greater degree of political power as they paid politicians and civil servants handsomely for the rights to construct the city’s infrastructure. The late nineteenth century saw the emergence of the “contractor boss”—a construction magnate who wielded political power directly ⇒ Read More
Susan Barile
Susan Barile is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Hunter College, New York, in the Department of English, and a graduate of The Graduate Center, New York, where she edited the letters of Edith Wharton to Bernard Berenson in fulfillment of her Ph.D. She is also the author of The Bookworm’s Big Apple: A Guide to ⇒ Read More
New leader wants to give elite Philly private school ‘public purpose’
NewsWorks story by Avi Wolfman-Arent
Cordwainers Trial of 1806
Shoemaking, one of the most lucrative trades in Philadelphia during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, also proved to be one of the most contentious. Dissension within the trade worsened in the last decade of the eighteenth century and climaxed with the Philadelphia Cordwainers (shoemakers) Trial of 1806. This trial proved to be not only ⇒ Read More
Shoemakers and Shoemaking
One of Philadelphia’s oldest occupations, shoemaking grew in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to become one of the city’s leading industries. During that period shoemakers in Philadelphia also became some of the leading figures in the city’s, and the nation’s, burgeoning labor movement. The methods and institutions that these leaders used throughout the nineteenth century ⇒ Read More
Pennsylvania Charter of Privileges
The Charter of Privileges, effective October 28, 1701, and sometimes known as the Charter of Liberties, functioned as Pennsylvania’s constitution until the American Revolution. It replaced several attempts since the colony’s 1681 establishment to create a viable frame of government. Among the more permissive of colonial constitutions in British North America, the document guaranteed religious ⇒ Read More
The billion dollar giveaway in Camden
WHYY story by Tara Nurin
Letitia House to become Centennial Parkside CDC’s headquarters
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
Historic cemeteries struggle to return from decades of neglect
WHYY story by Alan Jaffe
SEPTA Key’s ‘travel wallet’ function starts phasing out tokens
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
Helicopters
From barns and airfields throughout the Delaware Valley, during the twentieth century innovative individuals and local companies made greater Philadelphia the nation’s cradle of rotary-wing aviation. They successfully launched autogiros, gyroplanes, and helicopters, and the Boeing Company paired with Bell Helicopters in Buffalo, New York, to produce the world’s first production tilt-rotor aircraft, the V-22 ⇒ Read More
Victory over veteran homelessness in Delaware
WHYY story by Shirley Min
High School Sports
Originating in the nineteenth century, high school sports accompanied the spread of secondary schooling and became a nationwide phenomenon as students initiated team competitions and schools instituted physical education programs. In the Philadelphia region, early scholastic sports gained legitimacy from mentoring provided by the area’s many colleges and from the School District of Philadelphia’s commitment ⇒ Read More
What will Philly do about barriers to fair housing?
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
Revised PennEast pipeline faces 2 month delay
WHYY story by Tom Johnson
Hinterlands
Since its founding, Philadelphia has acted as a commercial hub for the surrounding region, its hinterlands. Although New Jersey and Delaware had European settlers before Philadelphia’s establishment in 1682, Pennsylvania and its founding city quickly became the focus of economic activity in the region extending both east and west of the Delaware River. With an advantageous ⇒ Read More
British Occupation of Philadelphia
On September 26, 1777, the British army marched into Philadelphia, beginning an occupation that lasted until the following spring. Its arrival led patriots to flee and Loyalists to rejoice, although wartime shortages soon led to suffering for those who remained in the city. The occupation, however, led to no concrete gains, and the British abandoned ⇒ Read More
Michael D. Schaffer
Michael D. Schaffer retired at the end of 2014 after more than thirty years as a writer and editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He has a doctorate in American History from Yale University.
Family gets Pennsylvania WWI soldier’s lost Purple Heart
WHYY story via the Associated Press
SEPTA strike causes significant dip in Philly high school attendance
WHYY story by Avi Wolfman-Arent
Girard’s Bequest
On December 26, 1831, the richest man in the United States died and gave the city of Philadelphia the great majority of his fortune. Committed to philanthropy for much of his life, Stephen Girard (1750-1831) had wealth at the time of his death estimated at more than $6 million, earned during his life as a ⇒ Read More
Hail, Columbia
“Hail, Columbia,” written in Philadelphia in the closing years of the eighteenth century, became a popular patriotic song in early America and served for many years as the unofficial national anthem. Bands began to play it in honor of the vice president of the United States in the 1830s, and later it became the official ⇒ Read More
Trade Unions (1820s and 1830s)
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 ⇒ Read More
William V. Bartleson
William V. Bartleson is an independent scholar of military history who has worked with the New Jersey National Guard Militia Museum and the Center for Veterans Oral history. He is a member of Phi Alpha Theta.
After N.J. rejects Atlantic City’s recovery plan, city officials push back
WHYY story by Joe Hernandez
Big 5
The Big 5, an association of Philadelphia-area college basketball programs that have competed locally while also belonging to different conferences, formed in 1955 among five universities: La Salle, Penn, Saint Joseph’s, Temple, and Villanova. Showcasing the basketball talent of the region, the round-robin doubleheaders between Big 5 teams have attracted raucous fans and produced intense ⇒ Read More
City transit workers on strike, union and SEPTA deadlocked on new deal
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
Preservation of the Lazaretto, America’s oldest surviving quarantine center, finally gets underway
WHYY story by Elana Gordon
Our Students Behind the Scenes
At the home base of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (MARCH) at Rutgers-Camden, students and recent alumni play important roles in producing each new topic. In the process they gain a deeper understanding of regional history and build skills in digital publishing. Read more about these activities and ⇒ Read More
David Elesh
David Elesh is emeritus faculty in sociology at Temple University. He has written widely on industrial change and its consequences.
Nigerians and Nigeria
With a significant presence in the Greater Philadelphia area dating back to the 1960s, Nigerians became the second-largest African population in the Delaware Valley in the first years of the twenty-first century. As major leaders in developing a new Pan-Africanism and in establishing pan-ethnic, transnational organizations to assist in the development of vibrant communities in ⇒ Read More
Tobacco
Growing, trading in, and manufacturing tobacco were important components of the economy and society of the Delaware Valley for centuries. Early residents raised tobacco for personal use and as a trade commodity, but in most of the region it fell out of favor by the late eighteenth century. The exception was Southeast Pennsylvania, where tobacco ⇒ Read More
Citizens air Gayborhood racial grievances for Commission on Human Relations action
WHYY story by Kyrie Greenberg
Chemistry
Philadelphians used chemistry to enhance manufacturing, household practice, and artisan trades, mixing scholarly with practical aims from the outset. Furthermore, chemistry’s relationship to other scientific disciplines, including botany, geology, and medicine, made Philadelphians particularly keen to promote and diffuse chemical knowledge. Encouraged by widespread interest in chemistry between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, a number ⇒ Read More
Art project asks 9th Street Market vendors to get into each other’s business
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
Hispanic and Asian communities frustrated by city’s fair housing assessment process
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
House of Refuge
Established on February 7, 1826, the Philadelphia House of Refuge provided an alternative to prisons for incarcerating juvenile delinquents and child vagrants. Although the House of Refuge purported to aid poor and delinquent children, in practice it became a paternalist organization that strove to implement social control over the city’s lower classes. A project of ⇒ Read More
Benjamin Franklin Parkway
Created in the first decades of the twentieth century, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway connected the heart of Philadelphia’s downtown to its premier park and over time became a district of cultural institutions and a commons for civic celebrations. The broad boulevard and its monumental structures reflected the European-inspired, nationwide City Beautiful Movement embraced by the ⇒ Read More
New community radio station sounds in Philadelphia
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
City Beautiful Movement
Grounded in landscape and European architecture and shaped by the politics of the Progressive Era, the City Beautiful Movement emerged in reaction to the physical decay and social congestion that burdened America’s industrial centers at the turn of the twentieth century. Considered the “mother” of urban planning, its promoters and practitioners sought to reorder the ⇒ Read More
China Trade
First pursued by the city’s merchants after the American Revolution, the China trade linked Philadelphians to the rest of the world through commerce. Alongside merchants in New York, Boston, and Salem, Philadelphians were pioneers in the trade, risking their ships and capital in new long-distance sailing routes that crisscrossed the globe to generate the silver ⇒ Read More
Mary Johnson Osirim
Mary Johnson Osirim is Provost and Professor of Sociology at Bryn Mawr College. Her research has focused on women, entrepreneurship, the state and nongovernmental organizations in the microenterprise sectors of Nigeria and Zimbabwe, the development of gender studies scholarship in Anglophone Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as transnationalism and community development among African immigrants in the ⇒ Read More
Kwanzaa
Because of its large African American population and the presence and influence of prominent Black Nationalist individuals and organizations, the Philadelphia area has been especially active in celebrating Kwanzaa, an African cultural holiday that emerged out of the Black Nationalist Movement of the 1960s. Kwanzaa emphasizes remembering and reconstructing African identity, which was forcibly erased ⇒ Read More
Liberians and Liberia
Greater Philadelphia has had close links to Liberia historically. Free blacks and abolitionists from the region helped colonize and underwrite the nation of Liberia’s founding in the early nineteenth century. Yet Philadelphia and Liberia had little connection between the mid-nineteenth and late twentieth century. Most Liberian settlement in the region resulted from the Liberian civil ⇒ Read More
Waterloo Playground’s revival takes off with Urban Roots / MTWB support
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War, like the Great War, World War II, and Korean War before it, had a significant impact on the Philadelphia region. During the height of open American involvement in the war from 1965 to 1968, thousands from the area were drafted or volunteered for the armed forces, and hundreds lost their lives. Other ⇒ Read More
Artisans
As skilled laborers who hand-crafted their goods on a per-customer basis, artisans played a central role in the formation of Philadelphia’s prerevolutionary economy: producing essential goods and services and providing social stability within households composed not just of immediate family but also of journeymen and apprentices. American independence brought artisans new economic opportunities as the ⇒ Read More
National History Day Webinar
Teachers, please join us on Wednesday, November 2, at 4:30 p.m. for a free webinar tutorial with our education outreach coordinator, Melissa Callahan. The webinar will provide an overview of the resources available from The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia and offer ways in which students might use those resources to create an outstanding National History ⇒ Read More
Celebrating 30 years of uplifting families with better housing in North Philadelphia
WHYY story by Aaron Moselle
SEPTA union preparing for potential strike November 1 that could last through Election Day
NewsWorks story via Plan Philly
Modern movie sound was born in a Philadelphia basement
WHYY story bu Elana Gordon
Neighborhood Gardens Trust targets preservation for 28 more gardens
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
Heating (Home)
The Delaware Valley’s frosty winters have always required residents to heat their homes for months at a time. At the time of the Philadelphia’s founding, the dense forests in its hinterland offered ample stocks of firewood—the region’s first home heating fuel. Anthracite coal from northeastern Pennsylvania began to supplement wood in the early nineteenth century ⇒ Read More
Philly celebrates Octavius Catto, who was assassinated on Election Day 1871
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
Echoes of three centuries take female form to express Callowhill’s harsh history
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
Project Milestone: 400 Topics Published Online
This week The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia reached and surpassed 400 topics online with the publication of the essay Community Development, by Howard Gillette Jr. and Domenic Vitiello, two of our editors. The continuing growth of this regional resource is made possible by the talents and good will of hundreds of writers, our civic partners, ⇒ Read More
Bloody Fifth Ward
Philadelphia’s Fifth Ward, south of Chestnut Street near the Delaware River, became infamous in the late nineteenth century for election-day riots among the Irish, blacks, and the police, with ward boss William “Bull” McMullen (1824-1901) at the center of the violence. By the early twentieth century, the area had become known as the “Bloody Fifth,” ⇒ Read More
Police Department (Philadelphia)
Created by state law in 1854 to maintain public order, prevent riots, and apprehend criminals, the Philadelphia Police Department operated for its first hundred years under direct control of politicians and served the reigning party’s interests by collecting graft as well as apprehending vagrants and solving crimes. During the twentieth century, especially in the latter ⇒ Read More
Infectious Diseases and Epidemics
Despite Philadelphia’s prominence, throughout its history, as a center for medical education and care, the region has experienced numerous epidemics of infectious disease. British America’s largest city in the eighteenth century, Philadelphia suffered dreadful outbreaks of smallpox and yellow fever, while the nineteenth century brought an exotic new disease—cholera—that killed hundreds. By the early twentieth ⇒ Read More
Reimagining Mifflin Square Park in 21 languages
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
Rhythm and Blues
With its large and diverse African American population and long tradition of black popular and religious music, Philadelphia became a hotbed of the new rhythm and blues style that emerged from jazz, blues, and gospel music in the 1940s and 1950s. The term “rhythm and blues” came into general use in the late 1940s to ⇒ Read More
Sarah Robey
Sarah Robey is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Temple University, where she studies American nuclear culture. She has been a fellow at the Philadelphia History Museum, the National Museum of American History, and the National Air and Space Museum.
After weekend walkout, Philadelphia Orchestra offers fans bouquet of pop-up concerts
NewsWorks story by Peter Crimmins
Boxing and Boxers
For over one hundred years, Philadelphia neighborhoods, for better and worse, played a significant role in molding fighters. Over two dozen world boxing champions throughout various weight classes called Philadelphia home. Nearby communities such as Camden, New Jersey, and Easton, Pennsylvania, also produced world champions. Over time, Philadelphia-area boxing was supported by a wide network ⇒ Read More
Free soil testing for city-owned gardens and lots through brownfields grant
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
Sports Fans
In the sports world, Philadelphia fans gained a reputation for enthusiasm as they passionately supported winners and losers, publicly booed, and privately cheered. Many sports fans across the country gained their only understanding of residents of Greater Philadelphia from the region’s sports fans, and out-of-town sportswriters often pointed to select incidents as evidence that Philadelphia ⇒ Read More
SEPTA regional rail schedule back to normal Monday
WHYY story by Bobby Allyn
Brian Albright
Brian Albright is a graduate of Rutgers University-Camden and Senior Historian at AECOM in Burlington, New Jersey. His interests include the industrial, labor, and social history of Philadelphia in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and the environmental history of the mid-Atlantic region.
Alaina Noland
Alaina Noland is a graduate student in history at Rutgers-Camden.
Chester, a city working on a new narrative
NewsWorks story via Grapple Podcast
Nameless in death, nine bodies exhumed in Pa. in hopes of unearthing identity
WHYY story by Elana Gordon
Atlantic City: We can pay state loan back and still keep our water utility
WHYY story via Associated Press
Mummers
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 ⇒ Read More
Laura Michel
Laura Michel is a Ph.D. student in History at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. She studies issues surrounding crime, poverty, and philanthropy in the early modern Atlantic World.
A New Resource for Teachers
In partnership with the National Archives at Philadelphia, we’re pleased to announce a new guide for teachers and students, “Comparing Primary and Secondary Sources,” which is newly published on the website for National History Day Philadelphia. Created to help students with their research for National History Day projects, the guide was prepared by Melissa Callahan, ⇒ Read More
Before Constitution Center honors, civil rights icon visits Camden and memories of MLK
WHYY story by Peter Crimmins
House Committee hears emotional testimony in favor of speed cameras on Roosevelt Boulevard
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
From parchment to iPad: U.S. Constitution digitized
WHYY story by Avi Wolfman-Arent
Diane Wenger
Diane Wenger is Associate Professor of History and co-chair of the Division of Global Cultures: History, Languages & Philosophy at Wilkes University. She is the author of A Country Storekeeper in Pennsylvania: Creating Economic Networks in Early America, 1790-1807 (Penn State Press, 2008).
Mighty Macs
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. ⇒ Read More
Korean War
Although active hostilities during the Korean War lasted for little more than three years (1950-53), the conflict had a lasting impact on the Philadelphia area. The war provided a boost for the shipbuilding industry on both sides of the Delaware River, and military bases played a major role in preparing soldiers and supplies for deployment. ⇒ Read More
Council supports Keystone Opportunity Zone expansions, called for greater transparency
NewsWorks story via PlanPhilly
Community Development
During the community development movement, which arose in the 1960s in large part in response to years of disruption spurred by government-imposed urban renewal, Philadelphia became an important center of activism and institutions devoted to locally-based improvement programs. Community development programs sought to provide greater control over the future of neighborhoods at a time when ⇒ Read More
Community Development Corporations (CDCs)
Community development corporations (CDCs), initially a federal initiative intended to direct resources to beleaguered neighborhoods where local activists would take the lead in identifying and solving their most pressing problems, first formed in Philadelphia at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s. As federal funding for such efforts dried up in the Reagan era, ⇒ Read More
Atlantic City casino revenue down 4.9 percent in August
WHYY story via the Associated Press
First lady stumps for youth vote in Philly
WHYY story by Dave Davies
Join the Discussion about Jewelers Row
Join us at the Philadelphia History Museum on Thursday, September 22, from 5:30 to 7 p.m. as we co-sponsor a conversation about the history and significance of Philadelphia’s Jewelers Row. Speakers will include Paul Steinke, Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia; Hy Goldberg, Jewelers Row Business Association; Bob Skiba, Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides; and representatives ⇒ Read More
Philly-area groups for veterans and created by veterans provide community, mission
WHYY story by Joe Hernandez
Alea Henle
Alea Henle is head of public services librarian at Western New Mexico University. Her research interests explore how efforts to preserve materials for history have shaped what survived.
Despite progress, teacher vacancies linger as Philly schools open
WHYY story by Avi Wolfman-Arent
Linda A. Ries
Linda A. Ries is a retired archivist from the Pennsylvania State Archives, part of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, where she worked for thirty-five years. She is editor of Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, the scholarly journal of the Pennsylvania Historical Association.
At Philadelphia Labor Day parade, federal and state investigations loom large
WHYY story by Marielle Segarra
End of N.J. urban enterprise zones will ‘devastate’ cities, lawmaker says
WHYY story by Phil Gregory
Dael A. Norwood
Dael A. Norwood is an assistant professor of history at Binghamton University. His book project, Trading in Liberty: How Commerce with China Defined Early America, examines how the lucrative commerce between the United States and China shaped the politics and political economy of the American state in its first century.
Revitalization stirs up memories of a time Sharswood pulsed with all that jazz
WHYY story by Aaron Moselle
Veteran says military gave him the strength to stand up to gentrification
WHYY story by Kimberly Paynter
Broad Street Bullies
The Philadelphia Flyers, formed as a National Hockey League expansion team in 1967, became known as the Broad Street Bullies for their aggressively physical play during the 1972-73 season. As the Flyers racked up penalty minutes at a record pace, Philadelphia’s press corps tried to create a colorful nickname for the team. Jack Chevalier and ⇒ Read More
Jazz
Jazz began to emerge as a distinct musical style around the turn of the twentieth century, a merging of two vernacular African American musical styles—ragtime and blues—with elements of popular music. New Orleans, the “cradle of jazz,” was the most important city in this process, with Chicago and New York playing particularly significant roles in ⇒ Read More
Seth Tannenbaum
Seth S. Tannenbaum is a lifelong Philadelphian and a doctoral candidate in American history at Temple University. His research has appeared in the Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, 2013-2014.
Stephen G. Hague
Stephen G. Hague teaches British and modern European history at Rowan University. His research interests center on social, cultural, and architectural history, and he is the author of The Gentleman’s House in the British Atlantic World, 1680–1780.
Chemical Industry
Since the eighteenth century, chemical or chemical processing industries have been an important part of the economy of Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley region and have reflected larger trends in the industry. The earliest chemical companies manufactured products such as sulfuric acid and white lead pigments for local consumption, while other manufacturers, such as tanners, ⇒ Read More
Urban Renewal
Urban renewal was a nationwide program aimed at maintaining the dominant position of central cities in the face of the urban crisis and suburban growth that marked the decades following World War II. Philadelphia was a leader in this revitalization practice, reserving more federal urban renewal grant funding ($209 million), by the end of 1965, ⇒ Read More
Matthew Ward
Matthew Ward is a boxing historian and writer from Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Arizona State University in 2007 with a B.A. in History and Culture, and Rutgers University—Camden in 2018 with an M.A. in History. He worked in financial services for over nine years and serves as a commissioned officer in the U.S. ⇒ Read More
Root Beer
Root beer, a popular beverage in the United States since the late eighteenth century, began as a medicinal beverage produced at home. In the nineteenth century, carbonated root beer grew in popularity, particularly after Philadelphia pharmacist Charles Elmer Hires (1851-1937) presented his version of root beer at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition. Although the popularity of ⇒ Read More
Kristen B. Crossney
Kristen B. Crossney is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Administration at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.
Public Health
From the moment Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans came together in the Delaware Valley, they confronted a host of health threats. Philadelphia’s earliest public health efforts reflected the lack of scientific understanding of infectious diseases, and usually began only after an outbreak commenced. After the terrible 1793 yellow fever epidemic, Philadelphia’s leaders founded a permanent ⇒ Read More
Privateering
As one of the largest British ports in North America, during the eighteenth century Philadelphia held a prominent place in privateering, the practice of privately financed warships attacking enemy shipping during wartime. These vessels, either converted merchant vessels or purpose-built commerce raiders, were often investments of wealthy or enterprising merchants. In order to operate legally, ⇒ Read More
Meteorology (Study of the Atmosphere)
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 weather forecasting became possible as technological innovations such ⇒ Read More
John Kenly Smith Jr.
John Kenly Smith Jr. teaches history at Lehigh University. He specializes in the history of technology and is coauthor with David A. Hounshell of Science and Corporate Strategy: DuPont R&D, 1902–1980.
Mandi Magnuson-Hung
Mandi Magnuson-Hung earned a master’s degree in history at Rutgers University-Camden.
Tenderloin
In the final decades of the 1800s, a vice district emerged just north of Philadelphia’s city center. Bound by Sixth Street on the east, Thirteenth Street on the west, Race Street to the south, and Callowhill Street to the north, this neighborhood was called the Tenderloin, like similar districts in many other cities of the ⇒ Read More
Ornithology (Study of Birds)
While Philadelphians maintained scientific interest in birds between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, the region became an important scholarly center for ornithology by the early nineteenth century. Primarily known for taxonomy (the science of classifying organisms), ornithological study transformed in the 1860s after the scientific community discovered a conclusive evolutionary link between birds and dinosaurs. ⇒ Read More
Francesca Russello Ammon
Francesca Russello Ammon is Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning and Historic Preservation at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on the history and culture of the built environment. She is the author of Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape (Yale University Press, 2016).
Erin Bernard
Erin Bernard earned her M.A. in history at Temple University. She is the founder and curator of the Philadelphia History Truck. Bernard is an Adjunct Professor of History at Moore College of Art and Design as well as Senior Lecturer of Museum Studies at the University of the Arts.
Matthew J. Wayman
Matthew J. Wayman is Head Librarian at the Ciletti Memorial Library, Penn State Schuylkill, and a military historian. He received his M. L. S. from Rutgers University and his M. A. in History from Temple University.
Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University
A group of six amateur scientists with an interest in natural history gathered at a private residence at High and Second Streets in Philadelphia on January 25, 1812, and founded the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia for, according to its charter, “the encouragement and cultivation of the Sciences” and “the advancement of useful learning.” ⇒ Read More
Refineries (Oil)
Philadelphia emerged as a petroleum hub in the second half of the nineteenth century. As an industrialized port city with global networks and extensive unbuilt land available on the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers, the city offered the necessary rail and water infrastructure as well as access to water for the new industry. Extensive construction of ⇒ Read More
Doo Wop
Philadelphia was one of several key cities where, in the 1950s and early 1960s, singers created the small-group vocal harmony style of rhythm and blues known as doo wop. Doo wop was an urban style, sung on city street corners and in school hallways. Its name, derived from a type of sound singers made in ⇒ Read More
2016 Democratic Party Platform: Related Essays
During the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia created a list of published essays related to the 2016 Democratic Party Platform to help provide journalists, delegates, and visitors with local angles and background history.
Radio DJs
Disc jockeys—“DJs” who play music on the radio—have had a key role in shaping Philadelphia musical tastes since the 1950s. They reflected national and local musical trends, exposed audiences to new music, and in some cases produced records and managed artists. Many Philadelphia DJs became celebrities, actively engaged and influential in the local music scene. ⇒ Read More
Nicholas Trajano Molnar
Nicholas Trajano Molnar is Assistant Professor of History at the Community College of Philadelphia and author of American Mestizos, the Philippines, and the Malleability of Race, 1898-1961 (University of Missouri Press, 2017). Previously, he served as Assistant Director of the Rutgers Oral History Archives. Trajano Molnar serves as the Digital Humanities Officer of the Immigration and ⇒ Read More
Peale Family of Painters
For over 125 years, the family headed by Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) documented Philadelphia’s leading citizens and created paintings to decorate their homes. The Peales’ involvement in the arts enriched the cultural landscape of Philadelphia, and their work as naturalists and museum entrepreneurs advanced the causes of art, science, and science education in the United ⇒ Read More
Art of Dox Thrash
Dox Thrash (1893-1965) was an accomplished draftsman, printmaker, watercolorist, and painter, whose art reflected his experiences as an African American in Philadelphia. He became well known in the 1940s after developing the Carborundum printmaking technique at the Philadelphia Fine Print Workshop (311 Broad Street) of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project. By rubbing coarse ⇒ Read More
Jeffrey Ray
Jeffrey Ray served as Senior Curator of the Philadelphia History Museum for 29 years prior to retirement. He teaches at the University of the Arts, Drexel University, and St. Joseph’s University.
Funerals and Burial Practices
In the Philadelphia region, burial and funeral rituals have served to honor the dead and comfort the living. These practices have reflected shifting gender roles, new material and technological developments, and changing demographics. Until the mid-nineteenth century, women were the primary caretakers of the dead prior to burial, while male sextons interred bodies. By the ⇒ Read More
Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania
The Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, founded in 1850 as the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, was the first medical school in the world for women authorized to award them the M.D. It was established in Philadelphia by a group of progressive Quakers and a businessman who believed that women had a right to education ⇒ Read More
Military Bases
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 ⇒ Read More
Presidents of the United States (Presence in Region)
Presidents of the United States, seeing Philadelphia as the city most connected to American independence, often have turned to the city and region to campaign, advance their agendas, and commemorate the past. In the city where the nation’s first two presidents established the executive branch of government, presidential legacies have spurred commemoration as well as ⇒ Read More
Landfills
Like many other towns and cities across the United States, municipalities in the Philadelphia region adopted the sanitary landfill as a primary refuse-disposal strategy in the mid- to late twentieth century. Intended to replace open dumps, landfills also promised to serve the disposal needs of a rapidly growing suburban population. From the 1950s to the ⇒ Read More
Veterans and Veterans’ Organizations
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 ⇒ Read More
Karen Guenther
Karen Guenther is Professor of History at Mansfield University and author of Sports in Pennsylvania (2007), published by the Pennsylvania Historical Association.
Soul Music
A term with varied meanings in popular music, “soul” broadly describes African American music characterized by emotional urgency and racial consciousness. More specifically, a soul style of black music emerged from rhythm and blues and gospel in the late 1950s and became popular with both black and white audiences through the 1970s. Different cities had ⇒ Read More
Manufacturing Suburbs
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 ⇒ Read More
Coffeehouses
Philadelphia’s first coffeehouse opened in 1703, and by mid-century half a dozen operated within the city limits. Their purpose, however, changed in important ways as the eighteenth century progressed. Early coffeehouses primarily served the needs of traders and mariners, acting as crucial centers of commerce. In the decades following the American Revolution, however, some coffeehouse ⇒ Read More
Loyalists
During the American Revolution, Loyalists, or “Tories” as Patriots called them, included prominent Pennsylvania political and religious leaders as well as many less affluent individuals from the state’s Quaker and German pacifist communities. A large number of “neutrals” also struggled with increasing difficulty to remain uninvolved in the conflict. Religion, ethnicity, economic status, and local ⇒ Read More
Public Markets
Public markets in Philadelphia belong to an ancient tradition of urban food provisioning in which the governing authority designated specific places for the exchange of life’s necessities. A formal and organized system of exchange was intended to attract local and regional producers to the city in order to ensure citizens an adequate supply of healthful ⇒ Read More
Civil Rights (LGBT)
In the second half of the twentieth century, a growing number of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Americans claimed political rights as people whose same-sex desire or gender presentation challenged prevailing social mores. As movements for African American, Latino American, and women’s rights gained traction and visibility, so too did movements for LGBT civil ⇒ Read More
Price of a Child (The)
Based on the life of Jane Johnson (c. 1814-22 to 1872) and her escape from slavery, the historical novel The Price of a Child (1995) by Philadelphia writer Lorene Cary (b. 1956) tells the tale of a freedwoman’s journey from bondage to freedom and describes the lives of freed African Americans in 1850s Philadelphia. The ⇒ Read More
David Niescior
David Nescior, M.A. in American history from Rutgers-Camden, is a historical interpreter at the Old Barracks Museum in Trenton, New Jersey, and winner of the 2016 American History Award for graduate study from the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America.
Leslie Peck
Leslie Peck earned a master’s degree in history at Rutgers University-Camden.
Melissa M. Mandell
Melissa M. Mandell is a Philadelphian and public historian who has most recently worked on digital history projects for the Drexel University College of Medicine Legacy Center Archives & Special Collections, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
Robert J. Kodosky
Robert J. Kodosky is an Associate Professor of History at West Chester University. He is the author of Psychological Operations American Style: The Joint United States Public Affairs Office, Vietnam and Beyond.
Free African Society
Headed by black founding fathers Richard Allen (1760-1831) and Absalom Jones (1746-1818), the Free African Society was founded on April 12, 1787, as a nondenominational mutual aid society and the first dedicated to serving Philadelphia’s burgeoning free black community. Members contributed one shilling per month to fund programs to support their social and economic needs. ⇒ Read More
Scientific Societies
Since the eighteenth century, Philadelphia-area scientific societies have promoted scholarship and innovation, increased access to scientific knowledge and played an important role in the professionalization of various disciplines. Longstanding institutions, including the American Philosophical Society (1743), the Academy of Natural Sciences (1812), and the Franklin Institute (1824), have garnered national and international accolades, while many ⇒ Read More
American Philosophical Society
Well before the Declaration of Independence, in 1743 Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) and his friend the Quaker botanist John Bartram (1699-1777) established the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia as a declaration of scientific independence from Great Britain’s scientific domination. The APS developed from a group of local intellectuals keen on expanding human knowledge to serve informally ⇒ Read More
Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)
Much as New England was shaped by its Puritan heritage, the history of Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley intertwined heavily with the Religious Society of Friends. Philadelphia gained one of its nicknames, “The Quaker City,” from its founding and settlement by the Friends, colloquially known as Quakers, a historically Christian religious sect that emerged during ⇒ Read More
Home Remedies
Although Philadelphia has been a premier city for medical innovation since the mid-eighteenth century, the diverse peoples of the region also have used home remedies to heal themselves. Home remedies preserve traditional domestic healthcare practices, and they have persisted into the twenty-first century as part of alternative medicine and mainstream scientific therapies. Medical recipes often ⇒ Read More
Elise Kammerer
Elise Kammerer is a Ph.D. candidate in American History at the University of Cologne, where she specializes in free black education in early national Philadelphia and the antislavery movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Karol Kovalovich Weaver
Karol Kovalovich Weaver is the author of Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue (University of Illinois Press) and Medical Caregiving and Identity in Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Region, 1880–2000 (Penn State Press). Her third book project is titled Powerful Grief: American Women and the Politics of Death.
Philadelphia Story (The)
The Philadelphia Story (1939) is a comedy of manners presented as a three-act play set in the late 1930s in a magnificent mansion in Philadelphia’s western Main Line suburbs, a location of wealth and exclusivity. Written by Philip Barry (1896-1949), a prolific dramatic and comic playwright, The Philadelphia Story centers on the lives of an ⇒ Read More
New Sweden
Founded in 1638, the colony of New Sweden survived less than twenty years and at its peak numbered only about four hundred people, most of whom lived along the western bank of the Delaware River between what became Philadelphia and New Castle, Delaware. As small and short-lived as it proved to be, New Sweden had ⇒ Read More
Melissa Ziobro
Melissa Ziobro served as a command historian for the U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Command, Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, from 2004 until the base’s 2011 closure following recommendations by the BRAC Commission. She is the Specialist Professor of Public History at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey.
Barbershops and Barbers
Throughout much of its modern American history, barbering has been derided as “servile” work, unfit for native-born, white citizens. As such, the profession has been dominated by marginalized groups. In the Philadelphia region, African Americans owned and operated the majority of barber shops during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Since then, waves of immigrant ⇒ Read More
Enterprise Zones and Empowerment Zones
Introduced in the Philadelphia area and the nation in the early 1980s, the enterprise zone was a new kind of urban policy that emphasized market-based, “supply-side” strategies for tackling urban decline, most notably in the form of tax incentives for business. A variation in the 1990s, the empowerment zone, targeted areas of high poverty and ⇒ Read More
Staircase Group (The)
After Charles Willson Peale’s The Staircase Group emerged from a private collection in the mid-twentieth century, the Philadelphia Museum of Art placed the compelling trompe l’oeil (deceive the eye) double portrait on display and it became widely reproduced in American popular and art historical literature. Its contemporary popularity echoed the popularity it enjoyed at Peale’s ⇒ Read More
Sean Patrick Adams
Sean Patrick Adams is Professor of History and Chair at the University of Florida. He is the author or editor of several books, including Home Fires: How Americans Kept Warm in the Nineteenth Century (2014).
Michelle Craig McDonald
Michelle Craig McDonald is an Associate Professor of History at Stockton University, where she teaches courses on early American and Atlantic world history, as well as museum studies.
James Cook-Thajudeen
James Cook-Thajudeen is a Ph.D. candidate in American History at Temple University.
Carola Hein
Carola Hein is Professor and Head, Chair History of Architecture and Urban Planning at Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands. She has published widely on topics in contemporary and historical architectural and urban planning— notably in Europe and Japan. Among other major grants, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship to pursue research on The Global Architecture ⇒ Read More
Coal
In the nineteenth century, Philadelphia banks and entrepreneurs played a pivotal role in facilitating the emergence of coal as the nation’s principal energy source for industry, transportation, and heating, by creating and financing the firms that first brought to market anthracite coal, mined exclusively in rugged eastern Pennsylvania. To mine anthracite, or “hard coal,” on ⇒ Read More
Christina Virok
Christina Virok is an educator and graduate student in the History Department at Villanova University.
Log Cabins
The Philadelphia region served as an important diffusion ground for log cabins in America as Swedes, Finns, and later Germans transposed their traditional building practices to the Delaware Valley, melding old-world models with the bounty of timber but adapting to the lack of tools and skilled craftsmen. By the mid-nineteenth century, log cabins had become ⇒ Read More
Women’s Education
As home to the first chartered school for girls in the United States, the country’s first medical college for women, one of the earliest chapters of the American Association of University Women (AAUW), and coeducational and women’s colleges, the Philadelphia region provided pioneering models in women’s education. These innovations operated in the context of national ⇒ Read More
Ben Davidson
Ben Davidson is a Ph.D. candidate in United States History at New York University. He is working on a dissertation about the generation of children who grew up during the Civil War era.
A New Milestone: 350 Topics Online
We are pleased to share the news that The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia has reached a new milestone: 350 topics online. Thanks to the many people who are making this project possible: authors, editors, reviewers, fact-checkers and page-builders, and the archival partners who provide illustrations. Our current phase of expansion is made possible by generous ⇒ Read More
Art of Thomas Eakins
The art of Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) is more deeply entwined with the city of Philadelphia than that of any other artist of the nineteenth century. Born in North Philadelphia in 1844, Eakins spent nearly his entire life in the city. He consistently took local residents as his subjects, portraying friends, family, and individuals he admired engaged ⇒ Read More
Susan Hanket Brandt
Susan Hanket Brandt holds a Ph.D. in history from Temple University and is an adjunct professor of history at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Her 2013 dissertation, “Gifted Women and Skilled Practitioners: Gender and Healing Authority in the Delaware Valley, 1740–1830,” includes information on home remedies. Her article, “ ‘Getting into a Little Business’: ⇒ Read More
Sean Trainor
Sean Trainor teaches history and humanities at the University of Florida, Penn State University, and Santa Fe College. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Business History Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Early American Studies, Salon, and TIME.
Carol Eaton Soltis
Carol Eaton Soltis is Project Associate Curator, Peale Collection Catalogue, American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Arts of Wharton Esherick
The unconventional artistic trajectory and prolific work of prominent Philadelphia-area artist and craftsman Wharton Esherick (1877–1970) have been claimed for and by multiple movements in the history of twentieth-century American art, from early-twentieth-century Arts and Crafts to postwar studio craft. Working across a wide variety of media, including printmaking, sculpture, furniture, and theatrical design, Esherick ⇒ Read More
Diners
With its origins in late-nineteenth-century street vending and transient “quick lunch” operations such as horse-drawn food carts, the diner emerged as one of the most popular and successful restaurant genres in the United States. Although diners entered a period of protracted decline after World War II with the arrival of fast food restaurants, changing consumer ⇒ Read More
Surveying (Colonial)
Land was the most valuable commodity in the Delaware Valley during the colonial period, and it had to be surveyed before it could be granted or transferred. In Pennsylvania, William Penn (1644–1718) relied upon surveyors to measure and map his new lands. Colonial surveyors established tract, manor, township, and county boundaries, laid out city streets ⇒ Read More
Timothy Weaver
Timothy Weaver is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY. He previously held the post of Assistant Professor of Urban Politics at the University of Louisville. He holds a B.A. (Hons.) in Philosophy and Politics from the University of Durham (U.K.) and an M.A. and Ph.D. in ⇒ Read More
Down There
Down There, a hardboiled crime novel by Philadelphia writer David Goodis (1917-67) published in 1956, follows Eddie Lynn, a former concert pianist, who hides from his past until his estranged brother shows up and forces him to grapple with his ghosts. Although not one of Goodis’s most successful novels, Down There became his most famous ⇒ Read More
Quaker City (The); Or, the Monks of Monk Hall
George Lippard (1822-54) published The Quaker City; Or, the Monks of Monk Hall in 1844-45 in serial installments, which were then collated as a novel. A gothic tale, set in Philadelphia and inspired by a linked pair of real-life urban crimes, the novel juxtaposes a plot centered on greed, amorality, and debauchery against the then-popular ⇒ Read More
Franklin Institute
On February 5, 1824, a group of Philadelphians led by Samuel Vaughn Merrick (1801–70) and William Hypolitus Keating (1799–1840) met at the courthouse on Sixth and Chestnut Streets to found the Franklin Institute of the State of Pennsylvania for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts. Seeking to emulate a passion for useful science, in the ⇒ Read More
Thomas Mackaman
Thomas Mackaman is Assistant Professor of History, at King’s College, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He is author of the forthcoming book, New Immigrants and American Industry, 1914-1924.
Frank Fuller
Frank Fuller is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Temple University and Chestnut Hill College. He has also taught at Villanova University and Rowan University. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Clark Atlanta University, an M.S. in International Affairs from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a B.A. in Politics from Oglethorpe University.
Isaac Barnes May
Isaac Barnes May is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and is pursuing a Ph.D. in Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He has previously published articles in Quaker History and Quaker Studies.
University City Science Center
The University City Science Center, the nation’s first and oldest urban research park, represents a pivotal chapter in the story of American urban renewal, its associated racial tensions, and the important role played by institutions of higher education. Established in 1960 in West Philadelphia adjacent to and intertwining the campuses of the University of Pennsylvania ⇒ Read More
Astronomy
University of PennsylvPhiladelphians embraced the study of celestial phenomena and bodies, such as stars, planets, and comets, from an early date. As early as 1769, the American Philosophical Society’s involvement in tracking that year’s transit of Venus gained transatlantic scientific attention. Astronomy remained a popular scientific pursuit throughout the region’s history; the Franklin Institute and ⇒ Read More
Michael Pospishil
Michael Pospishil is a Ph.D. candidate in the Hagley Program of Capitalism, Technology, and Culture at the University of Delaware. His dissertation explores the role of mid-Atlantic surveyors in cultivating a sense of order during and after the American Revolution.
Pennsylvania (Founding)
In March of 1681, King Charles II of England (1630-85) granted William Penn (1644-1718), gentleman and Quaker, the charter for a proprietary colony on the North American continent. Although both English colonial policy and the organization of the Society of Friends, known as Quakers, were works in progress between the years 1682 and 1701, in ⇒ Read More
Radio (Commercial)
From radio’s inception to contemporary times, Philadelphia-area innovators, performers, and manufacturers contributed to shaping the industry. Like its technological forerunner, the telegraph, radio made possible the direct, real-time transmission of information. The immediacy and intimacy of radio waves arriving directly into listeners’ homes made radio revolutionary. The medium quickly became not only a technology for ⇒ Read More
Country Clubs
Country clubs originated in the 1890s as elite, family-oriented havens usually emphasizing golf, but they have never been just about golf or even sports. Clubs fostered sportsmanship, appropriate deportment, and social development while also providing opportunities for exercise. A “golden age” of country clubs lasted until the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the number ⇒ Read More
Blue Route
Famous for the many protracted conflicts that delayed its full construction for decades, Pennsylvania’s Mid-County Expressway, also referred to as the Veterans Memorial Highway and, more commonly, the “Blue Route,” is the southernmost section of Interstate 476. The expressway stretches through southern Montgomery and Delaware Counties, linking the Pennsylvania Turnpike interchange at Plymouth Meeting with ⇒ Read More
Fairmount Water Works
For more than two centuries, Philadelphia’s Fairmount Water Works provided two vitally important, but different, services to the city. The first began when Philadelphia’s municipal water system—the first of its kind anywhere in the modern world—was moved to Fairmount and enlarged. Thanks to its charming design and placement beside the bucolic Schuylkill River, its second ⇒ Read More
Mark L. Thompson
Mark L. Thompson is an American historian who teaches at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. His book The Contest for the Delaware Valley: Allegiance, Identity, and Empire in the Seventeenth Century (2013) won the Pennsylvania Historical Association’s Philip S. Klein Book Prize for the best book in Pennsylvania history in 2012-13.
Petty Island
Petty Island, part of Pennsauken, New Jersey, in the Delaware River opposite the Kensington section of Philadelphia, played a significant supporting role in the economic development of the region. Also known as “Pettys” or “Petty’s” Island, over time it served as a place where people hunted, fished, gathered herbs, farmed, built and repaired boats, operated ⇒ Read More
Camden, New Jersey
Incorporated in 1828 and named county seat of the newly formed Camden County when it separated from Gloucester County in 1844, Camden City long served as the heart of the South Jersey region directly across the Delaware River from Philadelphia. Besieged in the second half of the twentieth century by losses of population and economic ⇒ Read More
Red City (The)
Written by Silas Weir Mitchell (1829-1914) and published in 1908, The Red City: A Historical Novel of the Second Administration of President Washington is a historical romance, a genre whose plot typically consists of a quest, followed by trials, and ending in marriage. Mitchell presents a view of Philadelphia in the 1790s as politically divided ⇒ Read More
Mother’s Day
First rising to popularity in Philadelphia, Mother’s Day has been formally observed on the second Sunday in May since 1914 and celebrated in the United States for even longer. Serving various purposes since the late nineteenth century, Mother’s Day has deep connections to religion, war, feminism, and consumerism. For over a century, the meaning and ⇒ Read More
Fugitives From Slavery
Immediately after passing the nation’s first gradual abolition law in 1780, Pennsylvania became a haven for fugitive slaves 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 the ⇒ Read More
Philadelphia Orchestra
Founded in 1900, the Philadelphia Orchestra developed into an iconic organization for Philadelphia through its musicianship, commitment to culture and education, and service as a cultural ambassador. The musical tastes and personalities of a series of influential conductors infused the orchestra with a rich history and distinctive sound as it became one of the finest ⇒ Read More
Brad Windhauser
Brad Windhauser is a Philadelphia-based writer whose short stories have appeared in several literary journals. He has published two Philadelphia-set novels: Regret (2007) and The Intersection (Fall 2016).
Joseph C. Schiavo
Joseph C. Schiavo is a Clinical Associate Professor of Music and the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs and University College in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University–Camden.
Philadelphia Award
Founded in 1921, each year the Philadelphia Award honors one or more Philadelphians for service “to advance the best and largest interests of Philadelphia.” Awardees have included scientists, educators, university administrators, directors of nonprofits, philanthropists, ministers, lawyers, politicians, artists, writers, and sports figures. Established by Edward Bok (1863–1930), retired editor of the Ladies Home Journal, ⇒ Read More
Garbage Barge (Khian Sea)
During the 1980s, as regional landfills closed, it became increasingly difficult for Philadelphia to find places to put its trash and the ash from burning that trash. This dilemma became a global odyssey when the city loaded about 15,000 tons of municipal ash on a ship, the Khian Sea, and sent it off to the ⇒ Read More
King of Prussia, Pennsylvania
Twenty miles northwest of downtown Philadelphia, where the Pennsylvania Turnpike converges with the Schuylkill Expressway, a sleepy rural town clustered around a colonial-era tavern expanded massively in the twentieth century to become the region’s largest employment hub outside of Center City Philadelphia. Its suburban location in fast-growing Montgomery County proved irresistible to real estate developers ⇒ Read More
Almshouses (Poorhouses)
From the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth century, almshouses offered food, shelter, clothing, and medical care to the poorest and most vulnerable, often in exchange for hard labor and forfeiture of freedom. Those who entered the Philadelphia region’s almshouses, willingly or unwillingly, rarely accepted this exchange and often protested their treatment or blatantly ⇒ Read More
Joanna Kolendo
Joanna Kolendo is an Assistant Professor of Library and Information Services at Chicago State University, where she works as a Reference & Electronic Resources Librarian. She received her M.S. from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and an M.Phil. from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.
Lynn Miller
Lynn Miller is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Temple University. He is the author of, among other works, Global Order: Values and Power in International Politics, Crossing the Line (a novel), and the co-author (with James McClelland) of City in a Park: A History of Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park System.
Levi Fox
Levi Fox is a Ph.D. candidate in public history at Temple University and a former Allen F. Davis fellow at the Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent. He teaches courses at Temple, Rutgers, and Stockton Universities.
Nina M. Schreiner
Nina M. Schreiner is a graduate student at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, where she studies the archaeology of colonial North America.
Entomology (Study of Insects)
Philadelphia and its nearby vicinities became important sites for entomological study by the nineteenth century due to the presence of the Academy of Natural Sciences (established in 1812) and the American Entomological Society (1859). Entomological writing and illustration also flourished in this center for book production. Over time, entomologists’ interest in insects shifted from the ⇒ Read More
Bank of the United States (First)
Chartered in 1791 as part of the financial and economic reform plans of Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804), the first secretary of the Treasury, the first Bank of the United States played an instrumental role in establishing the nation’s credit. Based in Philadelphia, then the national capital, the bank drew many principal investors from the region and ⇒ Read More
Lafayette’s Tour
When the Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834), a French hero of the American Revolution, returned to the United States in 1824-25, Philadelphians joined in a wave of nationwide affection for the nobleman who had volunteered for service in the Continental Army at the age of 19. Lafayette’s return to the region stirred increasing regard for preserving ⇒ Read More
Tourism
Philadelphia has been a tourist destination since leisure travel emerged as a common pastime for the middle and upper classes in the nineteenth century. By the twenty-first century, the region’s economy depended heavily on tourism to Philadelphia and nearby destinations such as the Brandywine Valley, Valley Forge, and the Jersey and Delaware shores. Historic sites ⇒ Read More
David Haugaard
David Haugaard is the director of research services at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. He edited the biographies written by HSP staff and volunteers for the Philadelphia Award project (now available on the organization’s website). He received his M.A. in history from the University of Pennsylvania. David previously worked at the Chester County Archives and ⇒ Read More
Melanie Dudley
Melanie Dudley is a graduate student in history at Villanova University.
Bookselling
Bookstores have long been an important part of the economic and cultural fabric of Philadelphia. As early as the eighteenth century, booksellers set up shop in the city, eager to serve a highly-educated population hungry for information. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the number of bookstores continued to rise. These stores sold a ⇒ Read More
Mara Kaktins
Mara Kaktins is a historical archaeologist who holds an M.A. from Temple University. Her graduate work focused on the changing treatment of the poor throughout the colonial period.
Grand Federal Procession
Three hours long and a mile-and-a-half in length, the Grand Federal Procession was an ambitious act of political street theater, scripted by federalist supporters of the newly ratified U.S. Constitution and performed in the streets of Philadelphia on the Fourth of July 1788. From its commencement at Third and South Streets to its conclusion on ⇒ Read More
Legionnaires’ Disease
The outbreak of a mysterious pneumonia-like disease in the Philadelphia region in the summer of 1976 puzzled doctors and public health officials. Many of the sick had attended an American Legion convention at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, giving the new illness the name “Legionnaires’ disease.” Months later, doctors discovered that bacteria in the hotel’s air conditioning ⇒ Read More
John L. Puckett
John L. Puckett is a professor in the Education, Culture, and Society Division of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. A co-founder of the Netter Center for Community Partnerships, he teaches academically-based community service courses at Penn, and he has been active in community organizing around schools in West Philadelphia. Among other books, ⇒ Read More
Slinky
Invented by accident in a Philadelphia shipyard, the Slinky is a stack of coiled metal that becomes a bit of oscillating magic, a moving, traveling toy perfect for flipping head-over-heels to “walk” down stairs. Always made in Pennsylvania, the Slinky became standard-issue equipment for generations of American children and a familiar, fun plaything for grown-ups ⇒ Read More
Typhoid Fever and Filtered Water
Philadelphia in the late nineteenth century stood shamefully high among large American cities in rates of death from typhoid fever (also known as enteric fever). Caused by a type of Salmonella bacterium, the disease had become common in Philadelphia and other cities with crowded populations, inadequate disposal of human waste, and lack of water treatment. ⇒ Read More
Matthew A. White
Matthew A. White is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at the University of Florida. His dissertation, “Patronage, Public Science, and Free Education: William Wagner and The Wagner Free Institute of Science 1855–1929,” was supported by grants from the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (Philadelphia). He is also a museum ⇒ Read More
Trails (Indian)
In the Philadelphia region prior to European settlement and during the colonial period, the Lenapes and other Indians used their knowledge of the landscape to engineer the most efficient routes through forests, mountains, and often shallow, treacherous waterways. Their complex system of overland paths crisscrossed the region to reach east to the shell fisheries on ⇒ Read More
Jordan AP Fansler
Jordan AP Fansler grew up in Pennsylvania, is a graduate of Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, and has worked at multiple museums in Greater Philadelphia. His doctoral thesis and scholarly work focus on the relationship of citizens to their state, national, and imperial governments in the early-modern Atlantic World.
Smith’s and Windmill Islands
Once a prominent feature of the Delaware River between Philadelphia and Camden, Smith’s and Windmill Islands were shifting signifiers of the recreational, commercial, and financial development of the region. Originally one island, then segmented by a canal in 1838, the islands attracted early but unsuccessful proposals for bridges between Camden and Philadelphia. Although they served ⇒ Read More
Medicine (Colonial Era)
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 disease. The health of the colonial population varied by race and region. In Pennsylvania and New Jersey, as in the ⇒ Read More
Laura Rigal
Laura Rigal is Associate Professor in the Departments of English and American Studies at the University of Iowa. She is the author of The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic (Princeton University Press, 1998).
Grand Juries
The grand jury, enshrined in common law and inscribed in the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, has represented a force for citizen participation in the judicial process as well as for government power. The grand jury has the power to indict in felony cases and the broad right to investigate crimes. Although Delaware, Pennsylvania, ⇒ Read More
Puerto Rican Migration
Puerto Ricans migrated to the Philadelphia area in search of better economic opportunities. A small stream of migration prior to the twentieth century grew during the two world wars, with many more migrants arriving from the 1950s onward. Many families settled permanently in the region, where their lives intertwined with black and white residents and ⇒ Read More
College of Physicians of Philadelphia
One of the oldest professional medical societies in the United States, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia was founded in 1787 “to advance the science of medicine and to thereby lessen human misery.” At the time, Philadelphia, home to the first general hospital and medical college, was the center of American medicine. The College of ⇒ Read More
Sports Cards
Sports card collecting, a classic American hobby, has strong ties to Philadelphia. Its history can be traced through Philadelphia firms such as the American Caramel Company, Fleer Corporation, and Bowman Gum Company. Those three, all pioneers and innovators in the sports card industry, helped to build collecting as a popular hobby. Sports cards developed from ⇒ Read More
Robert A. Shinn
Robert A. Shinn received his master’s degree in political science in 1972 and bachelor’s cegree in American civilization in 1970 from Brown University. He serves as treasurer of the Camden County Historical Society and conducts historical research and tours of Petty’s Island for the New Jersey State Natural Lands Trust. With Kevin Cook, he authored ⇒ Read More
Jeff Gammage
Jeff Gammage is a reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Herpetology (Study of Amphibians and Reptiles)
Over the course of three hundred years, urbanization and habitat loss in the Philadelphia region threatened amphibians and reptiles that once fostered rich scientific discussions. Nevertheless, pioneering herpetologists influenced medical, paleontological, and ecological studies of these creatures in North America. Beginning in the eighteenth century, naturalists on both sides of the Atlantic became entranced with ⇒ Read More
Vegetarianism and Veganism
The vegetarian movement in the United States was born in Philadelphia, and the city was pivotal in several of its most important developments. Throughout, Philadelphia maintained an ongoing community of vegetarians, including those who became known as vegans. Predating an organized movement, individuals practiced vegetarianism and some produced vegetarian cookbooks. Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) spent several ⇒ Read More
Fairmount Park
Fairmount Park was developed in the nineteenth century in an effort to protect Philadelphia’s public water supply and to preserve extensive green spaces within a rapidly industrializing cityscape. It became one of the largest urban riparian parks in the United States and comprises the largest contiguous components of Philadelphia’s public park system as administered by ⇒ Read More
Model Cities
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 ⇒ Read More
Cartoons and Cartoonists
American cartooning began in Philadelphia. Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), who introduced cartoons to North America, used images to galvanize viewers to action on the issues of their day. As the political, economic, and cultural capital of the early United States, Philadelphia became a center for producing political cartoons and humorous caricatures. Although New York eventually supplanted ⇒ Read More
Mormons (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints)
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 ⇒ Read More
Project Milestone: 300 Topics Online
This month we passed a new milestone in the creation of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia: our 300th topic published online. Published on March 8, topic number 300, “Board of Health (Philadelphia),” by James Higgins, added to our growing category of topics about health and medicine. We would like to take this opportunity to thank ⇒ Read More
Amanda Bevers Bristol
Amanda Bevers Bristol is a Ph.D. candidate in the History and Science Studies Departments at University of California, San Diego, where in 2012 she received her master’s. She is completing her dissertation entitled “To Bind Up the Nation’s Wounds: The Army Medical Museum and the Development of American Medical Science, 1862–1913,” which has been supported ⇒ Read More
Dentistry and Dentists
As dentistry slowly emerged as a profession in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, innovative dentists in Philadelphia helped to shape dental care, procedures, and tools. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, dental colleges, journals, and societies contributed to the expansion of dental training and practice, which gradually but increasingly became accessible to women and people of ⇒ Read More
ODUNDE Festival
The ODUNDE Festival, held in South Philadelphia each year on the second Sunday in June, celebrates the history and heritage of African people around the globe and serves to instill and encourage cultural pride. Taking its name from the word meaning “Happy New Year” in the Yoruba language (placed in all capital letters by the ⇒ Read More
Saint Patrick’s Day
In March, Philadelphians of many backgrounds join together to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day, the city’s Irish citizens, and their heritage. Celebrated in Philadelphia since 1771, the holiday began as a Catholic holy day and evolved into a rambunctious affair marked throughout the region by parades, music, dancing, drinking, and wearing kelly-green clothing to symbolize the ⇒ Read More
Vance Lehmkuhl
Vance Lehmkuhl is a journalist at the Philadelphia Daily News and Philly.com and is at work on a book about vegetarianism in Philadelphia.
Better Philadelphia Exhibition (1947)
The Better Philadelphia Exhibition, which ran from September 8 to October 15, 1947, at Gimbels department store in Center City, showcased new ideas for revitalizing Philadelphia after decades of depression and war. Conceived by young architects and planners and funded by prominent citizens, the exhibition introduced more than 350,000 people in the metropolitan area, free ⇒ Read More
Dewey’s Lunch Counter Sit-In
In 1965, protesters at a Dewey’s restaurant lunch counter in Center City Philadelphia demanded access to public accommodations for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. It was the first known protest of its kind in Philadelphia, and one of the earliest such demonstrations in the United States. Dewey’s was a chain of hamburger restaurants ⇒ Read More
Rachel Moloshok
Rachel Moloshok is managing editor of publications and associate manager of scholarly programs at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, where she has helped to plan and execute several digital history exhibits, including Politics in Graphic Detail: Exploring History through Political Cartoons (2015).
Union League of Philadelphia
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 ⇒ Read More
Board of Health (Philadelphia)
Philadelphia suffered numerous outbreaks of epidemic disease throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it was not until 1794, in the wake of the disastrous 1793 yellow fever outbreak, that a group of concerned citizens founded the Board of Health, independent of the city’s control. In the nineteenth century, the city supported the board with ⇒ Read More
Public Parks (Philadelphia)
Philadelphia boasts the oldest and one of the largest urban park systems in the United States, comprising more than one hundred parks encompassing some ten thousand acres. With origins in William Penn’s innovative city plan, Philadelphia’s public green spaces range in size and type from small neighborhood squares to extensive watershed and estuary parks along ⇒ Read More
Rock and Roll (Early Years)
For most Americans in the mid-1950s, rock and roll seemed to come out of nowhere, a raucous new musical style that suddenly burst on the scene. In reality, rock and roll had been taking shape for decades, as uniquely American vernacular musical styles such as jazz, blues, gospel, and country music cross-pollinated. The process unfolded ⇒ Read More
Susan Ferentinos
Susan Ferentinos is a public history researcher, writer, and consultant specializing in project management and using the past to build community. She holds a Ph.D. in U.S. history from Indiana University and is the author of Interpreting LGBT History at Museums and Historic Sites (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).
Martha K. Robinson
Martha K. Robinson is Associate Professor of History at Clarion University of Pennsylvania. Her publications include “New Worlds, New Medicines: Indian Remedies and English Medicine in Early America,” Early American Studies 3 (Spring 2005): 94-110.
Prehistoric Native Americans and Archaeology
For thousands of years before European settlement, Native Americans inhabited North America and left behind evidence of their lives in the form of artifacts, which archaeologists have studied and interpreted. The archaeological record for Philadelphia and the surrounding area reveals the complex relationship between prehistoric peoples and the region’s changing environment. Archaeologists also have learned ⇒ Read More
First Purchasers of Pennsylvania
Upon receiving his grant for Pennsylvania in March 1681, William Penn (1644-1718) immediately set about attracting investors and settlers. To pay expenses and realize a profit from his enterprise, Penn had to sell land. The “First Purchasers” who responded to his promotional tracts provided essential economic support for Penn’s “Holy Experiment.” Penn sought to attract ⇒ Read More
Arsenals
For much of the nation’s history Philadelphia held a preeminent position as the provider of logistical support to the U.S. Army, and federal arsenals played a considerable role in the economic life of the city. The Schuylkill Arsenal and Frankford Arsenal were, respectively, the largest manufacturers of uniforms and small-arms ammunition in the country, often ⇒ Read More
Buses
Beginning in the 1920s, the Philadelphia region’s independent transit companies added motorized buses (autobuses) to their networks. Superior in comfort to the horse-drawn omnibuses of the nineteenth century and with more range and versatility than electric trolleys, autobuses offered passengers easier means to traverse the metropolitan area. Prior to the internal combustion engine, mass transit ⇒ Read More
Mark Jaffe
Mark Jaffe covered the story of the Khian Sea while a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He also covered energy issues for the Denver Post.
Art Deco
Like other major American cities in the 1920s and 1930s, Philadelphia was an epicenter for the exuberant strain of architecture and design activity that came to be known as Art Deco. Fueled by the area’s economic importance and increasingly urban character after the First World War, designers, corporations, and manufacturers all engaged in a broad ⇒ Read More
In the News: Admiral Wilson Boulevard
We’re delighted to see our recently published essay about Admiral Wilson Boulevard, by Bart Everts, featured in the New Jersey edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Learn more about the author and the surprising history of the highway in Kevin Riordan’s column, “Camden’s Boulevard of Unfulfilled Dreams.”
Brant W. Ellsworth
Brant W. Ellsworth earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from Penn State, Harrisburg, and is an instructor of American History and Political Science at York College of Pennsylvania. He recently published a chapter examining Mormon soldier enlistment motivation during the Civil War in Ken Alford, ed., Civil War Saints.
Bank War
Conflict over renewing the charter of the Second Bank of the United States triggered the 1830s Bank War, waged between President Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) and bank president Nicholas Biddle (1786-1844). Operating from its Parthenon-style building on Chestnut Street between Fourth and Fifth Streets in Philadelphia, the bank served as a reliable depository for federal money ⇒ Read More
Jack McCarthy
Jack McCarthy is an archivist and historian who specializes in three areas of Philadelphia history: music, business and industry, and Northeast Philadelphia. He regularly writes, lectures, and gives tours on these subjects. His book In the Cradle of Industry and Liberty: A History of Manufacturing in Philadelphia was published in 2016 and he curated the 2017–18 exhibit Risk ⇒ Read More
Lower Delaware Colonies (1609-1704)
The colonies that became the state of Delaware lay in the middle of the North American Atlantic coast, extending about 120 miles north from the Atlantic Ocean along the southwestern shore of the Delaware (South) Bay and River to within 10 miles of Philadelphia. Between 1609 and 1704, the area was a contested borderland between ⇒ Read More
Vagrancy
Vagrancy, generally defined as the act of continuous geographical movement by the poor, often has been interpreted to signify idleness, unemployment, and homelessness. Since the colonial era, it has been a driving social concern in the Mid-Atlantic region, where urban centers, including Philadelphia, attracted poor migrants seeking new economic prospects. Laws created to aid them ⇒ Read More
Jessica Linker
Jessica Linker is a doctoral candidate at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, and the recipient of fellowships from a number of Philadelphia-area institutions, including the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Her work focuses on American women and scientific practice between 1720 and 1860.
Greater Philadelphia Movement
The reform wave that swept through City Hall in the mid-twentieth century owed much of its power to the Greater Philadelphia Movement (GPM), a volunteer group of corporate leaders who believed the city’s scandalous political corruption threatened its economic future. Formed in 1948, they called themselves “practical men” who wanted Philadelphia to work more effectively ⇒ Read More
Matthew Tormey
Matthew B. Tormey is a political science student at Westfield State University in Massachusetts. For his research into baseball card history he has received a prize from the Pioneer Institute and been published in the American Numismatic Association’s The Numismatist.
Abscam
Launched in March 1978, the FBI sting operation known as Abscam led to the conviction of a U.S. senator, six congressmen, three Philadelphia City Council members, and the mayor of Camden, New Jersey, for taking bribes from undercover agents pretending to be the Arab sheiks. The FBI secretly filmed the transactions in hotel rooms in ⇒ Read More
Plays of Susanna Rowson
In the three years in the 1790s that Susanna Rowson (1762-1824) was a presence on the Philadelphia stage as a writer and performer, her tireless promotion of the theater helped establish its centrality to the city’s arts community. Rowson came to prominence as a writer for Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth, published in 1791 ⇒ Read More
Christina Harris
Christina Afia Harris is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Africology and Africana Studies at Temple University.
Matthew C. White
Matthew C. White earned an M.A. in history at Rutgers-University Camden.
Admiral Wilson Boulevard
Admiral Wilson Boulevard, a two-and-a-half-mile section of U.S. Route 30 extending from the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in Camden to the Route 70 overpass in Pennsauken, was the first “auto strip” in the United States. Originally named Bridge Approach Boulevard when it opened in 1926, it was renamed in 1929 to honor Rear Admiral Henry Braid ⇒ Read More
Co-Working Spaces
In the 2000s and 2010s, nearly thirty co-working spaces opened in the Philadelphia area. Co-working offered flexible, shared office facilities to freelancers, technology start-ups, entrepreneurs, and nascent businesses that did not require or could not afford private workplaces. These spaces were designed to foster a collaborative atmosphere, where clients could share innovations and resources. A ⇒ Read More
Allen C. Guelzo
Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College.
Linda Myrsiades
Linda Myrsiades is professor emerita of English and comparative literature at West Chester University of Pennsylvania and the author of several books. Her most recent works include Law and Medicine in Revolutionary America, Medical Culture in Revolutionary America, The Culture of Abortion in Literature and Law, and Cultural Representation in Historical Resistance.
Restaurants
From colonial-era taverns to the celebrity chef establishments of the early twenty-first century, Greater Philadelphia’s restaurants illuminated the region’s socioeconomic, cultural, and culinary trends while also providing sustenance for millions, employing thousands, and in some cases emerging as historic and nostalgic treasures. Taverns and public houses (“pubs”) represented the area’s earliest food-serving establishments; many operated ⇒ Read More
James Higgins
James Higgins is a lecturer in American history at the University of Houston–Victoria. He specializes in the history of medicine, especially as it pertains to Pennsylvania. His manuscript, which analyzes four urban outbreaks in Pennsylvania during the 1918–19 influenza pandemic, is with the University of Rochester Press. He has offered a dozen conference papers and ⇒ Read More
Painters and Painting
Philadelphia has a long, distinguished history as a center of American painting. In addition to the work of individuals and artistic family dynasties, the history of Philadelphia painters is linked with the city’s art schools, particularly the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), founded in 1805. Working locally and abroad, Philadelphia painters have connected ⇒ Read More
Matthew A. Zimmerman
Matthew A. Zimmerman earned his Ph.D. in History at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of History and Political Science at Middle Georgia State University in Macon, Georgia.
Bart Everts
Bart Everts is a reference librarian at the Paul Robeson Library at Rutgers University-Camden and teaches history at Peirce College.
Commercial Museum
Opened to the public in 1897, the Commercial Museum was the foremost source of international trade knowledge for American manufacturers at the turn of the twentieth century. Located on the western bank of the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, the museum served as a reference library for merchants, facilitated connections between American export traders and foreign ⇒ Read More
Elizabeth Mannion
Elizabeth Mannion’s publications on modern drama include The Urban Plays of the Early Abbey Theatre: Beyond O’Casey (Syracuse University Press, 2014).
Peale’s Philadelphia Museum
Inspired by eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideals celebrating humankind’s capacity to learn and use new information, the artist Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) conceived his Philadelphia Museum. In it, Peale intended the works of man and nature to coexist for the edification of all. The Philadelphia Museum, Peale said, served “to instruct the mind and sow the seeds ⇒ Read More
Barnes Foundation
Businessman, chemist, educator, and art collector Dr. Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951) established the Barnes Foundation in 1922 as a center for art education organized around his growing collection of paintings, sculpture, and furniture. The institution earned international renown, less for its pedagogy than for its art collection, which by mid-century was world-class. Initially based in ⇒ Read More
Liberia; Or, Mr. Peyton’s Experiments
Liberia; Or, Mr. Peyton’s Experiments (1853) is a hybrid work containing fiction, history, and biography along with transcriptions of documents on Liberia. The work argued that free blacks could not prosper in North America but had opportunities for advancement and self-determination in Liberia, a black Christian republic. The Americo-Liberian settlers would not only rise themselves ⇒ Read More
Alien and Sedition Acts
A culmination of political battles between Democratic-Republicans and Federalists while Philadelphia served as capital of the United States, the federal Alien and Sedition Acts imposed stringent new rules governing political speech and writings, immigration rights, and non-naturalized immigrants. They also had an immediate impact on the political life of Philadelphia as they inflamed passions in ⇒ Read More
Atlantic City
Before Disneyland, Atlantic City was the first great middle-class resort in the nation, especially the Philadelphia region. From its founding in the 1850s through the early decades of the twenty-first century, Atlantic City succeeded and failed based on its ability to make itself in the image of the American middle class. As the cultural tastes ⇒ Read More
Educational Reform
Since the early nineteenth century, several reform efforts have aimed to improve Philadelphia-area public schools. While the historical context and the individual actors changed over time, a firm belief that basic education for all could foster social equality animated reform in every era. Of course, race- and class-based inequality did not disappear, but educational reform ⇒ Read More
Articles of Confederation
The Articles of Confederation established the Confederation Congress that governed the United States from 1781 to 1789. Meeting in Philadelphia, the Second Continental Congress appointed a committee that began drafting the Articles in 1776. However, the final draft was not complete until 1777 while the Continental Congress was ensconced in York, Pennsylvania, during the British ⇒ Read More
Railroad Stations
Railroad stations in Greater Philadelphia evolved with the railway industry into a wide variety of forms and functions. For most passengers and casual observers, railroad stations are buildings, but for the railways, these locations are also key operating points for loading and unloading passengers and freight. The vast majority of railroad stations in the Philadelphia ⇒ Read More
Philadelphia Board of Trade
Philadelphia’s Board of Trade worked for more than a century to promote commercial development in the city and the region while also arbitrating disputes among its member businesses. Formed in 1833, the board filled unmet needs for economic development and became the largest organization of its type in the nation. The original concept for the ⇒ Read More
Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan
Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of History at the University of Leicester. She is writing a dissertation on the social history of indigent transiency in the early American republic.
Andrew Tremel
Andrew Tremel is an independent researcher and public historian at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center.
Lu Ann De Cunzo
Lu Ann De Cunzo holds a Ph.D. in American Civilization with a specialization in historical archaeology. Her research has addressed diverse themes and topics of lower Delaware Valley history and cultures between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. She is Professor and currently Chair of Anthropology at the University of Delaware.
Fairmount Park Commission
The Fairmount Park Commission (FPC), constituted by the Pennsylvania state legislature in the Park Acts of 1867 and 1868, administered the city’s public park system from 1867 to 2010. Consisting of six municipal officials or their delegates and ten private citizens appointed by the courts to five-year terms, the FPC had authority to expropriate land ⇒ Read More
Cody Dodge Ewert
Cody Dodge Ewert is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at New York University. His dissertation examines the relationship among school reform, patriotism, and political culture during the Progressive Era.
Elizabeth Milroy
Elizabeth Milroy is Professor and Department Head of Art & Art History at the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design, Drexel University. She is the author of The Grid and the River: Philadelphia’s Green Places, 1682-1876 (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016).
Top Ten Topics of 2015
Which topics were our most-visited during 2015? Our statistics reveal some patterns: The political season seems to have had an impact on readership of topics related to immigration and nativism. We also see heavy use of topics related to Philadelphia’s decade as the nation’s capital, a popular subject for students and teachers in U.S. history ⇒ Read More
Anatomy and Anatomy Education
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, dissection and study of human corpses became the primary method for medical students to gain intimate visual and tactile knowledge of the body and prepare to perform surgery on the living. As the chief medical city in the United States during this period, Philadelphia also became the leading center ⇒ Read More
Gregory D. Lattanzi
Gregory D. Lattanzi, Ph.D., is Assistant Curator at the Bureau of Archaeology & Ethnography at the New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, New Jersey. Lattanzi specializes in ancient copper working and pottery analysis in the Middle Atlantic region. He is also interested in trade, exchange, and the aspect of cultural complexity as they apply to native ⇒ Read More
Superfund Sites
As a region with a complex industrial history that generated numerous chemical, industrial, and landfill operations, by the late twentieth century Greater Philadelphia held some of the nation’s highest concentrations of environmentally hazardous “Superfund” sites. Named for the federal Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA), also known as “Superfund,” the designation ⇒ Read More
Brownfields Redevelopment
First designated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1995, the polluted tracts of land known as “brownfields” resulted from Greater Philadelphia’s industrial heritage. For more than a century, manufacturers generated vast amounts of waste and runoff. After industry declined between the 1950s and the 1980s, acres of abandoned structures and soiled land remained. ⇒ Read More
Gunpowder Industry
The Mid-Atlantic gunpowder industry flourished in the nineteenth century along the Brandywine River in Delaware and spread into Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and other states. Long synonymous with the name duPont, the industry began in 1802 when Eleuthère Irénée duPont (1771–1834), a French refugee and former student of famous chemist Antoine Lavoisier (1743–94), began manufacturing gunpowder ⇒ Read More
Chelsea Clarke Reed
Chelsea Clarke Reed is a jazz vocalist in the Philadelphia area and public history graduate student at Temple University’s Center for Public History.
Sprawl
Despite Philadelphia’s twenty-first century resurgence as the urban center of a vital multistate region, the city’s revival did not stem the tide of outward expansion in a largely uncontrolled pattern known popularly as “sprawl.” The steepest population growth in the region continued to occur in the newer suburbs and rural locales, in a low-density and ⇒ Read More
Vigilance Committees
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 City in ⇒ Read More
Automobiles
Since appearing in the 1890s, automobiles have in many ways shaped Greater Philadelphia’s history and geography. Initially a luxury item and later available on a massive scale, cars, while enhancing mobility, required billions of dollars in infrastructure, reordered the landscape of every town and city, and made indelible marks on the region’s architecture, culture, and ⇒ Read More
Automotive Manufacturing
Once a mainstay of Greater Philadelphia’s industrial might and a reflection of the socioeconomic transformations of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the manufacturing of automobiles and related components provided mobility for millions, jobs for many thousands, and lifeblood for towns and cities. First appearing in the 1900s, flourishing during the interwar and postwar periods, ⇒ Read More
Garies (The) and Their Friends
Published in London in 1857, Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends is among the earliest novels written by an African American. Although it is not strictly a historical novel, The Garies reflects the deteriorating conditions of the free black community in Philadelphia during Webb’s childhood and early adulthood, in particular, the 1838 disenfranchisement ⇒ Read More
Philadelphia Transportation Company (PTC) Strike
The Philadelphia Transportation Company (PTC) strike, a five-day stoppage of the city’s mass transit system during World War II, resulted from longstanding racial animosities. Preceded by years of protest and ending only after the dispatching of federal troops, the strike exposed the dangers of workplace discrimination while threatening the material output of the nation’s third-largest ⇒ Read More
Native American-Pennsylvania Relations 1681-1753
Indian-brokered alliances more than Quaker pacifism anchored the “long peace” in the decades that followed Pennsylvania’s founding in 1681. The Iroquois Covenant Chain and the Lenapes’ treaties with William Penn (1644-1718) established the diplomatic parameters that made the long peace possible and allowed Pennsylvania to avoid the kind of destructive frontier warfare that engulfed the ⇒ Read More
Schuylkill Navigation Company
While eighteenth-century Philadelphians looked almost exclusively to the east and the Delaware River to connect them to the wider world, by the turn of the nineteenth century they looked increasingly to the Schuylkill River and the west. After several failed attempts to fund improvements that would make the rapid-filled Schuylkill River navigable in the 1780s ⇒ Read More
Jean-Pierre Beugoms
Jean-Pierre Beugoms is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Temple University. He is working on a dissertation about the logistics of the U.S. Army during the War of 1812.
Michael DiCamillo
Michael DiCamillo is the vice-president of the Historical Society of Moorestown, where he leads educational programs and processes collections for the society’s archives. He also teaches U.S. history courses at LaSalle University and has written for the Journal of Film and History.
Treaty Negotiations with Native Americans
From the arrival of Europeans in the seventeenth century through the era of the early republic, treaties were an important tool in diplomacy between native nations and colonial Pennsylvania and later the nascent federal government. Treaties followed indigenous modes of diplomacy, into which colonists introduced, and imposed, the signing of treaty documents. However, treaty councils ⇒ Read More
Law and Lawyers
From its earliest days as an English colony, Pennsylvania needed lawyers to run the government, settle disputes, and keep the peace. As Philadelphia became a large city and important commercial, insurance, banking, and shipping center on the eve of the American Revolution, its lawyers were crucial to every civic endeavor, including the making of a ⇒ Read More
Philadelphia Lawyer
The term Philadelphia lawyer originated in the eighteenth century as a description of members of the Philadelphia bar, then widely considered the best trained in the American colonies and exceptionally skilled in the law and rhetoric. By the twentieth century the term had taken on a less flattering secondary meaning, to denote a clever attorney ⇒ Read More
Democratic-Republican Societies
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, then the capital of the United States, Peter Muhlenberg (1746-1807) and Michael Leib (1760-1822) founded the first of these societies, the ⇒ Read More
Crosstown Expressway
The Crosstown Expressway, a proposed limited-access highway on the southern edge of Center City, became the subject of prolonged controversy during the 1960s and 1970s as redevelopment schemes met with neighborhood resistance. The envisioned highway first appeared in redevelopment plans for Center City during the 1940s and came to play a role in regional traffic ⇒ Read More
Revolutionary Crisis (American Revolution)
The Stamp Act of 1765, the first direct tax ever imposed by the British government on colonial Americans, inadvertently provoked a ten-year clash of wills between Britain and the colonies that led to the American Revolutionary War. During this Revolutionary Crisis period (1765-75), colonists resisted imperial taxes and other Parliamentary innovations with protests and with ⇒ Read More
I-95
Interstate 95—known as the Delaware Expressway in the Philadelphia area—is one of the region’s key transportation conduits. Running alongside the western bank of the Delaware River, it links central Philadelphia with Mercer County in New Jersey and Bucks and Delaware Counties in Pennsylvania. Conceived and built in an era when planners promoted automobile traffic above ⇒ Read More
Street Vendors
From the colonial period to the present, street vendors have been integral yet contentious features of Greater Philadelphia’s economic landscape. Providing massive numbers of customers with food, clothing, and other goods while allowing many working people an occupational foothold in the region, vending also sparked controversies regarding taxes, regulation, public health, and uses of space. ⇒ Read More
Office Buildings
Greater Philadelphia’s office buildings reflect the aspirations of individuals, companies, and municipalities. Once clustered in cities and later spreading to suburbs throughout the metropolitan area, office buildings have mirrored changing architectural styles and economic patterns. While many celebrated office buildings have been demolished, others (new, restored, or adapted) stand as integral features of the built ⇒ Read More
Art Colonies
Outside the urban core of Philadelphia, the picturesque rural landscape proved a significant draw to many artists in search of the purportedly simple, wholesome, and moral quality of countryside living. Whether planned and intentional or more organic and serendipitous, colonies like those in New Hope, Chadds Ford, and Rose Valley in Pennsylvania, and Arden and ⇒ Read More
Gardens (Public)
More than three centuries of private and public efforts have given the Philadelphia area the highest concentration of public gardens in the United States. Although William Penn (1644-1718) originally envisioned five squares dotting his metropolis, the energies of private citizens initially cultivated the plants, gardens, and landscapes of Philadelphia. From these beginnings, public gardens became ⇒ Read More
Katherine Henry
Katherine Henry is Associate Professor of English at Temple University, specializing in American literature before 1865. Her current book project is titled Ghosts of Liberty: Civic Unrest and the Philadelphia Gothic, 1830-1855.
Bryant Simon
Bryant Simon is Professor of History at Temple University and the author of Everything But the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks (2008), Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America (2004), and co-editor of Jumpin’ Jim Crow’: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (2000). His work on Atlantic City ⇒ Read More
Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission
The Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC) was founded in 1965 to coordinate planning activities within a nine-county area, which included Philadelphia, Bucks, Chester, and Delaware Counties in Pennsylvania and Camden, Burlington, Gloucester, and Mercer Counties in New Jersey. In the decades since its founding, DVRPC has worked to foster economic development, direct transportation projects, ⇒ Read More
Kate Nearpass Ogden
Kate Nearpass Ogden, Professor of Art History at Stockton University in Galloway, New Jersey, received her Ph.D. from Columbia University, New York. Her publications have focused on nineteenth-century American painting and photography.
Philadelphia (Warship)
Inspired by patriotic fervor during the Quasi-War with France, the people of Philadelphia raised money in one week during June 1798 to build the USS Philadelphia to help increase American naval power to protect commerce. Completed in 1799, the Philadelphia served in both the West Indies and the Mediterranean Sea, where it was captured in ⇒ Read More
Films (Feature)
Philadelphia’s association with movie-making dates back to the beginning of the film industry, when the city’s Lubin Manufacturing Company created and distributed many of the first generation of silent films. But after the company’s early collapse, the city never again attained a prominent role in the nation’s filmmaking. After Lubin, Philadelphia served as a setting ⇒ Read More
Ballet
Philadelphia has a rich ballet history that spans centuries. Although initially not hospitable to dance, the city developed into an attractive destination for international ballet dancers and teachers and eventually produced the first genuine ballerinas born in the United States, the first thoroughly American ballet troupe, and one of the most prominent of the regional ⇒ Read More
Thanksgiving
Although inspired by a 1621 feast shared by Pilgrims and Native Americans in Plymouth, Massachusetts, Thanksgiving traditions emerged from more than two centuries of celebrations influenced by social classes, ethnic groups, and the rise of consumer culture. Some of the most popular practices of Thanksgiving by the twenty-first century originated in Philadelphia. In colonial America, ⇒ Read More
Karie Diethorn
Karie Diethorn is the Chief Curator of Independence National Historical Park—the home of Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, and nearly one hundred portraits from Peale’s Philadelphia Museum.
Avenue of the Arts
The Avenue of the Arts is the appellation for a section of Broad Street—from Washington Avenue in South Philadelphia to Glenwood Avenue in North Philadelphia—devoted to arts and entertainment facilities. The Avenue was conceived in 1993 by a coalition of public and private entities to attract visitors to Center City. Amid a decline in manufacturing, ⇒ Read More
Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts
The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts was designed as the centerpiece of the Avenue of the Arts, a rebranded stretch of Broad Street devoted to performing arts venues. Built by a partnership of public and private entities, the Kimmel Center was part of a wider plan to revitalize Center City via the construction of ⇒ Read More
Monopoly
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 ⇒ Read More
Mikaela Maria
Mikaela Maria is a public historian who has worked as programs manager for the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities and an editorial, research, and digital publishing assistant for The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. She received her M.A. in American History from Rutgers University in 2015. Mikaela lives in Philadelphia and works in Camden, NJ.
U.S. Presidency (1790-1800)
Although the federal government under the U.S. Constitution went into operation in New York City in April 1789, the capital moved to Philadelphia late in 1790 and remained until 1800. This decade encompassed formative years for the U.S. presidency, including nearly seven years of the administration of George Washington (1732-99) and more than three years ⇒ Read More
Point Breeze (Bonaparte Estate)
Joseph Bonaparte’s Point Breeze estate was one of the finest country houses in the Delaware Valley. Similar grand houses once graced the Delaware Valley, especially upriver from Philadelphia and along the Schuylkill. The first was likely Pennsbury Manor, the American home of William Penn (1644-1718). Many of these country houses still stand, including the Woodlands, ⇒ Read More
Levittowns (Pennsylvania and New Jersey)
The iconic Levittown communities–the first in Long Island, New York, and the subsequent two in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and Burlington County, New Jersey–endure as symbols of the unique character of post-World War II U.S. suburban development. A confluence of forces encouraged the particular nature of these large-scale, mass-produced, low-cost suburban tract housing developments, including a ⇒ Read More
Bank of North America
Chartered May 26, 1781, by the Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation, this enterprise was the first national and truly commercial bank in the United States. Officially titled The President, Directors, and Company of the Bank of North America (BNA) until 1825, the bank was the first created by the national government to do ⇒ Read More
Ferries
Long before bridges, trestles, and elevated expressways, the people and products of Greater Philadelphia required a network of ferries to traverse the region’s numerous waterways. Once ubiquitous on the area’s rivers, ferries were economic necessities that were phased out over time as industry changed and transportation improved. Until the advent of steam and internal combustion ⇒ Read More
Convention Centers
Philadelphia-area residents and visitors have required places for large assemblies since the colonial era, and a variety of temporary and permanent facilities served this purpose in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Modern, multipurpose convention centers appeared in the late 1920s and have since grown in size and scope. By the early twenty-first century, many of ⇒ Read More
Book Publishing and Publishers
Between 1750 and 1800, Philadelphia became the center for book printing and publishing in the United States, surpassing New York and Boston. Although Philadelphia lost that primacy in the nineteenth century, firms specializing in medical and religious publishing continued to do well. By the mid to late twentieth century, however, as the publishing industry consolidated, ⇒ Read More
Godey’s Lady’s Book
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 ⇒ Read More
Pipelines
Reaching hundreds of miles to the Philadelphia area from western Pennsylvania, pipelines carrying oil and gas were critical to Philadelphia’s emergence as an industrial power and linked the fates of suppliers and consumers for more than 160 years. The development of the pipelines, marked by both challenge and innovation, supplied energy for residential and business ⇒ Read More
Penn’s Landing
Penn’s Landing, a 35-acre redevelopment site between Columbus Avenue and the Delaware River and South and Vine Streets, was designed to attract visitors to Philadelphia’s waterfront. Since construction began in the early 1960s, the vision for Penn’s Landing has evolved from a public space devoted to historic and museum facilities, to a locus for private ⇒ Read More
Richard Veit
Richard Veit, Ph.D., is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University. He teaches courses on archaeology, New Jersey history, Native Americans, and historic preservation. He has authored or co-authored numerous articles and reviews and five books including Digging New Jersey’s Past: Historical Archaeology in the Garden State ⇒ Read More
Radio (High School and College)
From radio’s earliest days, college and high school students in the Greater Philadelphia area have tested its boundaries. Student radio has been democratizing and distinct. Unrestrained by advertising sponsors, though sometimes constrained by school administrators’ concerns over content and control over budgets, students have freely experimented with format, content, and technology, and each class of ⇒ Read More
Streetcar Suburbs
Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia’s growing streetcar network facilitated the movement of upper and middle class Philadelphians to residential districts outside of the urban core. New streetcar-centric suburban developments combined the allure of pastoral living with fast access to work and commerce in central Philadelphia. In this way, streetcar suburbs represented ⇒ Read More
Robert J. Mason
Robert J. Mason is a professor in the Department of Geography & Urban Studies at Temple University, with interests in land use, environmental policy and planning, watershed management, and hazards in North America and East Asia.
Tara M. Zrinski
Tara M. Zrinski teaches Philosophy at Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She has been one of four eco-feminist bloggers writing for From the Ground Up, a blog on Shalereporter.com. Her work has focused on documenting the impacts of Marcellus Shale development on the environment and human health as well as the environmentalist response to ⇒ Read More
Shannon E. Duffy
Shannon E. Duffy received her B.A. from Emory University, her M.A. from the University of New Orleans, and her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Early American History at Texas State University. Her upcoming manuscript The Twin Occupations of Revolutionary Philadelphia explores the psychological effects of the British ⇒ Read More
Sheppard Lee
Sheppard Lee, a novel published in 1836 by Philadelphian author, playwright, and physician Robert Montgomery Bird (1806-54), is a narrative of the wandering soul of an indolent, down-on-his-luck farmer. Although fairly successful in its time and even receiving a rave review from the master of the American Gothic, Edgar Allan Poe, the book largely disappeared ⇒ Read More
Gothic Literature
From the early nineteenth century onward, Philadelphia spawned an abundance of mysterious tales starring shadowy strangers, fantastic happenings, and deadly conspiracies. Prominent genre writers including Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), George Lippard (1822-54), and Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) made the City of Brotherly Love the birthplace of American gothic literature. Although the gothic arguably reached its ⇒ Read More
Roosevelt Boulevard
Snaking its way through parts of North and Northeast Philadelphia, the Roosevelt Boulevard, formally known as the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Boulevard, has become one of the most heavily traveled thoroughfares in the Philadelphia metropolitan region. Initially conceived amid political maelstroms during the “corrupt and contented” phase of Progressive Era Philadelphia, “the Boulevard,” as it became ⇒ Read More
Red Rose Girls
Three young artists who took up residence at the old Red Rose Inn in Villanova, Pennsylvania, in the first decade of the twentieth century helped make Philadelphia a national leader in book and magazine illustration. They also successfully challenged the idea that only men could be “serious” and influential professional artists. The “Red Rose Girls”—Jessie ⇒ Read More
Meschianza
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 America. General Howe’s army took control of Philadelphia ⇒ Read More
Stephanie Gamble
Stephanie Gamble received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2014 for her dissertation, “Capital Negotiations: Native Diplomats in the American Capital, 1789-1837,” and is also the author of “A Community of Convenience: The Saponi Nation, Governor Spotswood, and the Experiment at Fort Christanna, 1670-1740,” in Native South (2003). She is a Learning Specialist at ⇒ Read More
Alexandra W. Lough
Alexandra W. Lough holds a Ph.D. in American History from Brandeis University. She is the Director of the Henry George Birthplace, Archives, and Historical Research Center.
Christian DuComb
Christian DuComb, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Theatre and English at Colgate University and the author of Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016).
Kim Burdick
Kim Burdick earned her M.A. in American Folk Culture & Museum Studies from Cooperstown Graduate Programs at SUNY Oneonta. She later served as a joint Hagley-Winterthur Research Fellow. She also holds an M.P.A. from the College of Urban Affairs at the University of Delaware. She is an award-winning public historian who has coordinated a number of ⇒ Read More
Emily T. Cooperman
Emily T. Cooperman is an architectural and landscape historian and historic preservation consultant. She serves as the principal of ARCH Preservation Consulting and as a senior consultant for Preservation Design Partnership. Her published work includes, with Lea Carson Sherk, William Birch: Picturing the American Scene (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
Christopher Willoughby
Christopher Willoughby is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History Department at Tulane University in New Orleans, where in 2012, he also received his Master’s. He is completing his dissertation entitled “Pedagogies of the Black Body: Race and Medical Education in the Antebellum United States,” which has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation ⇒ Read More
Riots (1830s and 1840s)
In the 1830s and 1840s, as social and economic tensions arose from early industrialization and from a population that was at once growing rapidly and becoming more racially and religiously diverse, Philadelphia experienced a sharp increase in disorder that it was unprepared to handle. The fragmentation of Philadelphia County into numerous municipalities and the absence ⇒ Read More
Chinatown
Settled by Chinese migrants in the 1870s, Philadelphia’s Chinatown grew over the course of the twentieth century from a small ethnic enclave on the outskirts of Skid Row to a vibrant family community in the heart of Center City. Threatened by urban renewal in the 1960s and 1970s, Chinatown residents marshaled the redevelopment process to ⇒ Read More
Jeffrey A. Davis
Jeffrey A. Davis, Ph.D., is Professor and Chair in the History Department at Bloomsburg University.
Sharon Skeel
Sharon Skeel is a Philadelphia-based dance writer and lecturer currently working on a biography of Catherine Littlefield. Her essay on Littlefield’s 1937 production of The Sleeping Beauty was published in the Summer 2015 issue of Ballet Review.
Suzanne Lashner Dayanim
Suzanne Lashner Dayanim holds a Ph.D. in Geography and Urban Studies from Temple University. Her dissertation measures the value of community facilities to inner ring suburban resilience, and its study area includes the four municipalities of Pennsylvania’s Levittown.
Vine Street Expressway
The Vine Street Expressway (Interstate 676), a 1.75-mile depressed limited-access highway traveling east-west across the northern edge of Philadelphia’s central business district, resulted from more than sixty years of effort to connect I-95 and I-76 and move traffic more easily between and through the city to surrounding counties in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Its route ⇒ Read More
Pirates
Philadelphia, like many cities throughout the Atlantic world, encountered a new threat in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries from pirates who raided the numerous merchant vessels in the region. Several historians have labeled this era as the golden age of piracy. Pirates also remained active after 1730, using the city as a staging ⇒ Read More
Kathryn Wilson
Kathryn Wilson is an Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University. She previously worked at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and is the author of Ethnic Renewal in Philadelphia’s Chinatown: Space, Place and Struggle.
Ann K. Johnson
Ann K. Johnson is the Library Publishing and Scholarly Communications Specialist at Temple University. She holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Southern California.
Stefan Schöberlein
Stefan Schöberlein is a doctoral candidate at the English Department of the University of Iowa and the managing editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review.
Billiards (Pool)
Billiards, the traditional name for games played on a table with balls and a cue stick, of which there are a number of variations, has been played in Philadelphia since at least the late 1700s. Played on a table with six pockets and either nine or fifteen balls, billiards is referred to as pocket billiards ⇒ Read More
Rachael A. Beyer
Rachael A. Beyer is a Ph.D. student and Hagley Fellow at the University of Delaware, where she studies radio, youth, and community. She recently completed a year as the David Sarnoff Library collection processing intern in manuscripts and archives at the Hagley Library and Museum in Wilmington, Delaware.
Printmaking
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Philadelphia became a leading center of printmaking in the United States. While publishing companies had operated in the city since the eighteenth century, the technological innovations of the firm of Peter S. Duval (1804/5-86) transformed Philadelphia’s lithographic trade into a booming industry. Duval’s commitment to improving printmaking methods and achieving ⇒ Read More
South Street
Along its east-west course, South Street has been a space where different types of Philadelphians—white and black, poor and wealthy, parochial and urbane, straight and gay—have met and mingled. From its early days as a theater district, it evolved through various incarnations: from a locus for African American life to a center for immigrant-owned garment ⇒ Read More
Sebastian Haumann
Sebastian Haumann is Assistant Professor of History at Darmstadt University of Technology in Darmstadt, Germany. In his dissertation he compared protest movements against urban redevelopment in Philadelphia and Cologne.
Bootlegging
Bootleg liquor, produced illegally during Prohibition (1920-33), flowed into the Philadelphia region from a variety of sources, including overseas shipments, small home stills, large stills in urban factories and country barns, beer breweries, and manufacturers of industrial alcohol. Philadelphia’s location at the confluence of the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, just inland from the Atlantic Ocean, ⇒ Read More
Saturday Evening Post
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 ⇒ Read More
Papal Visits
Popes use their visits to encourage faith, emphasize their priorities, and fulfill their role as pastors. The places visited use these trips to highlight their successes, history, and culture on an international stage. Prior to the visit of Pope Francis (b. 1936) to Philadelphia on September 26 and 27, 2015, only one other pope had ⇒ Read More
William Madges
William Madges, Ph.D. is a professor of theology in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Saint Joseph’s University. His most recent publication is a translation of Walter Kasper’s Pope Francis’ Revolution of Tenderness and Love (New York: Paulist Press, 2015).
Robert F. Smith
Robert F. Smith is assistant dean of humanities and social sciences at Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Michelle Donnelly
Michelle Donnelly is a Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She earned her M.A. in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2014 and worked as a Curatorial Assistant at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 2013 to 2014.
Mary Yee
Mary Yee is a doctoral student in literacy studies at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. Her research interests include community development, community health and literacy, and educational issues in immigrant communities.
Salt Making
Colonial Americans depended on Great Britain for many necessities. Primary among them was salt, the essential ingredient in curing meats and preserving foods through the winter. At the start of the American Revolution, the British Navy blockaded American ports and largely shut off the supply of imported salt. In Philadelphia, salt prices shot upward. Starting ⇒ Read More
United States Mint (Philadelphia)
Coins have been minted in Philadelphia as long as the federal government has produced legal tender coins. First authorized by Congress in 1792, the U.S. Mint’s Philadelphia facility (commonly known as the Philadelphia mint) in the early twenty-first century remained the nation’s largest producer of coins. Its history has been intertwined with the complicated history ⇒ Read More
Martin Luther King Jr. Day
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 ⇒ Read More
Eastern State Penitentiary
Eastern State Penitentiary, considered by many to be the world’s first full-scale penitentiary, opened in Philadelphia in 1829 and closed in 1971. Known for its system of total isolation of prisoners and remarkable architecture, Eastern State proved to be one of the most controversial institutions of the antebellum period. Abandoned as a prison in the ⇒ Read More
Quasi-War
Philadelphia, as capital of the United States during the 1790s, played a central role in the conflict called the Quasi-War, an undeclared war, between the United States and France during the years 1798 to 1800. Philadelphia became a hotbed of public displays for and against the Federalists’ response to this conflict and served as a ⇒ Read More
Opportunities Industrialization Center (OIC)
In the 1960s, after leading protest campaigns to expose discriminatory hiring and open thousands of jobs to African Americans, the Reverend Leon Sullivan (1922-2001) founded the Opportunities Industrialization Center (OIC), a vocational, educational, and life skills training program designed to prepare young men and women for full-time employment. Moving beyond protest to address the barriers ⇒ Read More
Nathaniel Conley
Nathaniel Conley is a doctoral student at the University of Arkansas whose research focuses on the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania with emphasis on the lower class and the border between slavery and freedom.
Stephen Burciaga
Stephen Burciaga received an A.S.B. in Culinary Arts and Restaurant Management from the Pennsylvania School of Culinary Arts, a B.A. in History from York College of Pennsylvania, and an M.A. in History from Millersville University of Pennsylvania.
Media, Pennsylvania
Media, Pennsylvania, was built on farmland in the 1850s as the new county seat of Delaware County. The county, which was carved from Chester County in 1789, lies in the southeastern corner of the state along the Delaware River between Philadelphia and the state of Delaware. Located only 12 miles from Philadelphia, Media is an ⇒ Read More
Carpet Weaving and Rug Making
In its early twentieth-century heyday, Philadelphia’s carpet and rug industry represented this nation’s greatest concentration of factories making household and commercial floor coverings. The Public Ledger boasted that “two wards, in the northern section of the city, produce more carpets than the whole of Great Britain and Ireland.” Indeed, as early as 1882, those Kensington ⇒ Read More
Christiana Riot Trial
During the 1850s, Northern abolitionism developed, Southern defense of slavery hardened, and debates over the expansion of slavery gripped the nation. When pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions met at Christiana, Pennsylvania, a mere 20 miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line, the events that followed and the subsequent trial in Philadelphia became flashpoints that deepened the sectional ⇒ Read More
Tun Tavern
For nearly a hundred years from 1693 to 1781, Tun Tavern served residents and visitors of Philadelphia near the Delaware River waterfront with food, spirits, and sociability. Also a meeting place for social and military organizations, Tun Tavern is best remembered as the “birthplace” of the United States Marine Corps. Its patrons included such noteworthy ⇒ Read More
Plantations
When American patriots declared independence from Great Britain in 1776, the single largest boon to their cause was the nation’s ability to feed itself—as well as much of the Atlantic world. Beginning in the mid-1700s, crop failures across Europe and an expanding slave population in the West Indies created a huge demand for food from ⇒ Read More
Jodine Mayberry
Jodine Mayberry is a retired journalist. She was a legal writer and editor for West Publications, a division of Thomson Reuters, for 18 years.
Bryan J. Dickerson
Bryan J. Dickerson is a military historian from Gloucester County, N.J. He holds a B.A. in History from Rowan University and an M.A. in American History from Monmouth University. He is a Navy veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom who deployed twice as a member of the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing.
John Andrew Gallery
John Andrew Gallery is an avid billiards player. He is a member of the American Poolplayers Association, plays on an APA team in Philadelphia, and has participated in Las Vegas, Chicago, Cleveland, and Cologne, Germany. He was the first director of the City’s Office of Housing and Community Development and executive director of the Preservation ⇒ Read More
Michael Adelberg
Michael Adelberg has been researching the American Revolution in New Jersey for twenty-five years. He is author of “ ‘Long in the Hand and Altogether Fruitless’: The Pennsylvania Salt Works and Salt-Making on the New Jersey Shore during the American Revolution” in Pennsylvania History, and articles published in The Journal of Military History and The ⇒ Read More
Prohibition
Despite the national prohibition of alcohol from 1920 to 1933, Philadelphia earned a reputation rivaling Chicago, Detroit, and New York City as a liquor-saturated municipality. The Literary Digest described Pennsylvania as a “bootlegger’s Elysium,” with every city as “wet as the Atlantic Ocean.” The Quaker City in particular was singled out, by newspapers from New ⇒ Read More
Modern Chivalry: Containing the Adventures of Captain John Farrago, and Teague O’Regan, his Servant
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, Captain John Farrago and his Irish servant, Teague O’Regan, who engage in humorous, ⇒ Read More
Pennsylvania Hall
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 ⇒ Read More
Philip Scranton
Philip Scranton is Board of Governors Professor of History Emeritus at Rutgers University-Camden. He has published widely on Philadelphia’s industrial history. He is presently researching steadily-changing business practices in post-1945 developed, developing, and socialist nations.
Philadelphia Gas Works
The Philadelphia Gas Works (PGW), founded in 1836, was in 2015 the largest municipal-owned utility in the United States. While supplying residents with fuel for heating and cooking, PGW also became a flashpoint of controversy over whether such a utility should be owned by the city or operated by a private corporation. Although a number of ⇒ Read More
Fries Rebellion
In 1798, while Philadelphia served as capital of the United States, a new federal tax and the Alien and Sedition Acts sparked resistance in rural Bucks, Montgomery, and Northampton Counties of Pennsylvania. The reputed ringleader John Fries (1750-1818) was twice convicted of treason but received a presidential pardon. Beyond local disruption, the rebellion played a ⇒ Read More
Maps and Mapmaking
As the country’s largest city, and for a time capital of the new nation, 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 ⇒ Read More
Daniel Thomas Fleming
Daniel Thomas Fleming is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He is the author of “Remembering Martin Luther King Jr.” in Agora, Vol 46, No 1, 2011 and “Marvin Gaye, Martin Luther King and the FBI” in Traffic, Vol 9, 2007. He has presented his research at conferences ⇒ Read More
National Parks
National parks figure prominently in Greater Philadelphia’s cultural, economic, and natural landscapes. Morristown (1933), Independence (1948), Valley Forge (1976), and First State (2015) National Historical Parks all preserve and provide access to sites associated with the American Revolution and early American history. Together they welcome nearly six million visitors each year and create more than ⇒ Read More
Lewis and Clark Expedition
On a November day during the severe winter of 1805, a parcel containing over sixty plants, rocks, and fossils arrived at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. Collected by Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809), these were specimens from the Corps of Discovery Expedition (1803-1806), the western journey of Lewis and William Clark (1770-1838). While the explorers became ⇒ Read More
Paul J. deGategno
Paul J. deGategno is Professor of English at The Pennsylvania State University at Brandywine and the author of James Macpherson, Poet of Ossian; Ivanhoe: The Mask of Chivalry; and The Critical Companion to Jonathan Swift.
Junto
“Do you love truth for truth’s sake?” If the answer is yes, you are one-fourth of the way through the initiation ceremony of the Junto, which Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) founded in 1727 in Philadelphia. The 21-year-old Franklin, according to his autobiography, established the Junto as a club for “mutual improvement,” inviting acquaintances to meet weekly ⇒ Read More
Chester, Pennsylvania
Located 30 miles down the Delaware River from Philadelphia, the small but once industrially mighty city of Chester emerged in the latter part of the twentieth century as but a shadow of its former prominence in the county and the region. The municipality’s fortunes shifted many times over the 334 years of its existence, evolving ⇒ Read More
Annie Anderson
Annie Anderson is the manager of research and public programming at Eastern State Penitentiary and the coauthor, with John Binder, of Philadelphia Organized Crime in the 1920s and 1930s (Arcadia Publishing, 2014). She received her M.A. in American Studies from the University of Massachusetts Boston.
James Kopaczewski
James Kopaczewski is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Temple University.
Pennsylvania Impressionism
Pennsylvania Impressionist painting flourished in eastern Pennsylvania in the first half of the twentieth century. Often referred to as the “New Hope School” because artists in Bucks County produced the best-known works, the style was also practiced vigorously in Montgomery, Chester, Delaware, and Lehigh Counties, and key artists of the movement taught at the Pennsylvania ⇒ Read More
Quaker City
William Penn (1644-1718), the founder and proprietor of Pennsylvania, had high hopes for Philadelphia. He wanted the city to become the economic and moral hub and showpiece of the nearly 50,000 square miles that he had been granted as Pennsylvania (Penn’s Woods). Penn outlined his radical notion when he advertised the city for settlement in ⇒ Read More
Common Sense
Published in Philadelphia in its first edition in January 1776, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense became one of the most widely disseminated and most often read political treatises in history. It looked forward to democratic politics and universal human rights, yet it also reflected local circumstances in Philadelphia. Common Sense was thus an overture to democracy ⇒ Read More
Beverly C. Tomek
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 ⇒ Read More
Mark W. Sullivan
Mark W. Sullivan earned a Ph. D. in Art History from Bryn Mawr College and specializes in American art and architecture. He is the author of Picturing Thoreau: Henry David Thoreau in American Visual Culture (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2015), and is writing a book on Thomas Anshutz and Hugh Breckenridge, whose Darby School of ⇒ Read More
Jake Blumgart
Jake Blumgart is a reporter with WHYY’s PlanPhilly. Follow him on Twitter @jblumgart.
Native and Colonial Go-Betweens
During the colonial period, the diversity of the region that became southeastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and northern Delaware made trade and diplomacy difficult. The many cultural, especially linguistic, barriers between various Native American and European groups required go-betweens, or intermediaries. The intermediaries who were called upon to interpret across cultures and help maintain the ⇒ Read More
Birch’s Views of Philadelphia
The City of Philadelphia, in the State of Pennsylvania North America; as it appeared in the Year 1800 is a masterpiece of American copperplate engraving and the first book of views to be entirely produced and published in the United States. Comprising twenty-seven scenes or “views” of Philadelphia’s buildings and streetscapes, the book aimed to ⇒ Read More
Private (Independent) Schools
The private or independent schools in the Greater Philadelphia area came about mainly to satisfy a need felt by wealthy, white families to educate their children in a cultural and intellectual environment that would prepare them for the responsibilities befitting their gender, race, and class status. Most have existed for at least a century. Although ⇒ Read More
Jefferson M. Moak
Jefferson M. Moak is a professional archivist, historian and genealogist. He has worked at the Map Collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Historical Commission, the Philadelphia City Archives, and most recently as senior archivist at the National Archives at Philadelphia. He has undertaken extensive research into the architectural, cartographic, and neighborhood histories ⇒ Read More
Arts and Crafts Movement
The Arts and Crafts movement in Greater Philadelphia grew against the backdrop of the area’s increasingly industrial character in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The 1876 Centennial Exhibition brought attention to Philadelphia’s prominence as a manufacturing center and fostered a renewed sense of pride in the city’s connections to national history, but it ⇒ Read More
Shirtwaist Strike (1909-10)
On December 20, 1909, more than 7,000 of Philadelphia’s 12,000 shirtwaist workers walked out on their jobs, one month after the “uprising of 20,000” commenced in New York City’s shirtwaist industry. The strike lasted until February 6, 1910, when manufacturers agreed to comply with workers’ demands (though ultimately refused union recognition). Occurring in an era ⇒ Read More
West New Jersey
Between 1674 and 1702, New Jersey was divided in half: The proprietary West New Jersey colony faced the Delaware River while East New Jersey looked toward the Hudson. Although this political division lasted less than three decades, it represented long-standing geographical orientations of the Lenape and Munsee native inhabitants and European colonists. Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) ⇒ Read More
Brooke Sylvia Palmieri
Brooke Sylvia Palmieri is a Philadelphia native living in London, working toward a Ph.D. at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at the University College London. Her dissertation details the reading, writing, and publication habits of Quakers at the end of the seventeenth century and how they circulated their ideas from London across the ⇒ Read More
Seth C. Bruggeman
Seth C. Bruggeman is an Associate Professor of History at Temple University. His publications include an edited volume, Born in the USA: Birth and Commemoration in American Public Memory (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), and Here, George Washington Was Born: Memory, Material Culture, and the Public History of a National Monument (University of Georgia Press, ⇒ Read More
John K. Brown
John K. Brown is Associate Professor of History, University of Virginia, and author of The Baldwin Locomotive Works, 1831-1915: A Study in American Industrial Practice (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
Football (Professional)
From the 1950s onward, pro football’s Eagles ruled the sports roost in Philadelphia, having built a dedicated fan base that filled the stadium each week and careened emotionally from each gridiron success and failure. Moreover, fierce play on the field was echoed by unbridled passion in the stands. That did not change even as the ⇒ Read More
Whiskey Rebellion Trials
The first two convictions of Americans for federal treason in United States history occurred in Philadelphia in the aftermath of the Whiskey Rebellion, an uprising against the federal excise tax on whiskey that took place primarily in western Pennsylvania in 1791-94. Philadelphia served as the nation’s capital during this period and therefore was the city ⇒ Read More
Stadiums and Arenas
The stadiums and arenas of the Greater Philadelphia region provide a physical venue not only for athletic contests, but also for Philadelphians’ passionate connection to their sports teams. Deeply embedded in regional identity and personal memories, the history of the area’s stadiums and arenas reflects broad patterns of regional development and change. During the 1860s ⇒ Read More
Philadelphia Campaign
During the War for Independence, in 1777, the British moved to seize Philadelphia in a series of battles that contributed to a turning point in the war. While the Philadelphia campaign strained British resources and exposed serious leadership issues with General Sir William Howe (1729-1814), the effectiveness of American forces led by General George Washington (1732-99) ⇒ Read More
Luke Willert
Luke Willert is a graduate student in the History Department at Harvard University. He writes about the American West and environmental history.
Susan Drinan
Susan Drinan retired in 2015 as registrar of the Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent.
Proclamation Line of 1763
The Royal Proclamation of 1763 created an imaginary line along the Appalachian Mountains that prohibited European settlement beyond the crest of the mountains, approximately two hundred miles west of Philadelphia. It thus established the region from the eastern seaboard to the mountains as the extent of British North America. In Pennsylvania the proclamation heightened racial, ⇒ Read More
Canals
Canals transformed the economic and geographic scope of Greater Philadelphia in the first half of the nineteenth century. By providing a cheap and reliable mechanism for shipping goods, these complex technological systems funneled the products of broad hinterland regions to the Quaker City. Although canals delivered a wide variety of goods including farm products, lumber, ⇒ Read More
Emily S. Warner
Emily S. Warner received her B.A. in Art History from the University of Chicago (2006) and her M.A. in the History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania (2012), where she is a doctoral candidate. Her research interests include topics in both nineteenth- and twentieth-century art history and visual culture.
Colin Fanning
Colin Fanning is a PhD candidate at the Bard Graduate Center, where his research focuses on the history of American design education. From 2014 to 2017, he was Curatorial Fellow for European Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Jason T. Bartlett
Jason T. Bartlett holds a Ph.D. in history from Temple University. His dissertation, “The Politics of Community Development: A History of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation,” examines the fifty-year history of the nation’s first comprehensive community development corporation.
Native American-Pennsylvania Relations, 1754-89
Relations between Pennsylvania’s Native American and European peoples underwent cataclysmic change during the second half of the eighteenth century. Despite the reputation for peaceful intercultural relations that Pennsylvania had enjoyed since its founding in 1681, a series of wars engulfed its frontiers after 1754, leading to the dispossession and exile of the colony’s native peoples. ⇒ Read More
John Maxymuk
John Maxymuk is a reference librarian at the Paul Robeson Library on the Camden campus of Rutgers University. He is the author of 14 books – 10 on football, including Eagles by the Numbers (2005), NFL Head Coaches (2012) and The Quarterback Abstract (2009).
Jennifer Lawrence Janofsky
Jennifer Lawrence Janofsky, Ph.D., is the Giordano Fellow in Public History at Rowan University and curator of the Whitall House at Red Bank Battlefield.
Gross Clinic (The)
The Gross Clinic, painted in 1875 by Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), is among the most highly regarded American artworks from the nineteenth century. It is a portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (1805-84), an internationally celebrated surgeon who taught at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia from 1856 to 1882. Created by a local artist and depicting ⇒ Read More
Constitutional Convention of 1787
The Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia from May 25 to September 17, 1787, at Independence Hall (then known as the Pennsylvania State House). The convention drafted the United States Constitution, the world’s oldest written national constitution still in use. The document, which divides power between the federal government and the states, launched a new phase ⇒ Read More
Austin Stewart
Austin Stewart is working on his Ph.D. in American history at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Christopher F. Jones
Christopher F. Jones is a historian of energy and environment with expertise in the mid-Atlantic region. His book, Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2014), analyzes the causes and consequences of America’s first energy transitions, with a particular emphasis on the transport of energy in the Greater Philadelphia region.
Mount Airy (West)
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 ⇒ Read More
Stephen T. Staggs
Stephen T. Staggs is an Adjunct Professor of History at Calvin College and author of “The View from the Dutch Republic: Protestant Conceptualizations of Indians,” which appeared in De Halve Maen (Spring 2013).
Kelsey Ransick
Kelsey Ransick is a museum professional in the Philadelphia area with an M.A. in history from the University of Delaware.
Kelly Weber
Kelly Weber earned a B.A. in history at Saint Joseph’s University and M.A. at Villanova, with a concentration in Public History and nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. She teaches high school at Country Day School of the Sacred Heart in Bryn Mawr, Pa.
Minju Bae
Minju Bae, the 2014-2015 Allen Davis Fellow at the Philadelphia History Museum, is a PhD student in the History Department of Temple University.
Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens
The Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens, Threatened with Disfranchisement, to the People of Philadelphia attempted to persuade Philadelphians to vote against the ratification of a new constitution for Pennsylvania in 1838 because the word “white” had been inserted prior to “freemen” as a qualification for voting. Written by African American leader Robert Purvis (1810-98), the ⇒ Read More
Timothy J. Shannon
Timothy J. Shannon is Professor of History at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. His publications include Indians and Colonists at the Crossroad of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000) and Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier (New York: Viking Penguin, 2008).
Demian Larry
Demian Larry is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Temple University. His dissertation is about the politics and economics of airport development in Philadelphia.
Airports
Commercial aviation grew dramatically in the United States in the twentieth century, and a number of airports in the Philadelphia area grew to become regional centers of the industry. There was nothing assured or inevitable about this growth, however. It depended on the efforts of local political leaders, investments by the aviation companies, and state ⇒ Read More
Philadelphia Social History Project
The Philadelphia Social History Project (PSHP) was a large and ambitious interdisciplinary project that played a central role in transforming the study of urban and social history. From its inception in 1969 until the project’s closure in 1985, the PSHP employed dozens of research associates and computer programmers, as well as hundreds of undergraduate students, ⇒ Read More
Antoinette J. Lee
Antoinette J. Lee is an independent historian in Arlington, Virginia. Previously, she worked at the National Park Service, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and as a historic preservation consultant.
Guian McKee
Guian McKee is Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. He is the author of The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (Chicago, 2008), and he is the editor of three volumes of the Miller Center’s series The ⇒ Read More
Cast Iron Architecture
Over a period of four decades, from 1840 through 1880, a commercial district of distinctive cast iron buildings developed in Center City Philadelphia. Born of the iron wealth of Pennsylvania and fashioned by the city’s architects and mechanics at a time of technological innovation, these buildings helped define the downtown of the emerging modern city. ⇒ Read More
Railroads
The history of the railroad industry in the United States and the growth of the Greater Philadelphia region are inextricably linked. Philadelphia money and engineering built the national network and, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, railroads helped make and maintain Philadelphia as a “Workshop of the World,” ⇒ Read More
Duffy’s Cut
At Duffy’s Cut, a railroad construction site in Chester County, Pennsylvania, fifty-seven Irish immigrant railroad workers died amid a cholera epidemic in the summer of 1832 and were buried in a mass grave. The Irishmen from Donegal, Tyrone, and Derry were hired to dig a railroad cut and construct an earthen fill in lieu of ⇒ Read More
Matt Cohen
Matt Cohen is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and a contributing editor at the online Walt Whitman Archive. With Edlie Wong, he edited Lippard’s The Killers with the University of Pennsylvania Press (2014).
Philadelphia Stock Exchange
The Philadelphia Stock Exchange played an influential role in America’s financial and economic development. It helped the fledgling nation raise funds to develop infrastructure for a growing industrial base and new commercial banks and insurance companies. The Exchange is the nation’s oldest, founded two years before the New York Stock Exchange, and third-oldest globally, after ⇒ Read More
William E. Watson
William E. Watson received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania and is Professor of History at Immaculata University. He is author of several books, and coauthor of The Ghosts of Duffy’s Cut and Irish-Americans: The History and Culture of a People.
Regan Kladstrup
Regan Kladstrup is the Assistant Director of the Special Collections Processing Center at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania Libraries.
Killers (The): A Narrative of Real Life in Philadelphia
The Killers is a sensational urban gothic tale written by the journalist, novelist, and labor activist George Lippard (1822-54) in 1849. It exposes Philadelphia’s class and racial conflicts and its gang warfare, criticizes corruption in government and finance, and lambasts the city’s new experiment in incarceration, the solitary confinement system of Eastern State Penitentiary. Illustrated ⇒ Read More
Capital of the United States (Selection of Philadelphia)
As the national capital from 1790 to 1800, Philadelphia was the seat of the federal government for a short but crucial time in the new nation’s history. How and why Congress selected Philadelphia as the temporary Unites States capital reflects the essential debates of the era, particularly the balance of power between North and South. ⇒ Read More
Forts and Fortifications
Constructed from the seventeenth through the mid-twentieth century, defensive fortifications along the lower Delaware River and bay guarded the region during times of international and sectional upheaval. As important structures with such long histories, forts help to explain the political, economic, and social history of the Greater Philadelphia region. The earliest fortifications in the lower ⇒ Read More
General Strike of 1910
On March 5, 1910, between 60,000 and 75,000 workers complied with the Central Federated Union’s call for a general strike in solidarity with the striking streetcar workers employed by Philadelphia’s Rapid Transit Company (RTC). Business and political elites feared that the strike would spread to other parts of Pennsylvania and to cities where workers had ⇒ Read More
Casinos
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, casino gambling became an accepted public policy in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and other states desperate to generate tax revenue and create jobs. But the gains often came with significant social and economic costs in Atlantic City, Philadelphia, and other communities in the region. Casinos began to open ⇒ Read More
Trails (Recreational)
An expanding network of recreational paths for walkers, hikers, cyclists, joggers, and commuters serves the Greater Philadelphia region. The first recreational paths date to the mid-nineteenth century, when upper-class residents sought idyllic walking grounds in rural cemeteries and urban parks. In the twentieth century, grassroots hiking clubs built additional footpaths, but by the early twenty-first ⇒ Read More
Roger W. Moss
Roger W. Moss is Executive Director Emeritus, the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, a position he occupied from 1968 to 2008. Simultaneously he was an adjunct professor in the Historic Preservation Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of more than a dozen books on architecture and design, including the trilogy Historic Houses of ⇒ Read More
Paul Davies
Paul Davies is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Delaware and a senior research fellow at the Institute for American Values, where he writes about gambling. He spent twenty-five years working for newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Davies is the author of the forthcoming book Casino State: ⇒ Read More
Tastykake
“Nobody bakes a cake as tasty as a Tastykake” has been a brand tag line known by virtually every Philadelphian for a century. Indeed, few things are as iconically associated with the city and region as Tastykakes. The company was founded in 1914 by Philip J. Baur and Herbert T. Morris, in the Germantown neighborhood ⇒ Read More
Free Society of Traders
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 Pennsylvania. But, from the beginning, controversy about the Society’s existence revealed fundamental political divisions within William Penn’s “Holy Experiment,” and opposition led to ⇒ Read More
Athenæum of Philadelphia
The Athenæum of Philadelphia, a non-profit, member-supported library, was founded in 1814 “to disseminate useful knowledge.” Threatened for its very existence with the advent of the city’s free library in 1894, the organization subsequently recovered and ultimately thrived as it reinvented itself as a special- collections library with related public exhibitions, lectures, and publications. Unlike ⇒ Read More
Society Hill
Society Hill is one of Philadelphia’s oldest neighborhoods, with more buildings surviving from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than any other in the country. Usually defined by the boundaries of Walnut, Lombard, Front and Eighth Streets, this area south of Independence National Historic Park evolved over the centuries as a diverse, complex residential and commercial ⇒ Read More
Political Conventions
Philadelphia has hosted national political conventions from the time of the Revolution to the modern era. The Pennsylvania State House, later known as Independence Hall, was the site of both the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the Constitutional Convention in 1787. In the mid-nineteenth century, as national party conventions became the ⇒ Read More
Daniel T. Kirsch
Daniel T. Kirsch completed his doctoral degree at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2014 and is now an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Valley Forge Military College in Wayne, Pennsylvania. Active in the American Association of University Professors and the Caucus for a New Political Science, his recent research projects include “Southie versus ⇒ Read More
Savings Societies
The two most prominent forms of savings societies are the mutual savings bank and the savings and loan association, and Philadelphia is the home to the first institution for both. The Philadelphia Saving Fund Society (PSFS), founded 1816, and Oxford Provident Building Association, formed in 1831, were member-owned cooperatives whose success helped launch two financial ⇒ Read More
Silas Chamberlin
Silas Chamberlin holds a doctorate in environmental history from Lehigh University and currently serves as a regional adviser in the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation & Natural Resources. His dissertation, “On the Trail: A History of American Hiking,” is the first comprehensive, national history of the hiking and trails community from the early nineteenth century to ⇒ Read More
Schuylkill Expressway
Fully opened for traffic November 25, 1958, Philadelphia’s Schuylkill Expressway was gridlocked from the first day of its operation. Envisioned by city planners as a panacea for economy-suffocating urban traffic congestion, but built on flawed engineering assumptions about traffic flows, the expressway ignored any concern for postwar social and regional realities. Rather than being acclaimed, ⇒ Read More
Artifact: Face Shield
Plexiglas face shield with embedded bullet, c. 1960s. (Philadelphia History Museum Collection, transfer from Fire Arms Identification Unit, Philadelphia Police Department, 1991, Photograph by Sara Hawken) This face shield for a police helmet is made of Plexiglas. Whenever it has been on exhibit at the Philadelphia History Museum, it has attracted the attention of visitors, ⇒ Read More
Artifact: Medicine Chest
Drag across the screen to turn the object. Zoom to see details. Read more below.[pano file=”MedicineKit-VR-cm/Medicine Kit.html” width=”575″ height=”480″] Medicine Chest, circa 1830. (Philadelphia History Museum Collection, Friends Historical Association Collection, 1987, Photograph by Sara Hawken) This artifact serves as a witness to nineteenth-century medical practices. Resembling a large jewelry box, the domestic medicine chest ⇒ Read More
Walking Purchase
With the Walking Purchase of 1737, Pennsylvania officials defrauded the Delaware Indians out of a vast amount of land, perhaps over one million acres, in the Delaware and Lehigh Valleys. John Penn (1700-46) and Thomas Penn (1702-75), the sons of William Penn (1644-1718), with James Logan (1674-1751), the provincial secretary of Pennsylvania, devised the land ⇒ Read More
Julianne Kornacki
Julianne Kornacki is a doctoral student in political science with an interest in the history of municipal and neighborhood politics in Philadelphia.
David L. Mason
David L. Mason is an Associate Professor of History at Georgia Gwinnett College, Lawrenceville, Georgia, and has written extensively on the savings and loan industry.
Scientific Management
The “Scientific Management” movement was born in early twentieth-century Philadelphia factories but spread rapidly, transforming not only management techniques but also popular conceptions of industrialized society itself. According to its founders, the system simply sought the “one best way” to perform any task. But its time-study engineers, along with the assembly line, came to symbolize ⇒ Read More
NEH Teacher Institute: Cultures of Independence
Applications are due March 2 for this new teacher workshop funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Cultures of Independence: Perspectives on Independence Hall and the Meaning of Freedom will raise awareness of how Independence Hall has been involved in the ongoing process of creating a nation and civic life, not just in the ⇒ Read More
New Program Series Explores Civil Rights Struggles
To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment and the abolition of slavery, local cultural institutions will host screenings of clips from Created Equal: America’s Civil Rights Struggle. The African American Museum in Philadelphia (AAMP), Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP), the National Constitution Center (NCC), and the Philadelphia History Museum (PHM) have also developed programming using these video clips to launch larger explorations ⇒ Read More
Murder of Octavius Catto
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 society. Election Day in 1871, just one year after the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. ⇒ Read More
Seven Years’ War
Philadelphia and the surrounding area played a significant role in the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), also known as the French and Indian War and the Great War for Empire. Beginning in North America and spreading to Europe, India, and the West Indies, the war was a struggle for colonial dominance between France and Great Britain ⇒ Read More
Colonization Movement (Africa)
The African colonization movement, dedicated to resettling North American free blacks in West Africa, caused heated debates in Philadelphia in the early nineteenth century. Proposals to remove free blacks from North America date from the 1770s, but the heyday of African colonization occurred between 1818 and 1865. Often described as a “return to Africa,” the ⇒ Read More
John Saillant
John Saillant is Professor of English and History at Western Michigan University. He is the author of the monograph Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes.
Aaron X. Smith
Aaron X. Smith is a Ph.D. candidate in the African American Studies Department at Temple University. He holds a B.A. in Asian Studies, an M.A. in Liberal Arts, and an M.A. in African American Studies. He has publications accepted in The SAGE Encyclopedia of African Cultural Heritage in North America on the subjects of “Running ⇒ Read More
Deep Roots, Lasting Legacy
The poster “Deep Roots, Continuing Legacy: Philadelphia in the Struggle for Civil Rights” is a new project from History Making Productions, the documentary film company that strives to share Philadelphia’s rich history through the powerful medium of film. We hope that the poster will encourage Philadelphia residents to delve into our rich, fascinating, and continuous ⇒ Read More
Arthur S. Guarino
Arthur S. Guarino is an Assistant Finance Professor at the Rutgers University Business School teaching courses in Financial Institutions and Markets, Corporate Finance, Financial Statement Analysis, and Financial Management. He has published articles dealing with economic history and the role of finance and economics in public policy.
Friends Neighborhood Guild
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 lines. Established in 1879 as Friends Mission No. 1 at Beach Street and ⇒ Read More
Gallery at Market East
Following the birth and success of suburban shopping malls, the Gallery at Market East was Philadelphia’s attempt to revitalize the city’s deteriorating retail environment in order to lure suburban shoppers back to Center City. In an effort to emulate the popular suburban shopping experience, Philadelphia urban planners created an enclosed, multistory shopping center and attempted ⇒ Read More
Trenton and Princeton Campaign (Washington’s Crossing)
One of the most significant events in the Revolutionary War was the Continental Army’s December 25, 1776, crossing of the Delaware River, led by General George Washington (1732-99), which preceded three crucial American victories—two at Trenton and one at Princeton, New Jersey—that reignited the virtually extinguished Patriot cause. Immortalized in the famous 1851 painting by ⇒ Read More
Tim Hayburn
Tim Hayburn received his doctorate in colonial American history from Lehigh University.
Sean McComas
Sean McComas teaches government and economics at Kennard-Dale High School in Fawn Grove, Pennsylvania, and holds a master’s degree in history from Millersville University.
Artifact: Atwater Kent Radio
Drag across the screen to turn the object. Zoom to view details. Read more below.[pano file=”NEW-Radio2-cm/NEW Radio.html” width=”600″ height=”370″]Radio manufactured in 1923 by A. Atwater Manufacturing Company. (Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, Gift of Roy Shapiro Family, 2014, Photograph by Sara Hawken) With all the necessary components mounted and displayed on a wooden ⇒ Read More
Artifact: Philly the Dog
Drag across the screen to turn the object. Zoom to view details. Read more below.[pano file=”PhillyDog-VR-cm/Philly Dog.html” width=”570″ height=”510″]Philly, the official mascot of Company A, 315th Infantry, 79th Division of the American Expeditionary Forces. (Taxidermy specimen, Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, transferred by the 315th Regiment, 1998, Photograph by Sara Hawken) Although the ⇒ Read More
Fair Housing
Years before the United States Congress put housing discrimination law into effect with the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968, Philadelphia and its suburbs grappled with the cumulative effects of policies that severely limited African Americans’ housing options. By the mid-1960s, new laws and policy initiatives addressed the situation in the Greater Philadelphia area with ⇒ Read More
New Call for Authors: Winter-Spring 2015
The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia is expanding and opening new subject categories with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mayor’s Fund for Philadelphia, and Poor Richard’s Charitable Trust. To join more than one hundred leading and emerging scholars who have already contributed to this peer-reviewed, digital-first project, let us know your choice of ⇒ Read More
Working Group:
Philadelphia, the Nation, and the World
Invitation to graduate students and other interested scholars: The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, based at Rutgers-Camden, is forming a working group to do original research into Philadelphia’s connections with other regions of the United States and the world. You can help us enhance the Encyclopedia with these topics and break new ground – and perhaps ⇒ Read More
J.D. Bowers
J.D. Bowers is Associate Vice Provost for University Honors and Associate Professor of History at Northern Illinois University.
Artifact: Draft Drum
Drag across the screen to turn the object. Zoom to view details. Read more below.[pano file=”DraftDrum2-VR-cm/Draft Drum.html” width=”570″ height=”668″]Civil War Draft Drum, likely used in the First and Second Districts of Pennsylvania. (Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection, Photograph by Sara Hawken) A number of Civil War-era draft drums ⇒ Read More
Gentrification
Even as Philadelphia experienced deindustrialization and decline in the 1970s, a handful of neighborhoods began to experience a phenomenon known as gentrification—a process where affluent individuals settled in lower-income areas. As middle-class residents returned, formerly moribund commercial corridors came alive with restaurants and shops catering to the well-heeled. Soon, real estate prices began to creep ⇒ Read More
PATCO
The Port Authority Transit Corporation (PATCO) Speedline combined two sets of underutilized transit infrastructure to create a groundbreaking model for regional passenger transportation when it opened in 1969. It was one of Greater Philadelphia’s major public transportation successes of the mid twentieth century. In the early twentieth-first century, however, PATCO struggled to maintain both the ⇒ Read More
SEPTA
The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (better known by its acronym SEPTA) is a state authority charged with funding and operating public transportation in the city of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania counties of Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery. Created in 1963, SEPTA often struggled with management issues, employee morale, strikes, aging equipment, inadequate funding, and poor public ⇒ Read More
Artifact: Imported Teacup
Drag across the screen to turn the object. Zoom to view details. Read more below.[pano file=”NEW-Teacup-cm/NEW Teacup.html” width=”570″ height=”450″]Painted porcelain teacup, Chinese export ware, likely early twentieth century. (Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, gift of William H. Noble Jr., 1950, Photograph by Sara Hawken) A staggering number of figures are crammed tightly onto ⇒ Read More
Artifact: Presentation Pitcher
Drag across the screen to turn the object. Zoom to view details. Read more below.[pano file=”Silverpitcher-VR-cm/FINAL.html”]Silver pitcher, 1841, presented at Mother Bethel AME Church to attorney David Paul Brown “by the disfranchised citizens of Philadelphia in testimony for his moral courage and generous disinterest in advocating the rights of the oppressed without regard to complexion ⇒ Read More
Artifact: “Success to Infant Navy” Pitcher
Drag across the screen to turn the object. Zoom to view details. Read more below. [pano file=”NEW-Navypitcher-cm/NEW Navy Pitcher.html” width=”400″ height=”580″] “Success to the Infant Navy” creamware pitcher with transfer print, circa 1790. (Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, Photograph by Sara Hawken) This creamware pitcher from the late eighteenth century celebrates the United ⇒ Read More
Artifact: Bicentennial Beer Can
Drag across the screen to turn the object. Zoom to view details. Read more below. [pano file=”Beercan3/NEW Beer Can.html” width=”450″ height=”600″] Bicentennial commemorative beer can. (Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, Photograph by Sara Hawken) This can makes no secret of its American pride. With red and blue stars flanking a bold sketch of ⇒ Read More
Artifact: Painted Fire Hat
Drag across the screen to turn the object. Zoom to view details. Read more below.[pano file=”FireHat3-VR-cm/NEW Fire Hat.html” width=”600″ height=”600″]Parade Fire Hat, 1847. (Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, gift of the Honorable Glover C. Lander, 1945, Photograph by Sara Hawken) With the elegance of a beaver top hat and the patriotic imagery expected ⇒ Read More
Indian Rights Associations
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 freedom. Founded in 1879, the Women’s National Indian Association organized by ⇒ Read More
Stuart Leibiger
Stuart Leibiger is a Professor and History Department Chair at La Salle University. He is the author of Founding Friendship: George Washington, James Madison, and the Creation of the American Republic (University of Virginia Press, 1999) and editor of a Companion to James Madison and James Monroe (Wiley-Blackwell Publishers, 2013).
Television
SThe Philadelphia region had a key role in the ascent of television in American popular culture. From the manufacturing of television sets to the production of innovative programming, researchers, technicians, and creative talents in the region produced many of the “firsts” that propelled television to success as a new mass medium in the twentieth century. ⇒ Read More
Alyssa Ribeiro
Alyssa Ribeiro is an Assistant Professor of History at Allegheny College. Her research has examined relations between Puerto Rican and African American residents in postwar Philadelphia.
Pedro A. Regalado
Pedro A. Regalado is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at Yale University. He is interested in twentieth century urban history, particularly questions surrounding race, housing, and migration.
Mason-Dixon Line
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 ⇒ Read More
Scrapple
Scrapple, which came to the Philadelphia region from Germany, is a loaf of cooked pig parts thickened with cornmeal or buckwheat usually spiced with sage and pepper. Once cooled, the loaf is sliced, fried, and served as a breakfast side dish, often with syrup. Not just a culinary transplant, scrapple exists because of the interplay ⇒ Read More
Dylan Gottlieb
Dylan Gottlieb is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University where he works on recent American urban history.
War of 1812
Philadelphia was pivotal in supporting America’s war effort during the War of 1812, the final war in which the United States and Britain fought on opposing sides. The city functioned as a major supply center for the army, and its revitalized port outfitted vessels for the navy. People from the Philadelphia area operated war-related businesses, ⇒ Read More
Hog Island
Hog Island, at the confluence of the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, exemplifies many broad trends in the environmental history of the region. Once improved for agriculture, the natural landscape ultimately deteriorated through overexploitation, leading to its conversion for industrial, commercial, and other forms of development. No longer productive in the early twentieth century, the island ⇒ Read More
Columbia Avenue Riot
On Friday, August 28, 1964, a scuffle with police at the busy intersection of Twenty-Second Street and Columbia Avenue sparked a three-day riot involving hundreds of North Philadelphians hurling bottles and bricks at police and looting stores. With the Columbia Avenue Riot, Philadelphia joined six other cities, including Jersey City, Paterson, and Elizabeth, New Jersey, ⇒ Read More
Crime
Crime is inextricably linked to Philadelphia’s shifting economic fortunes. Its history reflects the region’s status as a port and point of entry for goods, immigrants, and migrants, where concentrations of both wealth and poverty developed in a center of American commerce and industry. As a type of economic activity, forms of crime changed dramatically as ⇒ Read More
Playgrounds
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, children’s play became an important concern of urban reformers, who regarded playgrounds—outdoor environments designed, equipped, and sometimes staffed, to facilitate children’s play—as essential components in shaping behavior and ordering urban space. Many public and semipublic playgrounds established as a result of their efforts became permanent features of the Philadelphia ⇒ Read More
John W. Lawrence
John W. Lawrence received his Master’s Degree in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1989. He serves as Senior Archaeologist for an international engineering firm and has conducted original archaeological and historical research in Central America and in the Mid-Atlantic region.
Alex Elkins
Alex Elkins is a Ph.D. Candidate at Temple University, writing a dissertation on the 1960s riots and “get-tough” policing. His article, “‘At Once Judge, Jury, and Executioner’: Rioting and Policing in Philadelphia, 1838-1964,” appears in the Spring 2014 issue of the Bulletin of the German Historical Institute.
U.S. Congress (1790-1800)
During the 1790s, while Philadelphia served as the nation’s temporary capital, the U.S. Congress met problems and threats to the nation that tested the endurance of the Constitution and the republic it framed. Domestic issues of finance, taxation, sectionalism, Indian affairs, and slavery divided the delegates into bitter political camps, and international relations fomented disagreements ⇒ Read More
From Our Authors: New Book on Slavery and Abolition in New Jersey
James 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 ⇒ Read More
City of Medicine
In 1843, a student at the “med school of the University of Pennsylvania,” as he called it in a letter to a friend in Boston, declared Philadelphia “decidedly the city of the Union for doctors, the facilities for study making it a perfect little Paris.” The comparison reflected the renown of the French capital at ⇒ Read More
Native Peoples to 1680
Native Americans lived in what became southeastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and northern Delaware for more than 10,000 years before the arrival of Europeans in the early seventeenth century. By emphasizing peace and trade, the Lenapes retained their sovereignty and power through 1680, unlike native peoples in New England and Virginia who suffered disastrous conflicts ⇒ Read More
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 ⇒ Read More
Artifact: Model for William Penn Statue
Drag across the screen to turn the object. Zoom to view details. Read more below.[pano file=”PennStatue-VR-cm/William Penn.html”]Cast aluminum model for sculpture of William Penn for Philadelphia City Hall, 1886, by Alexander Calder. (Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection, gift of Mrs. Henry C. Forrest, 1930, Photograph by Sara Hawken) ⇒ Read More
Artifact: Caltrops
Drag across the screen to turn the object. Zoom to view details. Read more below.[pano file=”Caltrops/Caltrops.html” width=”570″ height=”480″]Caltrops from the era of the American Revolution. (Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection, Photograph by Sara Hawken) Four-pointed wrought iron devices known as caltrops, or crow’s feet, have been used by ⇒ Read More
Artifact: Street Sign
Drag across the screen to turn the object. Zoom to view details. Read more below.[pano file=”Streetsign-VR-cm/FINAL.html” width=”570″ height=”640″]Street sign, c. 1950. (Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection, Photograph by Sara Hawken) By the early twenty-first century, Philadelphia had more than 3,600 distinct named streets, alleys, lanes, places, boulevards, expressways, ⇒ Read More
Artifact: Swedish Helmet
Drag across the screen to turn the object. Zoom to view details. Read more below. [pano file=”Helmet-VR-cm/Final.html” width=”570″ height=”510″] Swedish steel helmet, c. 1640-1700, found in 1873 in Washingtonboro, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. (Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection, Photograph by Sara Hawken) The rust and corrosion visible on the ⇒ Read More
Artifact: George Washington’s Epaulet
Drag across the screen to turn the object. Zoom to view details. Read more below.[pano file=”Epaulet-VR-cm/FINAL.html”]Epaulet worn by George Washington, c. 1770s. (Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection, Photograph by Sara Hawken) This epaulet, worn by George Washington (1732-99) as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, ⇒ Read More
Artifact: Republican Convention Barbie
Drag across the screen to turn the object. Zoom to view details. Read more below. [pano file=”Barbie3-CM-vr/Encyclopedia – Barbie.html” width=”450″ height=”570″] Collector’s item from the Republican National Convention held in Philadelphia in 2000: an African American Barbie doll dressed as a delegate. (Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, gift of the Republican National Committee, ⇒ Read More
Artifact: Horizontal Steam Engine Model
Drag across the screen to turn the object. Zoom to view details. Read more below.[pano file=”SteamEngine-VR-cm/FINAL.html” width=”570″ height=”455″]Model of a horizontal steam engine, c. 1880, represents Philadelphia’s manufacturing prowess in the late nineteenth century. (Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, gift of A. Atwater Kent, Photograph by Sara Hawken) We know very little about ⇒ Read More
Artifact: Street Car Model
Drag across the screen to turn the object. Zoom to view details. Read more below.[pano file=”Streetcar-VR-cm/FINAL.html” width=”570″ height=”325″]Model of a nineteenth-century horse-drawn streetcar. (Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, transferred from Philadelphia Transportation Company, 1942, Photograph by Sara Hawken) This fascinating model of a horse-drawn streetcar links with the transportation history of late-nineteenth-century Philadelphia ⇒ Read More
Artifact: Toy (Schoenhut Company)
Drag across the screen to turn the object. Zoom to see details. Read more below.[pano file=”Toy-VR-cm/Camel-FINAL.html” width=”575″ height=”585″]Toy dromedary camel, c. 1915, manufactured by the A. Schoenhut Company. (Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent purchase, 1980, Photograph by Sara Hawken) Arabian, or dromedary, camels would have been exotic creatures to the American public in ⇒ Read More
Artifact: “Free Labor” Pinafore
Drag across the screen to turn the object. Zoom to see details. Read more below. [pano file=”Pinafore-NEW2-cm/NEW Baby Dress.html” width=”380″ height=”650″] Pinafore, c. 1845, labeled “free cotton” to assure that the item was not produced by slave labor. (Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, Friends Historical Association Collection, 1987, Photograph by Sara Hawken) There ⇒ Read More
Artifact: Compass
Drag across the screen to turn the object. Zoom to view details. Read more below.[pano file=”NEW-Compass-cm/NEW Compass.html” width=”575″ height=”475″]Compass used to lay out boundaries for West Jersey, between Pennsylvania and Maryland, and possibly in the City of Philadelphia, c. 1680. (Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection, transferred from Chicago ⇒ Read More
Artifact: Centre Square Pump House Model
Drag across the screen to turn the object. Zoom to view details. Read more below. [pano file=”CenterSquare-VR-cm/FINAL.html”] Centre Square Pump House, model by Frederick Graff, c. 1820. (Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection, gift of Mrs. Charles Graff, 1942, Photograph by Sara Hawken) If this model for Philadelphia’s first ⇒ Read More
Artifact: Menorah
Drag across the screen to turn the object. Zoom to see details. Read more below. [pano file=”Menorah-VR-cm/output/Menorah-FINAL.html”] Menorah, c. 1920. (Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent, gift of Howard Robboy, 2012, Photograph by Sara Hawken) Menorahs have a very ancient connection with Judaism. The instructions for making them appeared in the first five books ⇒ Read More
Jean R. Soderlund
Jean R. Soderlund is a Professor of History at Lehigh University and author of Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn.
Columbus Day
Observed on the second Monday in October, Columbus Day in the Philadelphia region gained prominence as Italian immigrant communities grew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. By commemorating the 1492 arrival of Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) in the New World, Italian-Americans embraced the navigator as their countryman, celebrated Italian culture, and called attention to ⇒ Read More
James R. McIntyre
James R. McIntyre is an Assistant Professor of History at Moraine Valley Community College, Palos Hills, Illinois. He serves as the editor of The Journal of the Seven Years War Association.
Steven J. Peitzman
Steven J. Peitzman is Professor of Medicine at Drexel University College of Medicine. His historical work includes the book A New and Untried Course: Woman’s Medical College and Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1850 – 1998 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000) and articles about medicine and medical education in Philadelphia and Germantown.
Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC)
The Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC), a nonprofit corporation controlled jointly by the city government and the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, formed in 1958 to support existing businesses and attract new ones by offering land and low-cost financing for both for-profit and nonprofit enterprises. To accomplish this mission, PIDC manages the oldest municipal land ⇒ Read More
Immigration and Migration (Colonial Era)
European settlement of the region on both sides of the Delaware River dates to the early seventeenth century. The population grew rapidly after 1682, when Pennsylvania’s policy of religious tolerance and its reputation as the “best poor man’s country” attracted people from all walks of life. By the time of the American Revolution, Philadelphia was ⇒ Read More
Coxey Toogood
Coxey Toogood is a Historian in the Cultural Resources Management Division of Independence National Historical Park.
Carolyn T. Adams
Carolyn T. Adams is Professor Emeritus of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University and associate editor of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia.
Hoagies
A hoagie is a sandwich made on a long Italian roll containing a variety of Italian meats and cheeses, lettuce, tomato, and onion, and dressed with olive oil, vinegar, and spices. Its exact origins are uncertain, but by the end of the twentieth century a mayoral proclamation declared the hoagie to be the “official sandwich” ⇒ Read More
Lynching
Lynching, the extralegal killing of a victim by individuals or a mob, notably by hanging or burning, was commonplace in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Though accounts vary, in the heyday of lynching following the Civil War, at least 3,500 incidents were recorded; more than 80 percent occurred in the ⇒ Read More
Deborah Shine Valentine
Deborah Shine Valentine is assistant professor of Early Childhood Education at Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia. She received a PhD in Childhood Studies from Rutgers-Camden (2013). She is currently working on a book manuscript that explores the history of playgrounds, race and early childhood education in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Philadelphia.
Eric C. Schneider
Eric C. Schneider, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, has written three books on American urban history, and is currently working on a history of murder in Philadelphia since 1940.
Cameron B. Strang
Cameron B. Strang is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Reno.
“City of Brotherly Love” at the FringeArts Festival
The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia will play a small role in this year’s FringeArts Festival with publication of our “City of Brotherly Love” theme essay, by Chris Satullo, in a commemorative booklet for the production 100% Philadelphia. As described by FringeArts: Join us at the 2014 Fringe Festival for an unforgettable experience that’s part-theater, part-data analysis ⇒ Read More
Labor Day
Labor Day, celebrated the first Monday of September, has been observed in the Philadelphia region since the 1880s, before it became a nationwide holiday. New Jersey was one of the first states to grant Labor Day legal status in 1887, and Pennsylvania followed suit by the end of the decade. The earliest incarnations of Labor ⇒ Read More
Scott Hearn
Scott Hearn earned his master’s degree in history at Rutgers-Camden.
Cemeteries
Cemeteries have been integral features of the Philadelphia-area landscape since the earliest European settlements of the mid-1600s. Over the centuries, and in tandem with developments such as epidemics, immigration, industrialization, war, and suburbanization, the region’s cemeteries matured from small, private grave sites, potter’s fields, and church burial yards to rural cemeteries, national cemeteries, and memorial ⇒ Read More
National Negro Convention Movement
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 Negro Convention Movement to address the hostility, discrimination, exclusion, and violence against African Americans by whites in northern cities. As national forums, the National Negro Conventions held from 1830 to 1864 ⇒ Read More
Welcome to the Team
As The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia expands, so does our team of editors. We are pleased to welcome the following colleagues, whose work you will begin to see in the Encyclopedia over the next several months: Donald D. Groff, a veteran journalist, is our new managing editor. Tyler Hoffman, Professor of English at Rutgers-Camden, is ⇒ Read More
Marie Basile McDaniel
Marie Basile McDaniel is an Assistant Professor of History at Southern Connecticut State University. Her essay on Immigration and Migration in the Colonial Era is based partly on her work for her dissertation, “We Shall Not Differ in Heaven: Marriage, Order and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia.”
Lucien Holness
Lucien Holness is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland-College Park. His research interests include African American and Atlantic history.
Gayborhood
In the second half of the twentieth century, the Center City neighborhood that became known as the Gayborhood formed in the vicinity of Locust and Thirteenth Streets. The community and the geographical spaces it occupied played a vital role in the social and political struggles of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) people locally and ⇒ Read More
Fort Wilson
On October 4, 1779, the home of noted Pennsylvania lawyer and statesman James Wilson (1742-98) on the southwest corner of Third and Walnut Streets in Philadelphia became a flash point for Philadelphians divided by politics and class. The militia attack on “Fort Wilson” occurred in the wake of conflict over the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, ⇒ Read More
Industrial Neighborhoods
The growth and decline of industry in the Philadelphia region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also shaped the character of many of its neighborhoods. Compact industrial neighborhoods originated at a time when the lack of public transportation made it necessary for workers to live within walking distance of the factories. These row house blocks ⇒ Read More
Baseball (Professional)
From the time the game was created to its organization into a professional league, and from the first National League game ever played to some of the earliest World Series, the city of Philadelphia has played a prominent role in professional baseball history. Variations of the game of baseball became popular some three decades prior ⇒ Read More
World War I
Although the United States’ military involvement in the First World War lasted just over a year, the conflict in Europe had a lasting impact on the Philadelphia region. The war created new opportunities for the industrial base of Philadelphia, Chester, and Camden, and as men and women enlisted for military service, the region developed a ⇒ Read More
Bob Skiba
Bob Skiba is the archivist at the William Way LGBT Community Center and the President of the Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides. In 2013, he co-authored Lost Philadelphia, with Edward Mauger. Skiba maintains a Philadelphia Gayborhood history blog at http://thegayborhoodguru.wordpress.com/
New Support from The Mayor’s Fund for Philadelphia, Poor Richard’s Charitable Trust
We are pleased to announce new financial support for The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia project. From The Mayor’s Fund for Philadelphia, the project has received a grant of $25,000. In addition, Poor Richard’s Charitable Trust has contributed $2,500. These much-needed awards will help us to continue to expand the Encyclopedia’s content, especially in ways that ⇒ Read More
Beth A. Twiss Houting
Beth A. Twiss Houting is the Senior Director of Programs and Services at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. She holds a B.A. in History from Pennsylvania State University and an M.A. from the University of Delaware in the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture with a Certificate in Museum Studies.
Pontiac’s War and the Paxton Boys
Pontiac’s War (1763-66), a conflict between Native Americans and the British Empire, began in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley regions but had important ramifications for Philadelphians as panic in the Pennsylvania backcountry sent refugees to the city. The arrival of the “Paxton Boys,” who were determined to seek revenge against Indians, sparked a political ⇒ Read More
Pine Barrens
New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, the forest and wetlands area also known as the Pinelands or the Pines, have played a varied but vital role in the region’s cultural and economic history. The Pine Barrens have, over time, been a home to Native American populations, a center of early American industry, a hub of military activity, ⇒ Read More
Valley Forge
In 1777 the Continental Army, unable to prevent the British forces from taking Philadelphia, retreated to Valley Forge for the winter of 1777-78. Selected for its strategic location between Philadelphia and York, along the Schuylkill River, Valley Forge had natural defensive positions, access to water, enough land to support the army, and was far enough ⇒ Read More
Call for Contributors: Summer 2014
The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia seeks authors for its next phase of expansion. A wide range of topics is available, including subtopics related to communications, transportation, business and industry, the built environment, civil rights, literary works, holiday traditions, and key events in the region’s history. The scope of the project includes the city of Philadelphia and ⇒ Read More
Michael Goode
Michael Goode is an Assistant Professor of Early American History at Utah Valley University.
Siobhan Fitzpatrick
Siobhan Fitzpatrick has worked with several history organizations in New Jersey and at Valley Forge National Historical Park.
Medical Publishing
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 since. The industry grew with the general book-selling industry, flourished as medicine acquired a solid scientific foundation starting around the end of the nineteenth century, went through a ⇒ Read More
Richard H. Lampert
Richard H. Lampert, a veteran of the medical publishing industry, is a consultant specializing in print and digital publishing strategy at The Lampert Consultancy, LLC. His clients have included large corporate organizations, small entrepreneurial publishers, and over two dozen professional societies in health care specialties.
Skylar Harris
Skylar Harris is Grants Program Manager, New Jersey Historical Commission, and an adjunct faculty member of the Rowan University History Department and American Studies Department. Her publications include “Mind over Matter: Social Justice, the Body, and Environmental History,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 79, no. 4 (2012): 440-450, and she has contributed to ⇒ Read More
Jacob Downs
Jacob Downs has a master’s degree in history from Rutgers University-Camden.
Southwest Philadelphia
Southwest Philadelphia, which along with adjacent Tinicum Township, Delaware County, is the location of the Philadelphia International Airport, greets many visitors to the city. Yet, Southwest Philadelphia, often described as “far” Southwest, is quite possibly the least-known area of the city, even to Philadelphians. Kingsessing, as this vicinity was originally named, was the first section ⇒ Read More
Immigration (1870-1930)
During the national explosion of immigration that took place between 1870 and the 1920s, the Philadelphia region became more diverse and cosmopolitan as it was energized by immigrants who indelibly changed the character of the places where they settled. With its reputation as the “Workshop of the World,” Philadelphia attracted immigrants to jobs in industry, ⇒ Read More
Support from Rutgers-Camden Digital Studies Center
We’re pleased to share the news of new support for The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia project from the Digital Studies Center at Rutgers-Camden. This grant will allow us to improve and expand our bibliographic survey by migrating it to Zotero, a platform that will make the citations more user-friendly and accessible to the public. Watch ⇒ Read More
Arboretums
The Philadelphia area is a recognized “hearth” of early American arboretums. Starting almost exclusively within a tight-knit community of Quaker botanists with a reverence for nature, early Philadelphia arboretums left a legacy of emphasis on native plants. Over time, the region’s arboretums also encompassed English naturalistic designs showcasing North American species and increasingly global perspectives, ⇒ Read More
Anastasia Day
Anastasia Day is a history doctoral candidate and Hagley Scholar in Capitalism, Technology, and Culture at the University of Delaware. She identifies as a historian of environment, technology, business, and society, themes that collide uniquely in food. Her dissertation is entitled “Productive Plots: Nature, Nation, and Industry in the Victory Gardens of the U.S. World ⇒ Read More
Walking Encyclopedia: Harrowgate
Like many neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Harrowgate, located just northwest of Kensington, experienced dramatic changes as a result of the industrial boom in the nineteenth century. Prior to industrialization, Harrowgate was a small community built around medicinal springs and attracted only the wealthiest of Philadelphia’s citizens. Industrialization, however, transformed Harrowgate. By the late nineteenth century, Harrowgate ⇒ Read More
Inga Saffron wins Pulitzer Prize for criticism
Congratulations to Inga Saffron of The Philadelphia Inquirer, who is the 2014 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Inga helped us launch the Encyclopedia with her theme essay on “Green Country Town,” which now anchors our growing coverage of topics related to the natural and built environment.
Barbara Klaczynska
Barbara Klaczynska researches, writes and teaches about urban, ethnic, labor, and women’s history. She teaches at Saint Joseph’s University and Penn State University Abington and works in preservation and interpretation with museums, public gardens, historic houses and sacred places.
From Our Authors: New Book Examines the Story of Intentional Integration in West Mount Airy
Just 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 ⇒ Read More
Higher Education: Private (Religious)
With the exception of Greater Boston, the Philadelphia region has more independent colleges and universities than any other metropolitan area of the United States. These numbers stem in large part from the variety of religious communities in the region, all of whom wanted to enjoy the prestige of having an institution of higher learning. Originally, ⇒ Read More
Follow Our Project on Facebook
The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia on Facebook offers an additional opportunity to follow new topics, join in discussion, and learn about our writers, editors, and civic partners. Link here to like us! Thanks to our digital media assistant Scott Hearn for creating our page as well as for managing our new Backgrounders feature and the ⇒ Read More
Baseball: Negro Leagues
More than any other city, Philadelphia epitomized the significance of Negro League baseball in urban communities. For a remarkable eight decades, local fans consistently supported a series of black ball clubs whose successes generated racial pride and represented a triumph of African American institution-building. In Philadelphia, the first all-black baseball teams surfaced in the 1860s. ⇒ Read More
National Endowment for the Humanities
Awards Two-Year Grant for the
Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia
Our project reached an important milestone this week with the awarding of a two-year, $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We are so grateful to the many organizations and individuals who have brought our project to this point: more than thirty partner organizations, more than 150 authors and editors, our digital publishing ⇒ Read More
Our Enhanced Digital Platform
Welcome to the newly enhanced Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia! As you explore our website, you will discover an array of new features and pathways for exploring our growing project. This enhanced digital platform builds upon suggestions from our users and partners, and it will allow us to continue to expand and take greater advantage of ⇒ Read More
Mary Rizzo
Mary Rizzo is the Public Historian in Residence at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (MARCH) at Rutgers University-Camden.
Abigail Perkiss
Abigail Perkiss is an Assistant Professor of History at Kean University in Union, N.J. She is the author of Making Good Neighbors: Civil Rights, Liberalism, and Integration in Post-War Philadelphia, published by Cornell University Press.
Roger D. Simon
Roger D. Simon is professor of history at Lehigh University. He is the author of Philadelphia: A Brief History (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania Historical Association, 2003).
Philadelphia Plan
Even as it underwent a painful process of economic restructuring in the years after World War II, Philadelphia garnered national attention from efforts to integrate historically white building trades. Dubbed the “Philadelphia Plan,” the program requiring federal contractors to practice nondiscrimination in hiring tested the liberal coalition formed in the aftermath of the New Deal ⇒ Read More
North Philadelphia
Where exactly North Philadelphia begins and ends is a matter of debate. Even native Philadelphians have difficulty identifying the boundaries of this area of their city with precision. This is likely because so many of the neighborhoods located north, northeast, or northwest of Philadelphia’s center enjoy common histories and developmental patterns and consequently look a ⇒ Read More
Gail Friedman
Gail Friedman is a writer, city planner, and graduate student in public history at Temple University.
Andrew Newman
Andrew Newman is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director for the Department of English at Stony Brook University. He is the author of On Records: Delaware Indians, Colonists, and the Media of History and Memory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012).
Laura Turner Igoe
Laura Turner Igoe is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at Temple University. Her dissertation, entitled “The Opulent City and the Sylvan State: Art and Environmental Embodiment in Early National Philadelphia,” considers how artists and architects used the body as a framework to visualize, comprehend, and reform the city’s rapidly changing urban ecology after the Revolutionary ⇒ Read More
Erika M. Kitzmiller
Erika M. Kitzmiller is a historian of race, social inequality, and education who served as an assistant clinical professor at Drexel University and is currently the Caperton Fellow at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute. She received her Ph.D. in History and Education and Master’s in Public Policy from the University of Pennsylvania and her B.A. ⇒ Read More
Education and Opportunity
In the twentieth century, many urban school districts, which had been among the finest in the nation, became some of the most challenged. The Greater Philadelphia region reflected this trend. In 1900 the region’s school systems consisted of largely uncoordinated public, parochial, and private schools. Between 1900 and 1965 politicians, educational administrators, and civic leaders ⇒ Read More
Northeast Philadelphia
From its initial, colonial foundations as a sparsely populated farming hinterland to its dramatic postwar housing development after World War II, Northeast Philadelphia developed into a desirable destination for those seeking to improve their economic, social, and cultural standing within Philadelphia’s city boundaries. Even as Northeast Philadelphia came to symbolize a middle-class environment rooted around homeownership, commercial development, and mass ⇒ Read More
March of the Mill Children
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 law. Jones, the storied Irish-born labor organizer, ⇒ Read More
David R. Contosta
David R. Contosta, Ph.D., is Professor of History at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia. He is the author or editor of some twenty books, along with numerous articles and reviews. These include biographies of Henry Adams, Charles Darwin, and Abraham Lincoln, as well writings about religious institutions, higher education, urban and suburban history, and metropolitan ⇒ Read More
City of Homes
In the late nineteenth century, Philadelphia developed dual personalities. While industry intensified, making the city a hard-driving, muscular “workshop of the world,” by the 1880s civic boosters also promoted Philadelphia’s more domestic qualities as a “city of homes.” Philadelphians’ pride in home ownership had deep roots in the founding and growth of the city. But ⇒ Read More
David W. Young
David W. Young is a lecturer at University of Pennsylvania Graduate Program in Historic Preservation and Executive Director at Cliveden House in Historic Germantown.
Neil Lanctot
Neil Lanctot is a historian who has written three books, each reflecting his keen interest in sports and race. His writing has also appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, and several other journals and anthologies.
David Amott
David Amott earned his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Delaware in art and architectural history. While working on these degrees, he researched several immigrant churches in North Philadelphia for the Historic American Building Survey. This experience allowed him the opportunity to become familiar with and to fall in love with North Philadelphia and ⇒ Read More
Whither the Downtown Department Store?
Readers who may have found David Sullivan’s essay on the history of department stores in Philadelphia of interest may well want to read a recent essay on the subject in Next City. With downtown booming, we might well expect to hold on to the one remaining standalone store, but even that prospect can not be ⇒ Read More
Domenic Vitiello
Domenic Vitiello is Associate Professor of City Planning and Urban Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Daniel Amsterdam
Daniel Amsterdam is Assistant Professor of History at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
James Bergquist
James Bergquist is Professor Emeritus of History, Villanova University.
Paul Campbell
Paul Campbell is an M.A. candidate in American History at Temple University. He also works as a park guide at Independence National Historical Park, where he developed a War of 1812 tour of the Portrait Gallery in the Second Bank of the United States.
Jennifer L. Green
Jennifer L. Green is Director of Education for the Colonial Pennsylvania Plantation, an eighteenth- century living history farm in Media, Pennsylvania. She has previously worked at The Mill at Anselma, a colonial-era grist mill in Chester County, where her study of early American agricultural and industrial history began. In addition to the Encyclopedia of Greater ⇒ Read More
Rosina McAvoy Ryan
Rosina McAvoy Ryan teaches in the Department of History at La Salle University. She earned her Ph.D. at Temple University, where her dissertation examined the College Settlement of Philadelphia.
Martin W. Wilson
Martin W. Wilson is Associate Professor of History at East Stroudsburg University. This essay draws upon his research on the history of tourism in Philadelphia between 1926 and 1976.
Simon Finger
Simon Finger holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University and is the author of The Contagious City: The Politics of Public Health in Early Philadelphia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2012).
Herbert Ershkowitz
Herbert Ershkowitz is Professor of History Emeritus at Temple University.
Stephen Nepa
Stephen Nepa teaches history at Temple University and Rowan University. He is the author of “The New Urban Dining Room: Sidewalk Cafes in Postindustrial Philadelphia,” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum (Fall 2011), contributing author to A Green Country Towne: Art, History, and Ecology in Philadelphia (Penn State University Press, due 2014), ⇒ Read More
Molly Roth
Molly Roth is a non-profit administrator in Philadelphia with an interest in the cultural anthropology of Mande West Africa. She served as Executive Director of OIC International, an international development agency founded by Leon H. Sullivan, from 2007 to 2009, and as Founding Executive Director of the Global Philadelphia Association in 2010 and 2011.
Ed Moorhouse
Ed Moorhouse is an editorial/media specialist at Rutgers–Camden.
Artifact: Side Chair
As shown in this chair, made in Philadelphia in 1808, the so-called Klismos form is distinguished by front and rear legs that curve inwards and directly mimics ancient Greek chairs as seen on pottery. The draped upholstery softens the severe lines. Benjamin Henry Latrobe designed this chair, other furniture, and a house at Seventh and ⇒ Read More
Artifact: Cheesesteak
Thin bits of frizzled beef served on a locally-made Italian roll, usually topped with fried onions and Cheez Whiz drawn from the can with a paint stirrer, a cheesesteak is a sandwich unlike any John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich (1718-1792), might have encountered. Cheesesteaks originated in 1930 as simply steak sandwiches, the cheese ⇒ Read More
Artifact: IWW Membership Button
For most of a decade, anyone who wanted to work on the Philadelphia waterfront had to be a member of Local 8. In order to ensure that only fully paid-up members worked, Local 8 distributed a new button monthly. When an employer hired someone not wearing the proper button, Local 8 members were known to ⇒ Read More
Artifact: Chinatown Friendship Gate
The Friendship Gate, produced by artisans in Chinatown’s “sister city” of Tianijn, China in 1983, was installed at the intersection of Tenth and Arch Street in 1984. The gate provides a distinctive anchor for Philadelphia’s Chinatown, which has evolved since the nineteenth century to become a cultural and business center for multiple Asian immigrant groups. ⇒ Read More
Helen Tangires
Helen Tangires holds a PhD in American studies from The George Washington University. She is a frequent contributor to books and journals on urban foodways and is the author of Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (2003). Dr. Tangires is also the administrator of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts ⇒ Read More
Amanda Casper
Amanda Casper is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Delaware. She has a M.S. in Historic Preservation from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.A. in History from the University of Delaware, and she has worked for the National Park Service Northeast Regional Office and at several historic sites throughout Philadelphia.
Monica Henry
Monica Henry is Associate Professor at the Université Paris Est-Créteil (France). She is currently working on a book on the origins of Pan-Americanism.
Braxton Boren
Braxton Boren is a PhD Candidate in the Music and Audio Research Lab and New York University. He specializes in applying physics and technology to research questions in the arts and humanities.
James Gigantino
James Gigantino is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. He is currently working on a book project on slavery and abolition in New Jersey.
Michelle Mormul
Michelle Mormul received her Ph.D. in history at the University of Delaware in 2010. Her research focuses on trade and commerce in the eighteenth century and textile history.
Joanne Danifo
Joanne Danifo holds a master’s degree in history from Rutgers University with a focus in administration and programming at historic sites. She has worked for the Elfreth’s Alley Association, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and in freelance research positions.
Twenty-First Century
While investing in new attractions and services for tourism and redeveloping sites such as the Philadelphia Navy Yard for new purposes, the Philadelphia region also re-emerged as an immigration gateway for newcomers from South and Central America, Asia, and Africa. In 2008, the city of Philadelphia gained population for the first time since the 1950s. ⇒ Read More
Twentieth Century after 1945
In the second half of the twentieth century, an era of social change, manufacturing in the Philadelphia region plummeted as northeastern states lost factories and jobs to the Sunbelt and international competitors. Philadelphia’s longtime major industry, textiles, also was hit by product changes, for example the change in consumer preferences for nylon hosiery rather than ⇒ Read More
Twentieth Century to 1945
Greater Philadelphia, the “Workshop of the World,” felt the impact of national and international events during two world wars and the Great Depression. Although the region’s rate of industrial growth slowed in the first half of the twentieth century, the demands created by war energized manufacturing, particularly in shipyards on both sides of the Delaware ⇒ Read More
Nineteenth Century after 1854
The nation celebrated the one-hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1876 in Philadelphia with the Centennial Exhibition, the first full-scale world’s fair held in the United States. As the exhibits in Fairmount Park demonstrated, the cause for celebration was not primarily history but industrial progress. In the decades after the Civil War, large-scale ⇒ Read More
Nineteenth Century to 1854
Industrialization, transportation, and migration transformed the Philadelphia region in the first half of the nineteenth century. While turnpikes, canals, and railroads extended the city’s reach, new communities also formed within Philadelphia County as boroughs such as Frankford and Spring Garden were incorporated and villages such as Manayunk developed around mills and factories. In South Jersey, ⇒ Read More
Capital of the United States Era
Philadelphia, where the U.S. Constitution was drafted in 1787, served as the nation’s capital for one decade in the 1790s. It was a decade of nation-building in many ways, from the drama of politics to the creation of a national culture. The U.S. Congress, meeting in the County Court House (Congress Hall), passed the Naturalization ⇒ Read More
American Revolution Era
Situated midway between New England and the southern colonies, Philadelphia became the capital of the American Revolution as representatives gathered for the First and Second Continental Congresses. When the delegates to Congress declared independence from Great Britain on July 2, 1776, they also secured Philadelphia’s enduring place in American history. In military action as well ⇒ Read More
Colonial Era
Jean R. Soderlund When Lenape Indians in July 1694 crossed the Delaware River from New Jersey to meet with Pennsylvania government officials, they represented a people whose homeland became the Greater Philadelphia region: southeastern Pennsylvania, central and southern New Jersey, and Delaware. Despite their decline in population from European diseases, the Lenapes remained strong. They ⇒ Read More
Before Colonization
Humans began to establish permanent settlements in the vicinity of Philadelphia approximately 2,800 years ago, centuries before Europeans claimed the lands along the Delaware River for the colonies of New Sweden, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. By the time Europeans arrived in the seventeenth century, the Lenape people inhabited a region along the Mid-Atlantic coast between ⇒ Read More
Matthew Smalarz
Matthew Smalarz teaches history at Manor College in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, where he serves as Chair of Social Sciences as well as History and Social Sciences Coordinator. He received the Outstanding Educator of the Year Award for the 2016-2017 academic year.
Jeffery M. Dorwart
Jeffery M. Dorwart is the author of histories of the Philadelphia Navy Yard; Fort Mifflin of Philadelphia; Naval Air Station Wildwood; Camden and Cape May Counties, New Jersey; Office of Naval Intelligence; Ferdinand Eberstadt and James Forrestal. Dorwart is Professor Emeritus of History, Rutgers University.
David Sullivan
David Sullivan is an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer.
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Francis J. Ryan
Francis J. Ryan is Professor and Director of American Studies at La Salle University. He is a co-author of Drowning in the Clear Pool: Cultural Narcissism, Technology & Character Education (Peter Lang Publishing, 2002). He is working on the history of progressive education in the Philadelphia Catholic schools, 1890-2010.
Laura Holzman
Laura Holzman is Assistant Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.
Greater Philadelphia
Civic boosters in the late nineteenth century adopted “Greater Philadelphia” as a phrase denoting aspirations for progress as well as way of describing the region including Philadelphia and extending beyond its boundaries. For more than a century since, numerous businesses and other organizations, including The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, have signaled their regional scope by ⇒ Read More
Philadelphia and the World
From its origins as a series of settlements at the edge of the Atlantic World to the age of international air travel, Greater Philadelphia has been a crossroads of global interaction and exchange. With a diverse population from the start, inhabited by Native Americans and then colonized by Dutch, Swedes, Englishmen, Germans, and Africans, the ⇒ Read More
Philadelphia and the Nation
Philadelphia’s central role in the birth of a new nation is not to be underestimated. But the commemoration of the Declaration of Independence, the work of the Continental Congress, and the writing of the Constitution in the city have tended to overshadow the ways in which the Philadelphia region’s entire story is in many ways ⇒ Read More
Charles Hardy III
Charles Hardy III is a professor of history at West Chester University. Supervising historian of ExplorePAhistory.com, he is also the co-author, with David Goldenberg, of Philadelphia All the Time: Sounds of the Quaker City, 1896 to 1947 (Rydal, Pa.: Spinning Disc Productions, 1992).
John F. Bauman
John F. Bauman is Visiting Research Professor at the Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine and the author of books and journal articles on a broad range of modern urban policy issues.
William W. Cutler III
William W. Cutler III is Professor of History, emeritus, at Temple University whose research and teaching focus on the relationships between education and American Culture. He was a member of the Jenkintown Board of School Directors for eight years (1995 to 2003), the last two as president. His books include Parents and Schools: The 150-Year ⇒ Read More
Catherine D’Ignazio
Catherine D’Ignazio holds a Ph.D. in Urban Education from Temple University. She is an Adjunct Professor of History at Rutgers University-Camden.
John P. Spencer
John P. Spencer is Associate Professor of Education at Ursinus College. He is the author of In the Crossfire: Marcus Foster and the Troubled History of American School Reform (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
Ryan D. Purcell
Ryan D. Purcell is an M.A. candidate in American History with a concentration in urban culture at Rutgers University.
James J. Wyatt
James J. Wyatt is the Director of Programs and Research at the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education at Shepherd University and President of the Association of Centers for the Study of Congress. He is curator of the traveling exhibit “Robert C. Byrd: Senator, Statesman, West Virginian” and co-curator of the collaborative ⇒ Read More
John B. Osborne
John B. Osborne is an Emeritus Professor of History at Millersville University of Pennsylvania.
Brian Hendricks
Brian Hendricks is a Ph.D. candidate in early American history at Southern Illinois University. His research focuses on the election of 1796 and the growth of political parties in New York and Pennsylvania.
Steven McGrail
Steven McGrail, Ph.D. Candidate in U.S. History, Rutgers University – New Brunswick, specialty: cultural history and national identity; advisors: Jackson Lears, David Foglesong, Ann Fabian.
Billy G. Smith
Billy G. Smith is Professor of History at Montana State University. Much of his research focuses on poorer people and runaway slaves in early America as well the experience of everyday life. Ship of Death: The Voyage that Changed the Atlantic World is forthcoming from Yale University Press.
Paul Sivitz
Paul Sivitz earned his PhD from Montana State University in 2012. His research focuses on early America, the history of science, and mapping late eighteenth-century Philadelphia. Currently, he teaches at Idaho State University.
Trees
Trees have been culturally, environmentally, and symbolically significant to the Philadelphia region since the city’s founding. They were believed to improve public health, they beautified and refined city streets, parks, and other green spaces, and several were revered as living memorials to past historical events. Trees also faced their fair share of destruction during the ⇒ Read More
Peter Hendee Brown
Peter Hendee Brown is an architect, planner, and urban development consultant based in the Twin Cities. He teaches private sector real estate development at the University of Minnesota and is the author of America’s Waterfront Revival: Port Authorities and Urban Redevelopment. Before moving to Minneapolis in 2003, he lived for seventeen years in Philadelphia, where he ⇒ Read More
Artifact: Door Knob
The scales of justice and a key, depicted against a shield on this door knob, presented symbols of authority to those who passed through the doors of the Lazaretto south of Philadelphia. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, the Lazaretto was the first stop for immigrants and merchants on incoming ships whose passengers and cargo ⇒ Read More
Treaty of Shackamaxon
The Treaty of Shackamaxon, otherwise known as William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians or “Great Treaty,” is Pennsylvania’s most longstanding historical tradition, a counterpart to the foundation stories of Virginia (John Smith and Pocahontas) and New England (the first Thanksgiving). According to the tradition, soon after William Penn (1644-1718) arrived in Pennsylvania in late October ⇒ Read More
Lance R. Eisenhower
Lance R. Eisenhower is a Lecturer of History at Montgomery County Community College. He holds an M.A. in history from Villanova University.
Thomas H. Keels
Thomas H. Keels is a local historian and the author or co-author of six books on Philadelphia, including Forgotten Philadelphia: Lost Architecture of the Quaker City (Temple University Press, 2007). His latest work, Sesqui! Greed, Graft, and the Forgotten World’s Fair of 1926, a study of the ill-fated Sesquicentennial International Exposition, will be published by ⇒ Read More
Dennis Downey
Dennis Downey is Professor of History and Director of the University Honors College at Millersville University. He is at work on a new book, A World Apart: The Story of the Pennhurst State School and Hospital.
Augustin Cerveaux
Augustin Cerveaux is an independent scholar and former fellow of the Chemical Heritage Foundation.
Anne E. Krulikowski
Anne E. Krulikowski holds a Ph.D. in American history with a concentration in material culture/preservation from the University of Delaware. She teaches at West Chester University.
Zachary M. Schrag
Zachary M. Schrag is a professor of history at George Mason University. He is at work on a book about the 1844 riots.
Charlene Mires
Charlene Mires is the author of Independence Hall in American Memory (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) and Capital of the World: The Race to Host the United Nations (NYU Press, 2013). She is Professor of History at Rutgers-Camden and Editor-in-Chief of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia.
Jacqueline Beatty
Jacqueline Beatty is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University.
Patrick Grubbs
Patrick Grubbs is an advanced Ph.D. student at Lehigh University and is writing his dissertation entitled “Bringing Order to the State: How Order Triumphed in Pennsylvania.” He has also been employed at Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, since 2009 and has taught Pennsylvania history there since 2011.
Scott Gabriel Knowles
Scott Gabriel Knowles is associate professor of history at Drexel University. He is the author of The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America (2011) and Imagining Philadelphia: Edmund Bacon and the Future of the City (2009).
Harry Kyriakodis
Harry Kyriakodis is the author of Philadelphia’s Lost Waterfront (The History Press, 2011) and Northern Liberties: The Story of a Philadelphia River Ward (The History Press, 2012). He is a founding/certified member of the Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides.
Andrew Heath
Andrew Heath is a Lecturer in American History at the University of Sheffield, U.K. He is currently writing a book on the Consolidation of 1854.
John Hepp
John Hepp is Associate Professor of History at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and he teaches American urban and cultural history with an emphasis on the period 1800 to 1940.
Kerry L. Bryan
Kerry L. Bryan holds a Master’s of Education from Chestnut Hill College and received training in historical research as a candidate for a Master of Liberal Arts degree at the University of Pennsylvania. As a historical consultant, she contributed to developing the “Philadelphia 1862: A City at War” exhibit at the Heritage Center at the Union League ⇒ Read More
Brandi Scardilli
Brandi Scardilli graduated from Rutgers University–Camden with an M.A. in history.
Vibiana Bowman Cvetkovic
Vibiana Bowman Cvetkovic is a Reference Librarian at the Paul Robeson Library. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the Childhood Studies program at Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey. Cvetkovic’s area of research and writing include children and media, intellectual ethics, and American popular culture. She is the coeditor of Fleeting Image: Portrayals of Children in ⇒ Read More
Dianna Marder
Dianna Marder is a journalist who retired in 2012 after 27 years as a staff writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where she wrote about the courts, crime, and the cultural impact of food.
Stephanie Grauman Wolf
Stephanie Grauman Wolf is a senior fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania.
Daniel Sidorick
Daniel Sidorick has taught history at Temple and Rutgers Universities and the College of New Jersey. His book Condensed Capitalism: Campbell Soup and the Pursuit of Cheap Production in the Twentieth Century (Cornell University Press) was awarded the Richard P. McCormick Prize by the New Jersey Historical Commission.
George W. Dowdall
George W. Dowdall is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Saint Joseph’s University and Adjunct Fellow, Center for Public Health Initiatives, University of Pennsylvania.
Peter Cole
Peter Cole is a Professor of History at Western Illinois University in Macomb. His current research compares how longshore workers in Durban, South Africa and the San Francisco Bay area participated in the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements as well as how they responded to radical technological changes in global trade.
Brenna O’Rourke Holland
Brenna O’Rourke Holland earned her Ph.D. in history at Temple University. Her dissertation, “Free Market Family: Gender, Capitalism, and the Life of Stephen Girard,” is a cultural biography of Philadelphia merchant-turned-banker Stephen Girard that interrogates the transition to capitalism in the early American Republic. As an undergraduate at Colgate University, she was a coxswain for ⇒ Read More
Madison Eggert-Crowe
Madison Eggert-Crowe is a graduate of Drexel University (2010) and is pursuing her Master’s in Public Administration at University of Pennsylvania’s Fels Institute of Government.
Hannah Farber
Hannah Farber is a Ph. D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, completing a dissertation on early American marine insurance in politics and culture. During 2012-13 she held fellowships at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.
Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley
Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley is Associate Curator of American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Richardson Dilworth
Richardson Dilworth is Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Public Policy at Drexel University. His books include Social Capital in the City: Community and Civic Life in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).
Emma J. Lapsansky Werner
Emma Lapsansky Werner is Professor of History Emeritus at Haverford College, where she was Curator of the Quaker Collection.
Inga Saffron
Inga Saffron is the Architecture Critic at the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Howard Gillette Jr.
Howard Gillette Jr. is Professor Emeritus of History at Rutgers University-Camden and co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia.
Gary B. Nash
Gary B. Nash is Professor of History Emeritus at UCLA and the author of many books, including First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
Linn Washington Jr.
Linn Washington Jr. is Associate Professor of Journalism at Temple University and Co-Director of Philadelphianeighborhoods.com.
Michael Zuckerman
Michael Zuckerman is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania.
Chris Satullo
Chris Satullo is Executive Director of News and Civic Dialogue at WHYY.
David A. Canton
David Canton is Associate Professor of History at Connecticut College and author of Raymond Pace Alexander: A New Negro Lawyer Fights for Civil Rights in Philadelphia (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010).
Automats
Beloved by generations of diners and immortalized in art, song, cinema, and poetic verse, Automats, also known as “automatics” or “waiterless restaurants,” were popular manifestations of an early-twentieth century modernizing impulse. Influenced by studies of scientific management by Frederick W. Taylor and the widespread use of the assembly line, the Automat removed the process of ⇒ Read More
Michael A. Martorelli
Michael A. Martorelli is a Director at the investment banking firm Fairmount Partners in West Conshohocken, and a frequent contributor to Financial History magazine.
Bill Leon Smith
Bill Leon Smith is pursuing his PhD in Early American History at the College of William and Mary. He is also an Associate Fellow with the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. His research focuses on the development of animal ethics and other forms of humanitarianism during the eighteenth century. Prior to William and Mary, he ⇒ Read More
Will Caverly
Will Caverly is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Villanova University.
Amanda McClain
Amanda McClain is Assistant Professor of Communications at Holy Family University.
Jordan McClain
Jordan McClain is Assistant Teaching Professor of Communication at Drexel University.
Dan Royles
Dan Royles is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Florida International University. His first book, To Make the Wounded Whole: African American Responses to HIV/AIDS, is under advance contract with the University of North Carolina Press.
James Wolfinger
James Wolfinger is associate professor of history and education at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. He is the author of numerous articles on Philadelphia’s history as well as the book Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love.
Richard S. Newman
Richard S. Newman is Professor of History at Rochester Institute of Technology and the author of Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (NYU Press).
Michael Karpyn
Michael Karpyn teaches History, Economics, and Advanced Placement U.S. Government and Politics at Marple Newtown Senior High School in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania. He has served as a Summer Teaching Fellow at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, where he is a member of the Teacher Advisory Group.
Hillary S. Kativa
Hillary S. Kativa received her B.A. in History and English from Dickinson College ’05 and her M.A. in History from Villanova University ’08. Her research interests include American political history and presidential campaigns, public history, and digital humanities.
Test VRs
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Center City Map
Forming the core of civic, commercial, and residential life since Philadelphia’s seventeenth-century founding, Center City has been a continually evolving experiment in urban living and management. Consisting of the roughly rectangular area bounded by Vine Street at the north, South Street to the south, the Schuylkill at the west and the Delaware River at the ⇒ Read More
David Reader
David Reader teaches history at Camden Catholic High School and as an adjunct at Saint Joseph’s University. He was the recipient of the James Madison Memorial Fellowship in 2007.
Doreen Skala
Doreen Skala holds a master’s degree in history from Rutgers University with a focus in colonial and transatlantic history. Her research has been published as a book chapter and as an article at a British historical society.
Northwest Philadelphia Map
Northwest Philadelphia, bound loosely by the Roosevelt Expressway to the south, Broad Street to the east, and the suburbs of Montgomery County to the north and west, has origins as old as the city itself. Developing around the Schuylkill and Wissahickon Creek waterways, and later Fairmount Park, the Northwest expanded and changed with the advent ⇒ Read More
South Philadelphia Map
From the film Rocky (1976) to the Italian Market, South Philadelphia’s image as an urban village has been entwined with Italian immigration. While South Philadelphia’s large Italian immigrant community marked the neighborhood in many ways, an array of ethnic, racial, and religious groups have resided in South Philadelphia since the seventeenth century, making its history ⇒ Read More
Bucks County Map
Bucks County, one of three counties established in 1682 by William Penn (1644-1718), originally stretched northward along the Delaware River all the way to the Delaware Water Gap and westward past Allentown. Even after shrinking dramatically when Northampton and Lehigh Counties were carved from its territory in 1752, the county still encompassed multiple regions that ⇒ Read More
Delaware County Map
Carved out of Chester County in 1789 (with the remainder of that county lying to its southwest), Delaware County long served as a distinct but close neighbor to the City of Philadelphia. Linked to the Philadelphia port from the eighteenth century onward, the eastern part of the county, including Chester and its neighboring municipalities along ⇒ Read More
Montgomery County Map
The early Europeans who settled in what would become Montgomery County in the eighteenth century tended prosperous farms, forges, and mills. They depended on the Philadelphia market to sell their products and on its port to connect them to the wider colonial world. Subsequent generations built a dense transportation network that linked county laborers, suppliers, ⇒ Read More
Chester County Map
As one of the original counties established by William Penn (1644-1718), Chester County was only modestly influenced by Philadelphia in its early development because after 1789 it shared no border with the city. Although the Pennsylvania Railroad linked the county’s central valley to Philadelphia in the mid-nineteenth century, it remained a largely rural landscape whose ⇒ Read More
West Philadelphia Map
Reaching from the Schuylkill River to the western city line, West Philadelphia developed as a distant suburb of Philadelphia between 1720 and 1840. Increasingly linked to the city during the nineteenth century by population growth, bridges, and new forms of transportation, West Philadelphia offers insights about American suburbanization throughout the processes of revolution, industrialization, and ⇒ Read More
Southwest Philadelphia Map
Southwest Philadelphia, often described as “far” Southwest, is possibly the least known area of the city, even to Philadelphians. Yet, Kingsessing, as this vicinity was originally known, was the first section of Philadelphia settled by Europeans and in the twentieth century came to national attention as the Eastwick Urban Redevelopment Project. With the Philadelphia International ⇒ Read More
North Philadelphia Map
Where exactly North Philadelphia begins and ends is a matter of debate. Even native Philadelphians have difficulty identifying the boundaries of this area of their city with precision. This is likely because so many of the neighborhoods located north, northeast, or northwest of Philadelphia’s center enjoy common histories and developmental patterns and consequently look a ⇒ Read More
Northeast Philadelphia Map
From its initial, colonial foundations as a sparsely populated farming hinterland to its dramatic postwar housing development after World War II, Northeast Philadelphia developed into a desirable destination for those seeking to improve their economic, social, and cultural standing within Philadelphia’s city boundaries. Stretching from Frankford in the lower Northeast to Somerton in the Far ⇒ Read More
Walter Licht
Walter Licht is Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include Getting Work: Philadelphia, 1840-1950 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992).
Artifact: Pretzel
Philadelphia soft pretzels are distinguished from all others by their shape (a figure-8, not loopy with a thick center and thinner ends), their texture (chewy, not crunchy), and their distribution method (look for them on street corners, not supermarkets). They come lightly salted, or, on request, as “baldies.” — Text by Dianna Marder
Public Education: Suburbs
In the second half of the twentieth century, many parents moved their families out of Philadelphia, Camden, or Wilmington so that their children could enroll in suburban public schools because they perceived them to be better than their urban counterparts. Before then, many believed that the best public schools were urban and that rural schools ⇒ Read More
African American Migration
People of African descent have migrated to Philadelphia since the seventeenth century. First arriving in bondage, either directly from Africa or by way of the Caribbean, they soon developed a small but robust community that grew throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although African Americans faced employment discrimination, disfranchisement, and periodic race riots in the ⇒ Read More
Sullivan Principles
The Global Sullivan Principles, launched in 1977 by Philadelphia civil rights leader Leon H. Sullivan (1922-2001), represent one of the twentieth century’s most powerful attempts to effect social justice through economic leverage. More a sustained movement than a static document, the principles sought to bring the power of American investment in South Africa to bear ⇒ Read More
Insurance
Insurance is sometimes called an “invisible” element of commerce, but in Philadelphia, it has never been far from view. From the eighteenth century through the twenty-first, Philadelphia’s leadership in the field of insurance has enhanced the city’s preeminence in many types of commercial and communal endeavor. Insurance in Philadelphia, over the years, has meant everything ⇒ Read More
Recording Industry
The birthplace of the American “record” industry, the Philadelphia region for more than a century has been home to a thriving industry of recording studios and record companies. In Camden, New Jersey, the Victor Company in the early 1900s was the nation’s largest manufacturer of musical recordings. Since then, Philadelphia’s unique concentration of diversified industries, ⇒ Read More
Byberry (Philadelphia State Hospital)
From the arrival of its first patients in 1911 to 1990, when the Commonwealth formally closed it down, the Philadelphia State Hospital, popularly known as Byberry, was the home for thousands of mental patients. In its early decades Byberry was controlled by the city, and from 1938 onward it was one of the several hundred ⇒ Read More
Broad Street
“No other street in America quite compares with Broad Street,” wrote E. Digby Baltzell, author of Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, of the varied architecture north and south of City Hall. Philadelphia’s Broad Street goes past stores, churches, synagogues, museums, funeral parlors, fast food places, gas stations, apartment houses, and rows and rows of row ⇒ Read More
Settlement Houses
The settlement house movement, a phenomenon of the Progressive era with origins in London, spread to Philadelphia in the 1890s as a large influx of needy immigrants and unsanitary conditions in the city attracted the attention of middle-class, college-educated reformers. Living among the poor in South Philadelphia, Kensington, and other neighborhoods, settlement house residents sought ⇒ Read More
Boathouse Row
Philadelphia’s Boathouse Row is a National Historic Landmark that reflects the city’s fusion of sport, culture, and history. The boathouses, built in the second half of the nineteenth-century, line the eastern bank of the Schuylkill River just north of the Fairmount Waterworks. Lit at night with thousands of glowing bulbs, they form a welcoming beacon ⇒ Read More
Knights of Labor
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 ⇒ Read More
Public Baths and Bathing
Public bathing became a civil and social imperative in the Philadelphia region and elsewhere in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century. Following the cholera epidemic of 1849, which devastated the American population, leaving hundreds of thousands of deaths in its wake, including that of President James K. Polk, it became ⇒ Read More
Haitian Revolution
The Haitian Revolution, the most successful slave revolt in the history of the modern world, caused large numbers of both blacks and whites to flee the Caribbean, with many relocating to the United States. In 1793 Philadelphia received hundreds of these refugees, including white slaveholders and their black slaves. Foreign policy decisions also were made ⇒ Read More
Rocky
More than just a popular series of Hollywood films or the fictional prizefighter whose life and career they chronicle, Rocky is a late-twentieth-century cultural phenomenon that reframed Philadelphia for local, national, and international audiences. Rocky premiered in 1976. Written by and starring Sylvester Stallone (b. 1946), the film introduced audiences to Rocky Balboa: a down-and-out ⇒ Read More
Immigration (1790-1860)
The revival of immigration to Philadelphia and its surrounding region in the early nineteenth century provided one of the most powerful elements in reshaping the city’s society. After a decline in immigration during the wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, the growing industrialization of the Philadelphia region began to attract streams of ⇒ Read More
Streetcars
For more than 150 years streetcars have served the Philadelphia area and helped Center City Philadelphia retain its commercial, retail, and entertainment supremacy in an ever-expanding region. Although the motive power switched from horses to electricity (with short detours into steam and cable), most change has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Perhaps the greatest transformation ⇒ Read More
Bicentennial (1976)
Planners of Philadelphia’s Bicentennial celebration in 1976, aware of the incredible success of the 1876 Centennial as well as the flop of the 1926 Sesquicentennial, hoped to showcase the growth and ambitions of the city while also commemorating the two-hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. While the big celebrations drew crowds of Americans, the ⇒ Read More
Great Depression
The Great Depression, which lasted from 1929 to 1941, was characterized in both the Philadelphia region and the nation by a severe contraction in all levels of economic activity, massive unemployment, widespread bank failures, and sharp price deflation. Many people lost their life savings and their homes. Untold thousands went hungry; some starved. It led ⇒ Read More
Taverns
From small operations in the colonial era to elaborate social spaces in the twenty-first century, taverns in and around Philadelphia have been vital institutions, offering respite, nourishment, and camaraderie to travelers and patrons. Over time, attitudes and laws regarding the consumption of alcohol altered the character of the tavern and gave rise to modern hotels, ⇒ Read More
South Philadelphia
From the film Rocky (1976) to the Italian Market, South Philadelphia’s image as an urban village has been entwined with Italian immigration. While South Philadelphia’s large Italian immigrant community marked the neighborhood in many ways, an array of ethnic, racial, and religious groups have resided in South Philadelphia since the seventeenth century, making its history ⇒ Read More
Row Houses
Lining Philadelphia’s straight, gridiron streets, the row house defines the vernacular architecture of the city and reflects the ambitions of the people who built and lived there. Row houses were built to fit all levels of taste and budgets, from single-room bandbox plans to grand town houses. The row house was easy to build on ⇒ Read More
New Civic Partner: Camden County Historical Society
We are pleased to extend the coalition of civic partners involved with The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia into South Jersey with the addition of the Camden County Historical Society. Watch for items from the CCHS collections to be featured in the image galleries that accompany topics of regional interest.
Immigration (1930-Present)
For most of the decades since the United States’ immigration restriction acts of the 1920s, Philadelphia was not a major destination for immigrants, but at the end of the twentieth century the region re-emerged as a significant gateway. Beginning with changes in U.S. law in 1965 and accelerating by the 1990s, immigration added large, diverse ⇒ Read More
Paints and Varnishes
From colonial times to the nationwide deindustrialization trend starting in the 1950s, Philadelphia played a leading role in providing American and overseas markets with quality paints and varnishes. “Oil and Colours” merchants of the colonial period turned, during the early nineteenth century, into family-owned-and-managed manufacturing companies, as they opened paint and varnish factories in Center ⇒ Read More
Printing and Publishing
From the late seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century, Philadelphia’s printing and publishing industry was a central component of the city’s evolution from “Green Country Town” to “Cradle of Liberty” to “Workshop of the World.” Growing their operations from small do-it-all shops into large fully mechanized publishing houses, Philadelphia’s printers and publishers capitalized on the ⇒ Read More
Public Transportation
For more than three centuries public transportation has helped both to shape and define the Greater Philadelphia region. Befitting one of the world’s largest cities, Philadelphia and its hinterland have been served by a bewildering array of transportation options, and these vehicles and routes have helped to define the extent of the region. Public transportation ⇒ Read More
Roman Catholic Education
(Elementary and Secondary)
Parochial schools in the Philadelphia region share a common Catholic mission and similar patterns of growth and development. For more than three centuries they have responded to the changing characteristics of the region’s Catholic population. Several of these developments, such as schools for specific ethnic groups, occurred in Philadelphia, Camden, N.J., and Wilmington, Del., within ⇒ Read More
Anchors of Civic Life?
Shopping Centers Not All They Could Have been
The regional shopping mall is so much a part of modern American culture it is easy enough to forget how much more was expected of it with its introduction in the 1950s than simply being an “engine of commerce.” Taken together with David Sullivan’s entry on department stores, Matthew Smalarz’s essay on shopping centers suggests ⇒ Read More
Shopping Centers
Shopping centers, which bound retailers together into one physically convenient and accessible commercial venue for suburban consumers, profoundly altered Greater Philadelphia, redefining the region’s socioeconomic dimensions and destabilizing the city’s old, commercial core, the Central Business District. Commercial retailing also underwent significant changes, as the location, planning, and physical proportions of shopping facilities dramatically transformed ⇒ Read More
Fox Hunting
Fox hunting, the sport of mounted riders following a pack of hounds that are hunting a fox by scent, became a popular leisure activity of the emerging gentry in the Philadelphia region during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It survives as a twenty-first-century pastime, even though development has reduced the available countryside, and animal-rights activists ⇒ Read More
Animal Protection
Moral doubt over the cruel usage of animals has a long history in Philadelphia. Public disapproval of such treatment surfaced by the late eighteenth century, but even with comprehensive laws designed to protect animals, and organizations devoted to enforcing those laws, the region has struggled to extend adequate protection to its nonhuman animals. Benjamin Franklin ⇒ Read More
Nativist Riots of 1844
In May and July 1844, Philadelphia suffered some of the bloodiest rioting of the antebellum period, as anti-immigrant mobs attacked Irish-American homes and Roman Catholic churches before being suppressed by the militia. The violence was part of a wave of riots that convulsed American cities starting in the 1830s. Yet even amid this tumult, they ⇒ Read More
Delaware Avenue (Columbus Boulevard)
Delaware Avenue, the north-south thoroughfare closest to the Delaware River in Philadelphia, owes its existence to the richest man in America, who wanted a grand avenue along the central waterfront. The street, including a portion renamed Columbus Boulevard in the 1990s, played a significant role in the development of Philadelphia’s maritime activity, particularly food distribution ⇒ Read More
Subways and Elevated Lines
Philadelphia’s subway and elevated network consists of four lines that connect with other transportation options to serve much of the region. Although the network is relatively simple compared with systems in other cities, its history is complex. It took over eight decades to plan and to build, and its construction required a variety of public-private ⇒ Read More
Public Education: High Schools
From one of America’s earliest public secondary schools to the large, neighborhood high schools of the early twentieth century and sprawling suburban campuses after World War II, through later experiments aimed at restructuring and reforming urban high schools, Greater Philadelphia has been notable in the development of secondary education in the United States. Central High ⇒ Read More
Food Processing
The food industry has always held a special place in Philadelphia and its surrounding region, though it never became a center of a massive industry like meatpacking in Chicago. Still, the methods of processing food at different periods and the people who did the work tell much about the state of Philadelphia’s economy and its ⇒ Read More
Campbell Soup Company
Anyone crossing the Benjamin Franklin Bridge from Philadelphia to Camden during most of the twentieth century saw one of the best-known icons of American consumerism, the giant Campbell-Soup-can water towers looming over the company’s flagship cannery. Campbell Soup may have been “America’s Favorite Food,” as the title of the company-sponsored history claims, but it was ⇒ Read More
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
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 ⇒ Read More
Sounds of the City: The Colonial Era
Soon after its founding, Philadelphia quickly crossed the threshold from a mere rural agglomeration into a true city, complete with an urban soundscape. In contrast to the countryside, where large distances and tree lines weakened the intensity of sound traveling between farms, within the city neighbors had no choice but to hear the diverse noises ⇒ Read More
Sports Mascots
The origins of the word “mascot” can be traced to France, where it was once used to describe anything that brought luck. But in the sports world, mascots are much more than good-luck charms. They are larger-than-life cheerleaders who encourage fans to root for the home team, laugh, and even have some fun at the ⇒ Read More
Consolidation Act of 1854
The Consolidation Act of 1854 extended Philadelphia’s territory from the two-square-mile “city proper” founded by William Penn to nearly 130 square miles, making the municipal borders coterminous with Philadelphia County and turning the metropolis into the largest in extent in the nation, a position it held until Chicago leapt ahead in 1889. Consolidation’s supporters believed ⇒ Read More
Putting the Delaware River Port Authority in Context
News that a grand jury is considering possible corruption in the award of economic development funds by the Delaware River Port Authority to politically connected recipients makes Peter Hendee Brown’s posting on the DRPA on this site especially timely. What the DRPA is supposed to do and how it operates is hard to grasp from ⇒ Read More
Delaware River Port Authority
The Delaware River Port Authority (DRPA) was created nearly one hundred years ago as a bi-state commission for the purpose of building a single toll bridge. By the 1930s regional leaders had started to envision a larger maritime role for their new agency, but efforts to broaden its powers to include port operations were repeatedly ⇒ Read More
Political Parties (Origins, 1790s)
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 capital. A decade that began with the unanimously-chosen George Washington (1732-99) as the first President of the United States ended with partisan rancor, ⇒ Read More
Defining Greater Philadelphia
Richard Florida, well-known for introducing the term “creative class,” has recently released an assessment of the class divide distinguishing the Philadelphia area. Part of a larger series on U.S. cities, the report draws from the U.S. Census American Community Survey to designate areas across the region as part of one of three classes: creative, service, ⇒ Read More
New Civic Partner:
Global Philadelphia Association
The mission of the Global Philadelphia Association is “to assist—and to encourage greater interaction among—the many organizations and people who are engaged in international activity in the Greater Philadelphia Region, to promote the development of an international consciousness within the region, and to enhance the region’s global profile.” We are pleased to have Global Philadelphia ⇒ Read More
Northwest Philadelphia
Northwest Philadelphia, bound loosely by the Roosevelt Expressway to the south, Broad Street to the east, and the suburbs of Montgomery County to the north and west, has origins as old as the city itself. Developing around the Schuylkill and Wissahickon Creek waterways, and later Fairmount Park, the Northwest expanded and changed with the advent ⇒ Read More
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 ⇒ Read More
Philadelphia Negro (The)
In 1899, the University of Pennsylvania published The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, the first scholarly race study of an urban place in what became a growing trend of Progressive-era social surveys. The massive report about Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward became a distinctive (and still relevant) landmark in the annals of sociological study and social advocacy. ⇒ Read More
City Hall (Philadelphia)
Constructed over a thirty-year period at a cost approaching $25 million, Philadelphia City Hall stands as a monument both to the city’s grand ambitions and to the extravagance of its political culture. Controversial from the outset–for its location, its architecture, and the patronage it commanded on behalf of its construction–the structure nonetheless came to be ⇒ Read More
Centennial Exhibition (1876)
The International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine, more simply known as “the Centennial,” opened in Fairmount Park to great fanfare on May 10, 1876, and closed with equal flourish six months later. Modeled after the Crystal Palace Great Exhibition in London in 1851, and the first in a long ⇒ Read More
Shipbuilding and Shipyards
Perhaps no business, industry, or institution illuminates the history of the Greater Philadelphia region from the seventeenth century to the present day more clearly than shipbuilding and shipyards. This may seem surprising since Philadelphia and nearby Delaware riverfront ports lie one hundred miles from the Atlantic Ocean up an often treacherous Delaware Bay and river ⇒ Read More
Pennhurst State School and Hospital
During eight decades of continuous operation (1908-87), Pennhurst evolved from a model facility into the subject of tremendous public scandal and controversy before the federal courts ordered it closed and the remaining residents moved elsewhere. Twenty years after its closure, the Pennhurst campus was recognized as an International Site of Conscience and its history became ⇒ Read More
Ladies Association of Philadelphia
Philadelphia was a center of patriotic fervor and activity during the American Revolution. Many of its residents, including women, participated in the war for independence by providing material and moral support for the “patriot” cause. On June 12, 1780, one such Philadelphian, Esther De Berdt Reed (1746-80), penned a broadside entitled “Sentiments of an American ⇒ Read More
Slavery and the Slave Trade
Slavery and the slave trade were central to the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Philadelphia as the region economically benefited from the institution and dealt with tensions created by slave trading, slave holding, and abolitionism. Early Philadelphia, an Atlantic trading hub, became both a focal point for the slave trade and a community of enslaved ⇒ Read More
Abolitionism
Few regions in the United States can claim an abolitionist heritage as rich as Philadelphia. By the time Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79) launched The Liberator in 1831, the Philadelphia area’s confrontation with human bondage was nearly 150 years old. Still, Philadelphia abolitionism is often treated as a distant cousin of the epic nineteenth-century ⇒ Read More
Spanish-American Revolutions
As a port with longstanding commercial, cultural, and political connections with Spanish America, Philadelphia played a significant role in the era of Spanish-American revolutions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The City of Brotherly Love welcomed individuals escaping Spanish domination and helped to support their ideas about liberty, equality and independence. Philadelphia’s ⇒ Read More
French Revolution
The French Revolution of 1789 created political, social, and financial instability throughout Europe, prompting many terrified French aristocrats, businessmen, and intellectuals to flee to the United States. Philadelphia, with its cosmopolitan atmosphere, accessible port, and thriving commerce, attracted many of the French émigrés. Most settled along the Delaware River in the Mulberry district of Philadelphia ⇒ Read More
William Penn Foundation Grant
We are pleased to announce that The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia will enhance its digital platform with a two-year, $81,040 grant awarded by the William Penn Foundation to the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (MARCH) at Rutgers–Camden, the Encyclopedia’s institutional home. The grant will allow us to add photo galleries of material artifacts; place-mapping; ⇒ Read More
Flaxseed and Linen
In the colonial era linen and flaxseed were fundamental to the mercantile life of Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley. Philadelphia’s linen and flaxseed market extended from the farthest point of settlement, Fort Pitt, to the fields of England and Ireland. Traveling in a circle of trade across the north Atlantic, these goods forged relationships among ⇒ Read More
Industrial Workers of the World
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. Indeed, there might not have been a more egalitarian ⇒ Read More
Banking
Greater Philadelphia’s banking roots go deeper than those of any region in the country. Philadelphia was the home of the first commercial bank (1782), the first national bank (1791), the first savings bank (1816), and the first savings and loan association (1831). Until the mid-1980s, celebrated local institutions such as First Pennsylvania, Girard, and Provident ⇒ Read More
Laurel Hill Cemetery
Founded in 1836 as an alternative to the overcrowded churchyards of rapidly growing Philadelphia, Laurel Hill Cemetery was the first rural cemetery for the city and the second in the United States. With monuments designed by the era’s most prominent sculptors and architects, it served as elite Philadelphia’s preferred burial place for over a century. ⇒ Read More
Flour Milling
At the time the first European colonists settled in the Delaware Valley, few places in the world were as well-suited to the cultivation of grains. The region’s generous rainfall, mild climate, and rich limestone soils provided the perfect environment for planting wheat, the most desirable and profitable grain in the world. By 1750 the Delaware ⇒ Read More
School Naming
Family names and place names were almost the only names one needed to know when America was composed of small, homogeneous communities. Often interchangeable, such markers signified social and cultural status. But they ceased to be sufficient when America became more diverse and the family less communal. An institution like the school needed