New Philadelphia

New Philadelphia
Author: Gerald A. McWorter
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780910671170

New Philadelphia chronicles the history of a town founded in 1836 in Central Illinois by a freed slave. The book covers the history of the town, the inhabitants, their descendants, and the archeological digs.

New Philadelphia

New Philadelphia
Author: Paul A. Shackel
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2011
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0520266293

"A groundbreaking study in which an engaged archaeology produces nuanced understandings of the past and shapes new understandings of the present. New Philadelphia promotes a rethinking of race relations between African and European Americans."—Claire Smith, President, World Archaeological Congress "Shackel shows in explicit detail how one community archaeology project—dealing with the delicate subject of race—is being put into practice in the American Midwest. This is required reading for archaeologists and historic preservation activists who confront bondage and freedom, and who wrestle with remembrance and representation in real time."—Charles Orser, author of Race and Practice in Archaeological Interpretation "New Philadelphia examines an historic struggle for social justice and the role for archaeology in anti-racist projects. Shackel's engaging narrative shifts among artifacts, landscapes, and documents to illuminate the lives of African Americans and European Americans in a 19th- and early 20th-century community. This is an important book for archaeologists, historians, and cultural heritage practitioners interested in recovering the past to address pressing issues of the present."—Robert Paynter, co-editor of Lines that Divide and co-director of archaeological research at the W.E.B. Du Bois Boyhood Homesite

The Lady from Philadelphia: The Peterkin Papers

The Lady from Philadelphia: The Peterkin Papers
Author: Lucretia P. Hale
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2019-08-27
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1681373777

The Lady from Philadelphia records the antics of the most memorably and hopelessly bumbling of respectable American families. Confronted by the endless challenges of daily life, the Peterkins rise to every occasion with misguided aplomb: They sit out in the sun for hours and fail to go for a ride because they’ve forgotten to unhitch the horse; they play the piano from the porch through the parlor window because the movers left the keyboard turned that way; they decide to raise the ceiling to accommodate a too-tall Christmas tree. Only the timely intervention of their great and good friend, the lady from Philadelphia, can be counted on to get the Peterkins out of their latest scrape. A classic of American children’s literature and a masterpiece of deadpan drollery, The Lady from Philadelphia restores our astonishment at the ordinary, finding a rich vein of humor and happy surprise in the mere fact of our surviving the trivialities and tribulations of family life.

Free Frank

Free Frank
Author: Juliet E.K. Walker
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2021-10-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813184150

The story of Free Frank is not only a testament to human courage and resourcefulness but affords new insight into the American frontier. Born a slave in the South Carolina piedmont in 1777, Frank died a free man in 1854 in a town he had founded in western Illinois. His accomplishments, creditable for any frontiersman, were for a black man extraordinary. We first learn details of Frank's life when in 1795 his owner moved to Pulaski County, Kentucky. We know that he married Lucy, a slave on a neighboring farm, in 1799. Later he was allowed to hire out his time, and when his owner moved to Tennessee, Frank was left in charge of the Kentucky farm. During the War of 1812, he set up his own saltpeter works, an enterprise he maintained until he left Kentucky. In 1817 he purchased his wife's freedom for $800; two years later he bought his own liberty for the same price. Now free, he expanded his activities, purchasing land and dealing in livestock. With his wife and four of his children, Free Frank left Kentucky in 1830 to settle on a new frontier. In Pike County, Illinois, he purchased a farm and later, in 1836, platted and successfully promoted the town of New Philadelphia. The desire for freedom was an obvious spur to his commercial efforts. Through his lifetime of work he purchased the liberty of sixteen members of his family at a cost of nearly $14,000. Goods and services commanded a premium in the life of the frontier. Free Frank's career shows what an exceptional man, through working against great odds, could accomplish through industry, acumen, and aggressiveness. His story suggests a great deal about business activity and legal practices, as well as racial conditions, on the frontier. Juliet Walker has performed a task of historical detection in recreating the life of Free Frank from family traditions, limited personal papers, public documents, and secondary sources. In doing so, she has added a significant chapter to the history of African Americans.

Stolen

Stolen
Author: Richard Bell
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2019-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501169459

This “superbly researched and engaging” (The Wall Street Journal) true story about five boys who were kidnapped in the North and smuggled into slavery in the Deep South—and their daring attempt to escape and bring their captors to justice belongs “alongside the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edward P. Jones, and Toni Morrison” (Jane Kamensky, Professor of American History at Harvard University). Philadelphia, 1825: five young, free black boys fall into the clutches of the most fearsome gang of kidnappers and slavers in the United States. Lured onto a small ship with the promise of food and pay, they are instead met with blindfolds, ropes, and knives. Over four long months, their kidnappers drive them overland into the Cotton Kingdom to be sold as slaves. Determined to resist, the boys form a tight brotherhood as they struggle to free themselves and find their way home. Their ordeal—an odyssey that takes them from the Philadelphia waterfront to the marshes of Mississippi and then onward still—shines a glaring spotlight on the Reverse Underground Railroad, a black market network of human traffickers and slave traders who stole away thousands of legally free African Americans from their families in order to fuel slavery’s rapid expansion in the decades before the Civil War. “Rigorously researched, heartfelt, and dramatically concise, Bell’s investigation illuminates the role slavery played in the systemic inequalities that still confront Black Americans” (Booklist).

True Crime Philadelphia

True Crime Philadelphia
Author: Kathryn Canavan
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2021-11-15
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 1493036165

Serial killer H.H. Holmes built his murder castle in Chicago, but he met the hangman in Philadelphia. Al Capone served his first prison sentence here. The real-life killers who inspired HBO’s Boardwalk Empire lived and died here. America’s first bank robbery was pulled off here in 1798. The country’s first kidnapping for ransom came off without a hitch in 1874. A South Philadelphia man hatched the largest mass murder plot in U.S. history in the 1930s. His partners in crime were unhappy housewives. Catholics and Protestants aimed cannon at each other in city streets in 1844. Civil rights hero Octavius V. Catto was gunned down on South Street in 1871. Take a walk with us through city history. Would you pass Eastern State Penitentiary on April 3, 1945, just as famed bank robber Willie Sutton popped out of an escape tunnel in broad daylight? Or you might have been one of the invited guests at H.H. Holmes’ hanging at Moyamensing Prison on a gray morning in May 1896. It still ranks as one of the most bizarre executions in city history. Or, if you walked down Washington Lane on July 1, 1874, would you have been alert enough to stop the two men who lured little blond Charley Ross away with candy? You might have stopped America’s first kidnapping for ransom, the one that gave rise to the admonition, “Never take candy from a stranger.” The case inspired the Leopold and Loeb kidnapping. Then there was the bank robber whose funeral drew thousands of spectators and the burglary defendant so alluring that conversation would stop whenever she entered the courtroom. Mix in murderous maids, bumbling burglars, and unflinching local heroes and you have True Crime Philadelphia.

The Italian Legacy in Philadelphia

The Italian Legacy in Philadelphia
Author: Andrea Canepari
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2021-12-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1439916470

"The Italian Legacy in Philadelphia examines the impact and influence of Italian arts, culture, people, and ideas on the city of Philadelphia from the founding to the present"--

Just Look Up

Just Look Up
Author: Joe Beckman
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2020-10-14
Genre:
ISBN: 9781634893725

Miracle At Philadelphia

Miracle At Philadelphia
Author: Catherine Drinker Bowen
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Total Pages: 372
Release: 1986-09-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780316103985

A classic history of the Federal Convention at Philadelphia in 1787, the stormy, dramatic session that produced the most enduring of political documents: the Constitution of the United States. From Catherine Drinker Bowen, noted American biographer and National Book Award winner, comes the canonical account of the Constitutional Convention recommended as "required reading for every American." Looked at straight from the records, the Federal Convention is startlingly fresh and new, and Mrs. Bowen evokes it as if the reader were actually there, mingling with the delegates, hearing their arguments, witnessing a dramatic moment in history. Here is the fascinating record of the hot, sultry summer months of debate and decision when ideas clashed and tempers flared. Here is the country as it was then, described by contemporaries, by Berkshire farmers in Massachusetts, by Patrick Henry's Kentucky allies, by French and English travelers. Here, too, are the offstage voices--Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine and John Adams from Europe. In all, fifty-five men attended; and in spite of the heat, in spite of clashing interests--the big states against the little, the slave states against the anti-slave states--in tension and anxiety that mounted week after week, they wrote out a working plan of government and put their signatures to it.