| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Gary B. Nash. First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory. (Early American Studies.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2002. Pp. 383. $34.95.

Gary B. Nash has undertaken an ambitious effort to trace the founding and growth of the United States' "first city" through the evolving "ideological, cultural, and politically informed agendas" (p. 8) of such keepers of historical memory as the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP) and the Library Company of Philadelphia. This book, an outgrowth of Nash's work on the "Visions and Revisions: Finding Philadelphia's Past" exhibition at the HSP in 1989, blends historical research and artifactual analysis to emerge as something both more and less than a synthetic history of what is arguably the nation's most historically conscious city. In that limbolike status, it represents well the tensions and opportunities that await writers seeking to push the craft of history to a new level of self-awareness and creativity. 1

Working from the city's establishment in 1681 through the Constitution Centennial of 1887, Nash keeps his (and the reader's) eyes fixed through a stereoscopic viewer in an effort to capture both "what really happened" and what we remember of it. The two points of focus blend, in the best of cases, to produce a sharpened, three-dimensional view of Philadelphia; at some times, however, they converge closely enough to cause eyestrain, while at others one subject drifts from the field of view altogether. . . .

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