| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Charlene Mires. Independence Hall in American Memory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2002. Pp. xviii, 350. $34.95.

The building we know as Independence Hall was built in 1732, at the edge of town in Philadelphia, as the Pennsylvania State House. The Second Continental Congress began meeting there in May 1775, and in July of the following year members adopted a resolution declaring independence from Great Britain. Eleven years later, delegates met in the same room to draft what became the United States Constitution. The Pennsylvania Assembly continued meeting in the building, sometimes at the same time as these national gatherings and in opposition to them. After Pennsylvania moved its capital west in the 1790s, the structure housed Charles Willson Peale's museum of art and natural history. The city of Philadelphia bought the old state house and refurbished the first-floor "Hall of Independence" for the Marquis de Lafayette's 1824 return to America. Thus historical commemoration became one of the building's formal uses, but it did not displace other uses for many years. The building served as a U.S. courthouse, where fugitive slave hearings sent at least one Philadelphian back to bondage, from one floor above the national altar of freedom. Philadelphia's city councils remodelled the courtroom after the Civil War and met there until the 1890s. For the past century, its uses have been historical.

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