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Clio's Cornucopia: The Last Quarter Century of Historical Scholarship on Philadelphia
| Fifteen years in the making, Philadelphia: A 300-Year History was the first comprehensive history of Penn's "greene country towne" since 1912 and certainly the most scholarly and interpretive history ever published. With 751 pages of text divided into sixteen chapters and sprinkled with carefully chosen lithographs, paintings, and photographs, the book drew upon senior historians, most of whom were educated in the decades bracketing World War II. Appropriate to their training and interests, the fluidly written essays focused mostly on the city's political, institutional, and cultural history with due attention to religion, economic development, and the built environment. Chief officers of The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Winterthur Museum contributed essays, while other chapters came from the hands of faculty members at Bryn Mawr, Haverford, the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, and a few outlying colleges. It was an insiders' history, |
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A quarter century later, the book still reads well because its authors were skillful wordsmiths and because the authors, mindful that they were trying to reach a broad public audience, happily abandoned stiff academic prose. The essays had whiffs of humor, plenty of bite, and even excursions here and there into the sensational (such as the lurid tales of the Lanzetti brothers, the racket kings who controlled South Philadelphia in the 1930s). The editor (Russell F. Weigley) and the associate editors (Nicholas B. Wainwright and Edwin Wolf 2nd) gave the chapter writers, including themselves, plenty of leash to write forcefully. In his chapter on "The Border City in Civil War," for example, Weigley did not conceal his disgust that it took "the outrageous exclusion of black men who were serving in the armed forces of the Union, and of their families" finally to begin, late in the war, to "crack the resistance of the streetcar companies and the indifference of white Philadelphia" (p. 415). Nor did he shrink from averring that "the first families of Philadelphia did not accept revolution gladly in 1776, and again they did not now," as the nation verged on Civil War (p. 403). Elizabeth Geffen's frank, peppery prose on pre–Civil War racism, antiabolitionism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-laborism leaves the reader no doubts about her progressive outlook. |
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That the 300-Year History is slightly irreverent and steadfastly reformist in its political stance should not have evoked surprise because historians in general, with a few exceptions, are liberal in politics and progressive on social issues. It bears remembering, as well, that the essays were written in the midst of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the women's movement—in other words, in one of the most tumultuous and contested eras of American history. Also, at the time the book was commissioned in 1967, women's history was emerging from its infancy and African American history, building from a thin line of pioneers, was entering a period of rapid expansion that has continued to the present. Thus, the book's authors (or so it seems) were attuned to, if not quite part of, challenges to the consensus school of American history that had come to the fore in the post–World War II years. Considering that what is called "the new social history" was still aborning, most of the authors were ahead of their time in giving some notice to the roles, struggles, and accomplishments of African Americans, women, immigrants, labor organizers, radicals, street life and street gangs, popular culture, sports, and other such topics. |
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