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Reviews of Books
First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory.
By
GARY B. NASH
. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Pp. viii, 383.
$34.95.)
Reviewed by William M. Fowler, Massachusetts Historical Society
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Preserving materials for the study of history is not a democratic process. The first stage of preservation—simple survival—is often serendipitous. These are the materials that have eluded the perils of fire, flood, and neglect. The second stage of preservation, when librarians and curators select those items they deem important enough to be accessioned into their collections, is deliberate. In deciding what will go and what will stay, individuals and institutions play a decisive role in shaping historical memory. In First City, Gary Nash provides a case study of this process as it shaped the historical image of Philadelphia. |
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Nash began this book as a result of his involvement with an exhibit, "Visions and Revisions: Finding Philadelphia's Past," that opened in November 1989 at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The goal of the exhibit was to introduce to the public "a Philadelphia they barely knew" (p. 9). In presenting this new vision of the city, Nash and his collaborators had to examine first the origins of the traditional views of the City of Brotherly Love. |
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Along with the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the American Philosophical Society and the Library Company played central roles in crafting Philadelphia's historical image. Although each of these institutions adopted different collecting principles, they shared a preference for bringing through the doors materials that told the story of a triumphant Philadelphia. The shelves of these libraries groaned with boxes of papers, often biographical and genealogical in spirit, donated by elite families. The institutions' early founders and directors, as well as donors, understood how useful history could be in preserving their place in a social order that by the mid-nineteenth century was becoming increasingly unstable. |
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Nash is explicit in demonstrating that these institutions deliberately marginalized the working class, blacks, radicals, and immigrants. These were people with whom the institutions' governors were not concerned, and their story was not part of the mainstream plot that advanced the notion of continuous progress. "The founders hoped that by selecting and collecting the right historical materials—books, manuscripts, and artifacts—they could restore a collective memory that might nurture unity and order as people reflected on a less trammeled, more virtuous, and less materialistic past" (p. 17). |
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Despite these efforts, the voices of the under documented were not silenced. Thanks to the American Negro Historical Society, for example, African American materials entered the collections of the Library Company and the Historical Society. Records of charitable institutions with which the city's elite were associated also endured, providing insight into the condition of Philadelphia's sick and poor. In other instances, printed materials such as broadsides, protests, and petitions were collected as examples of printing history with little notice given to their content. Some of these have yielded important social and political data. In nearly every case, however, the survival of such records was either accidental or intended for a purpose other than documenting the life of Philadelphia's underclass. |
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