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In early January 1838, weeks following a disastrous military defeat at the hands of the British at Saint-Eustache, in the British colony of Lower Canada, two patriotes leaders, Dr. Robert Nelson and Dr. Edmund O'Callaghan, arrived in Philadelphia. Their mission was to find military and financial support among local residents for the 1837 Rebellion. A few days later, they left empty-handed and disappointed. According to O'Callaghan, those who supported them were incapable to help, while those who had the means to offer concrete assistance were, quite simply, opposed to their crusade. Why did Nelson and O'Callaghan leave empty-handed? Were O'Callaghan's assumptions about the people of Philadelphia correct? This article explains why the Patirote mission to Philadelphia failed and suggests that O'Callaghan was incorrect. The mission did not fail because their allies were too poor while those with money opposed them. Instead, though many actually hoped that the rebels succeeded and offered much moral support and encouragement, all were quite simply unwilling to offer any military or financial support, citing American neutrality, economic uncertainty, and the fear of British retaliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the historiography of the American labor organization Knights of Labor, officially known as the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor. Topics include the organization starting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1869 with a few garment cutters and being formally dissolved in the year 1917.

Although some scholars treat racial residential segregation in northern cities as a twentieth-century phenomenon, recent research on New York and Chicago has shown that black-white segregation was already high and rising by 1880. We draw on data from the Philadelphia Social History Project and other new sources to study trends in this city as far back as 1850 and extending to 1900, a time when DuBois had completed his epic study of The Philadelphia Negro. Segregation of “free negroes” in Philadelphia was high even before the Civil War but did not increase as the total and black populations grew through 1900. Geocoded information from the full-count data from the 1880 Census makes it possible to map the spatial configuration of black residents in fine detail. At the scale of the street segment, segregation in that year was extraordinarily high, reflecting a micropattern in which many blacks lived in alleys and short streets. Although there was considerable class variation in the black community, higher-status black households lived in areas that were little different in racial and class composition than lower-status households. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented on the history of oil company Atlantic Refining Co.'s Point Breeze petroleum refinery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the late 19th to 20th centuries. It discusses various technological and business developments in the context of a nascent industry, the struggle for engineering efficiency in a self-regulation regime, and managerial and ownership developments. It also looks at the costs of such dependence for the safety of residents, workers and the city environment.

John Fawcett's Obi; or, Three Finger'd Jack, a pantomime based on a Jamaican slave revolt of 1780 to 1781, took to the Atlantic stages just as the Saint Domingue insurrection threatened to engulf the Caribbean and spread to North America. The pantomime debuted in London in 1800 and in Philadelphia in 1801, but it was produced and understood quite disparately in the two cities. In London the pantomime and its blackface hero, Jack, elicited multivalent reactions: antislavery sympathy, anticolonial sentiment, and constructions of Jack as a neoclassical hero. In Philadelphia, by contrast, Obi was performed largely as spectacle, and written reactions construed Jack as a one-dimensional savage villain, probably owing to the palpable threat of slave revolt to the city and polity. The signification of the pantomime and its blackface hero was contingent on the site of its performance, but even decades after its Atlantic debuts Jack and Toussaint L'Ouverture were still enduringly linked. Trans- Atlantic iterations of Obi were thus both contributors to and barometers of not only the disparate political and cultural pressures of London and Philadelphia, but also the contested meanings of slave revolt as either savage vengeance or the proving ground for human rights and political agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Determining whether, or to what degree, there was a Quaker aesthetic in Philadelphia has challenged scholars for more than half a century. Through their material choices, nineteenth-century Friends consciously and unconsciously conveyed information and ideas about their religious beliefs and the extent of their intersection with non-Quakers to friends, family members, business associates, strangers, and the world at large. An analysis of Philadelphia Quakers' antebellum photographic consumption, including a comparison with non-Quakers' selections, reveals that although there was a range of choices of attributes in daguerreotypes among Quakers, their portraits fall at the more restrained end of the spectrum. By choosing a gallery, wearing certain clothing, and opting for a daguerreotype of a particular size and elaboration, Friends balanced their own needs with those of their faith and actively participated in the consumer culture of a major metropolitan area. Their choices invite us to look at how people employed material culture--photographic images and clothing here, but also buildings, landscapes, furniture, and everyday items--and put their imprint on the actions of buying, selling, giving, receiving, and using objects and spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at antiquarianism in mid-19th-century Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. According to the author, collectors shaped the meaning of historical authenticity and memory, and focused their efforts on preserving documents and artifacts which reflected their own values and perspectives. It is suggested that their practices influenced future collectors and historians. Details on celebrations of the Centennial of the U.S. are presented. Other topics include women historians and print culture.

This vignette examines the business of Philadelphia photographer James McClees who successfully made the transition from daguerreotypes to paper photography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1823 a group of Orthodox Quaker women in Philadelphia formed the Female Prison Association of Friends in Philadelphia, a female auxiliary of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons (later known as the Pennsylvania Prison Society). For approximately the next fifty years they engaged in organized prison visiting in Philadelphia at Arch Street and Moyamensing prisons and the Eastern State Penitentiary. As visitors they became subtle, understated allies in the operation of the Pennsylvania System of separate confinement with labor. Their work was reformist in nature, in that they pressed for practical measures they deemed significant to improve the condition of female inmates: the institution of matrons and the founding of the Floward Institution, a sort of halfway house for released prisoners. Their main goal, however, was spiritual, and the salvation they sought was their own as well as that of the imprisoned women they aided. As a Quaker women's group that worked quietly in the background during a period usually associated with the more public work of activist Hicksite Quaker women, they were barely officially recognized by the male society in their own day and are almost entirely unknown today. Their story suggests that the spiritual motivation of some nineteenth-century women may be a significant but little-noted force behind their contributions to the history of social reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Great Famine Pennsylvania emerged as the second most important state for famine relief in 1846-47. Philadelphia became the second-largest port shipping aid to Ireland. Relief supplies from all over the United States were channeled to the Philadelphia Irish Famine Relief Committee, the nonpartisan citizens committee, and to Philadelphia Quakers who organized their own relief operation under the leadership of Thomas P. Cope. Pennsylvanians joined in a national cause of philanthropy, and members of all denominations gave to relief aid-Roman Catholic, Methodist, Quaker, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Lutheran, Moravian, and Jewish. In 1847 the people of Pennsylvania put aside sectarian differences because of shared values of common humanity with the suffering Irish. Pennsylvanians portrayed themselves as a people of plenty with an obligation to help, the Irish as worthy of that aid, and international voluntary aid as an expression of American republican values. Political leaders, whether Whig or Democrat, embraced this responsibility by encouraging citizens to raise funds for Ireland. In a movement spearheaded by Governor Francis Shunk, who persuaded the state legislature to pass legislation allowing toll free shipping of relief aid, citizens throughout the state organized town and county meetings to raise money, food, and clothing for famine relief and joined in a national movement to aid the starving Irish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charles Dickens visited the United States in 1842, including a significant amount of time in Pennsylvania. Dickens's travels resulted in a tour book, American Notes for General Circulation; a novel containing a harshly critical American segment, Martin Chuzzlewit; a vast quantity of letters that were later published; and American-inspired passages in other novels, such as the prison inmate descriptions in A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens shocked and angered American readers when the beloved author found much to criticize. In the Keystone State, for example, he noted that the transportation system was primitive, the people's manners and habits abhorrent, and the prison system appalling. Dickens discovered there was no sympathy for authors whose works were being routinely pirated by publishers in an era of virtually no copyright protection. Dickens hoped that his six-month tour of the States could, at the very least, open American eyes to the need for institutional reforms and a copyright law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the depiction of racial politics within the work of the African American painter and abolitionist Robert Douglass Jr. from 1833 through 1846. An overview of Douglass' political activity in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, including in regard to his portraits of American abolitionists and his support for the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, is provided.

The fear of a cholera outbreak in Philadelphia in 1893 led to intense debate over how to manage the risk of an epidemic. Philadelphians largely agreed that the risk was spatial in nature, and that coping with the danger of cholera meant addressing the problem of the city's southeastern 'slums.' But the meaning of this space was contested. Some reformers viewed it as a den of immorality, while others saw it as a site of injustice. The city government ignored both views, instead undertaking a technical reform by repaving the neighborhood's streets with asphalt. The episode demonstrates how competing understandings of risk and urban space yielded competing prescriptions for urban reform, and why technical reform came to be preferred over moral or economic reconstruction in the Progressive Era. Contrary to previous interpretations, Progressive reformers cannot be understood as simply 'confident' or 'anxious,' but as prioritizing certain risks while ignoring others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Five seasons into its organized existence under the National Association of Base Ball Players, the version of baseball known variously as the National Association, Knickerbocker Rules, or New York Rules game continued to face the challenge in 1863 of surviving the Civil War. Further, no end was in sight as the year opened. The war had ended the game's spectacular growth of the immediate prewar period, and ended significant organized play in all but its core areas--today's New York City metropolitan area and Philadelphia. The present article recounts the course of the season, now 150 years in the past, a season in which both the game and the Union struggled to survive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the relationship between surgeon William Chancellor and abolitionist Anthony Benezet in eighteenth century Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It comments on how Benezet used the testimony of Chancellor, who conducted medical evaluations of slaves on a slave ship called Wolf, in his anti-slavery writings, including "Observations on the Enslaving, Importing, and Purchasing of Negroes." Topics include a visit by Chancellor to London, England, ways in which the two men might have met, and mercantile society in Philadelphia.

The article discusses the formation of U.S. tariff policy in the early 1820s, focusing on the debate surrounding the Baldwin tariff bill, sponsored by Henry Baldwin, the Chairman of the House Committee on Manufactures, during the first session of the Sixteenth U.S. Congress. It particularly examines the protectionist, pro-tariff activism of printer Mathew Carey of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and comments on the nonpartisan voluntary associations the Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of National Industry and the Pennsylvania Society for the Encouragement of American Manufactures.

Through exploring the neglected career of John Campbell, an Irish-born Chartist refugee who ascended to a leadership role in the antebellum American labor movement, this article seeks to shed light on how revolutionary upheaval in Europe, debates over immigration, and sectional conflict affected working-class politics. Focusing on the period 1848 to 1851, and tracing Campbell's rapid evolution from a radical opponent of slavery to an ardent supporter of black subjugation, I argue that labor historians need to pay closer attention to shifting local and national contexts to understand the racial politics of labor agitators. Yet even as Campbell's views changed, his commitment to a producerist vision remained constant; by 1851 he had simply added people of African descent to a list of “idle” nonproducers who lived off the labor of workingmen. His proslavery twist on producer ideology suggests historians of antebellum social relations may need to go beyond interrogating the racial dimensions of artisan republicanism to gain a fuller understanding of the variety of working-class attitudes to race. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the earliest production of cream cheese by postcolonial Philadelphia farm families. It examines how changes in American cuisine and demographics produced the demand for "fancy" cheeses in the late nineteenth century. It shows how mechanization transformed the dairy industry as it moved from its pastoral period into the industrial Age. This paper also traces how these changes resulted in large-scale cream cheese manufacturing efforts in the late 1870s. Finally, the critical role played by William A. Lawrence, a Chester, NY farmer, who was the first manufacturer of cream cheese in America, is also detailed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a historical profile of the economic conditions of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania between 1846 and 1877, focusing on the role played by the expansion of the Pennsylvania Railroad on the city's economic policies. Urban growth in the city during the time period is chronicled and the impact of the concept of manifest destiny on the city's economic ventures is explored. Other topics include public funding of transportation and trade routes, economic elite in Philadelphia, and the influence of the American Civil War on the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Examines the cultural politics of anatomy in both the art and medical disciplinary contexts in late-nineteenth-century Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Careers of realist painter Thomas Eakins and anatomy professor William Smith Forbes; Construction of fraternal discourse through the bodies of anatomical specimens by white male professionals in difference disciplines; Examination of specimens which came from proletarian and ethnic minority populations.

Presents information pertaining to the history of the American Quakers, while highlighting the circumstances surrounding the separation of the Philadelphia Quakers in the 1820s, into the Orthodox and Hicksite Quakers. Why the separation was referred to as the Hicksite schism; Consideration by each side that they were the legitimate `Society of Friends'; Differences between the Orthodox and Hicksite Quakers; Length of time the Quakers had been benevolent societies before the separation.

The article explores notions of historical social and occupational mobility in the U.S. By focusing on the experiences of immigrants in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania employed in factories between 1850 and 1880. It uses the U.S. Census of Manufactures reports to find information regarding wage rates, the number and sex ration of employees, capital investment, mechanization, and values of raw and finished goods. Topics include skilled and unskilled labor, types of industry, size of the firm, and occupational hierarchies.

The article offers a preview of the Ph.D. history dissertation titled "Home Alteration in Industrial Philadelphia 1865 to 1925," by the article's author.