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The article focuses on the 1793 outbreak of yellow fever in the early American republic and Atlantic world and how it impacted the origins of the democratic movement. The author discusses how Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s Democratic Republicans worked to form the Democratic Society of Pennsylvania and how it was impacted by the pandemic outbreak.

Through the little known Longchamps Affair, this article explores the interaction between state and national, and popular and legal, conceptions of American citizenship during the founding era. In 1784, French migrant Charles Julien de Longchamps attacked a French diplomat on the streets of Philadelphia, sparking a national debate on what it meant to be an American citizen. While the French government demanded his expatriation, in an unexpected turn of events, Longchamps alleged that he had been naturalised as a citizen of Pennsylvania the day before the attack, and consequently had the right to stand trial in the United States. The affair became a national referendum on the nature of American citizenship. Officials employed a state-centric, legal vision of membership inherited from the colonial period to argue that Longchamps was not an American citizen and advocate for his removal. These claims were disputed in newspaper coverage across the United States, which instead contended that Longchamps' commitment to revolutionary values proved his citizenship, invoking a broader national community. The public perceived Longchamps' fate as inherently tied to their own, demonstrating that a shared sense of belonging across the United States was equally as important as state membership in shaping how citizenship was understood in real terms. The Longchamps Affair provides a window into the ambiguous and contested nature of membership during the founding decades, both in determining what constituted American citizenship, and how the rights conferred by citizenship differed for native-born Americans and naturalized migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

British strategy for ending the American rebellion in 1777 required placing the army in a location where a generally friendly civilian population would provide the supplies, recruits, and intelligence it needed. General Sir William Howe was driven to capture Philadelphia because of the supposed pervasive Loyalism in that area. However, the slow movement of the British army to that objective from July to September 1777, caused civilians in the region to behave in ways that frustrated General Howe's plans for distinguishing friend from foe. The already well-known penchant for his soldiers' indiscriminate plundering of civilian property regardless of their owners' political persuasion created conditions that caused many civilians to flee the British approach despite Howe's promises of protection and security for those who remained peaceably at home. The remaining population's political, economic, and gender composition was ill-designed to satisfy British military requirements making the capture of Philadelphia a strategic failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article challenges the popular perceptions that historians, documentarians, and policy advisors espouse with respect to the role that Philadelphia's director of public health, Dr. Wilmer Krusen, played during the city's uniquely catastrophic outbreak of influenza during the pandemic of 1918-22. The article analyzes the autumn 1918 outbreak and suggests that the portrayal of Krusen as a public health amateur or bumbling incompetent by various authors and multimedia documentaries is misleading. Furthermore, as the threat of epidemics by respiratory viruses--for instance, HPAI H5N1, H1N1, SARS, MERS, and Nipah--appears to increase, public health officials and policymakers may look to history in their own efforts to fashion responses to future urban outbreaks. Historians must take care to avoid incorrect conclusions concerning the failures of Philadelphia's response to the great influenza epidemic if they wish to make competent suggestions for combating future outbreaks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considers the antebellum history of the Franco-American Girard family, especially merchant husband Stephen and his wife Mary of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania by focusing on family correspondence about the onset of Mary's madness. Topics include Stephen's brother Jean who lived in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, issues of gender, capitalism, and cultural economy in the Atlantic world. Mary was diagnosed as being mad in the 1785 after eight years of marriage and by 1790, Stephen had Mary committed to Pennsylvania Hospital, where she remained until her death in 1815.

Local and state histories need not be parochial. This article examines the intersection of Pennsylvania with swirling global revolutionary winds in the 1960s and 1970s, especially the Weathermen (later called the Weather Underground). It further studies how Philadelphia produced a radical pacifist, direct action, prefigurative political impulse within the New Left. Led in the Keystone State by Philadelphia-educated women, or Weatherwomen, the movement intersected with global revolutionary actions. The Weathermen, a splinter group of the Students for a Democratic Society, were the products of a relatively sophisticated and systematic set of transnational revolutionary ideas. Philosophically led by the young French radical Regis Debray and Latin American revolutionaries Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, these globally minded radicals built and promoted a revolutionary program aimed to topple Western liberal capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses writing the final chapter in his unfinished book "Reconstructing Philadelphia: The Persistence of Racism and the African American Struggle for Political Leverage and Civil Rights in the Urban North," while also considering being a professor of Africana studies and his work as a historian. The book focuses on the period from the Progressive era, including the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, into the late 20th century.

In the University of Pennsylvania Museum, Philadelphia, two small, fragmentary Punic stelae were found in storage by Asian Section Keeper Stephen Lang. 1 They were remnants from a large donation, made over a century ago, of part of the variegated collection of Maxwell Sommerville, perhaps best known for engraved gems of all kinds, and also much Asian material. Sommerville (1829–1904) was an affluent Philadelphia businessman who devoted his later life (and funds) to world travel and the collection of antiquities in Europe, Turkey, Syria, Egypt, and North Africa as well as China, Japan, India, Burma, and Thailand. He published memoirs of his travels and catalogues and discussions of the gems and seals. His collection, originally exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1888–1891), was placed in the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania (1891) and remained there upon his bequest (see Berges 2002: 11–19). Although Sommerville's memoir Sands of Sahara (1901) describes some of his North African travels, there is no reference to his acquisition of the Punic artifacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay considers the history of books, ephemera and reading, audience and reader's responses by exploring annotations and marginalia, often found in family papers and archives. It uses a July 12, 1770 card printed to announce a public meeting at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania's State House in two days to discuss the city's nonimportation agreements after the partial repeal in 1770 of the Townshend Act. The card has marginalia attributed to radical Charles Thomson.

The article considers the history of music by focusing on a newspaper review of the the premiere of the popular Federalist anthem “Hail Columbia” at Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Theatre on April 25, 1798 which appeared in the "Porcupine's Gazette," as well as the sheet music of "Hail Columbia" by Philip Phile and Joseph Hopkinson, published by Benjamin Carr.

The author considers the history of the book in the U.S. using hand-powered printing presses, focusing particularly on how the printed sheets became folded, sewed, collated and bound to become book - embracing the duality of bound/unbound. The process of creating both bound and unbound books is detailed. The interrelationship between printers, binders, publishers, and booksellers both in the U.S. and Great Britain is explored. It explores the minutes of polyglot Benjamin Franklin's Library Company of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and their business with bookbinder Stephen Potts.

Philadelphia's 1793 yellow fever epidemic is well known in the history of the early republic, and so too is Mathew Carey's Short Account of the Malignant Fever, the influential pamphlet that described the city's moral breakdown and recovery during the pestilence. Some historians have criticized the Short Account's unflattering depictions of the African Americans who volunteered to aid the sick, but most have taken it as an accurate account of the city's response. This article offers another way of thinking about the work. By reconstructing the circumstances of its composition, and by deconstructing its narrative elements, it shows that Carey's Short Account was a literary creation, one that imitated historical plague stories. This reading of the Short Account illuminates little-known aspects of the literary culture and historical consciousness of early republicans. More important, it opens a window onto the "archaeology of plague narratives"-the pattern of narrative mimicry that predisposed plague writers to tell the events of epidemics in certain ways. The view it offers calls into question not only what happened in Philadelphia in 1793, but also what happens to communities when plagues strike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My work analyzes the cultural performance of politics across generations and over time. I explore the ways Deborah Read Franklin and Sally Franklin Bache constructed and were constructed by the public resistance to the British. For both women, the Philadelphia community and Benjamin Franklin entailed complex, intertwined audiences for their theatricalities. In 1764 a fifty-five-year-old Deborah bravely defended the Franklin house when a mob raided it during the Stamp Act crisis. Putting on a courageous face to the outside world, she proved she could protect her domain. Yet Deborah alluded often to the security of her home, a place from which she became temporarily engaged in political matters but also a place to which she retreated from political strife. These were shifting strategic choices she made about her performances as a gendered subject, as a political actor in her own right, and as the wife of Benjamin Franklin. Sixteen years later, as the war continued to take a toll on the Continental Army, a thirty-seven-year-old Sally Bache and a group of elite women in Philadelphia constructed a theater of urban politics, spending the summer walking the city streets seeking monetary donations from rich and poor friends, neighbors, and strangers. The women had launched their campaign with the broadside "Sentiments of an American Woman," published first in the Pennsylvania Gazette and then in newspapers across the country. By proudly proclaiming her duty to the cause, Sally publicly and selfconsciously fashioned herself as a Patriot. Between 1765 and 1780 the Franklins elder and younger experienced conflict, resistance, and resolution in Revolutionary Philadelphia. To differing degrees at separate times they engaged in a gendered intergenerational theater of identity politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconsiders the complex relationship between Quakers and African slavery during the early eighteenth century by examining a small contingent of Quaker merchants who directed the intercolonial African slave trade in Philadelphia. This is much more than an aberrant moment in the larger story of Quaker antislavery. The first two decades of the eighteenth century, when Quakers were the colony's largest slave owners and most active in the slave trade, witnessed the coalescence of a declining economic interest in the intercolonial slave trade and the emergence of an embryotic conversation about the morality of African slavery. Rather than focusing on the moral and religious critique of slavery, this article instead reorients our focus to the crucial role that practical considerations and economic motivations played in the evolution of antislavery among the Society of Friends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late summer and early fall of 1791, the United States experienced its first financial panic. With public confidence in the constitutional regime already low, the Hamilton Treasury faced a collapse in the prices of Bank of the United States script and US securities. Despite the Treasury's novel and paradigm-setting bailout of financial markets, the panic resulted in profound political and cultural shifts in Philadelphia. The shock of financial crisis played a pivotal role in converting Philadelphia from a Federalist stronghold into the epicenter of early American Jeffersonian Republicanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on labor history and science and technology studies to propose a method, and to provide an example, of historical analysis that is responsive to the conceptual categories that arise out of ethnographic accounts of individuals’ lived experiences. Using an ‘ontological tool-box’, this article follows various enactments of consumer appliances and, along with them, ideas of what it is to be a productive worker in a small appliance repair shop and across the practices of certain institutions of disciplinary power. Through an ethnographic and ontological analysis of repair in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington, this article reveals that, rather than being inevitable or essential, all the categories used to organize our world, whether referent to identities or objects, are both constituted by and constitutive of a complex set of social relations and ideological priorities, which even historians are implicated in reproducing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the exhibition "Curious Revolutionaries: The Peales of Philadelphia," which tells the story of the Peale family and its role in shaping early American popular culture at the American Philosophical Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from April 7, 2017 to December 30, 2017.

Merchants living in the early modern era experienced their commercial successes and failures not only as participants in great Atlantic world networks of traders and goods, but also as residents of particular local places. Scholars' sensitive and rich portraits of port city commerce portray international traders as the decision makers who shaped longdistance trade, which in turn had a profound influence on the developing character of individual port cities. Integrating and improving across great spans of time and space, the British Atlantic merchant formed coherent networks that shared a language of credit, trust, and profitable exchange. But just as significantly, we can start to integrate the myriad daily economic choices of local city residents with those of merchants, and we can do so productively by recognizing the "cityness" of ports, a quality constituted from the constant interactions, negotiations, and perceptions of their residents within man-made and natural surroundings. This article tests how the intertwined natures of long-distance trade and local cityness affected the different commercial trajectories of three merchants in three different British Atlantic ports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Library Company of Philadelphia's World War I Graphics Collection is explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the fall of 1918, the world came to a virtual standstill while Spanish influenza raged. In the United States, no other city suffered more than Philadelphia. The virus entered via the Philadelphia Navy Yard, arriving on a ship from Boston. As soldiers fell victim to the virus, city authorities believed the outbreak was under control and continued with plans to kick off the Fourth Liberty Loan drive with a parade September 28. After 200,000 people jammed the parade route, the virus exploded in the civilian population. For three months, hundreds of thousands of Philadelphians battled the virus, which, at the end, took over 13,000 lives. Schools, churches, saloons, and theaters closed, thirty-two emergency hospitals opened, and burying the dead became almost impossible. By November, the disease receded, and while the flu continued into the spring, its virulence decreased. As quickly and deadly as it struck Philadelphia, the influenza epidemic receded from collective memory and, largely forgotten, is barely mentioned in discussions of World War I. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considerable research has examined the social, cultural, economic, and community benefits of urban gardening. Few studies, however, have empirically assessed factors that influence urban community garden agrodiversity or its relationship to these dimensions of gardening. We conducted an interdisciplinary study of agrodiversity and cultural identity, based certain markers of identity, including how people see themselves with respect to race, ethnicity, or place of origin, in community gardens in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We conducted fifty-six semistructured interviews with gardeners with different cultural identities in eight community gardens on their motivations for urban community gardening during 2014. We conducted plant inventories of the corresponding garden plots and found 104 cultivated edible and ornamental species and 28 varieties representing 34 families. We find that although gardens with culturally diverse gardeners did not have higher species richness, the cultural identity of the gardeners influenced species selection and reason for gardening. Further, the structure, design and species composition of garden plots reflected the identities of garden members. These finding have implications for the recent institutionalization of urban agriculture into city land policies in Philadelphia and other cities in North America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

»Aufstieg durch Schulen und Kirche: Abolitionistische Ansätze für öffentliche Bildung für Afro-Amerikaner im Philadelphia nach der Revolution«. This contribution provides a case study of how Richard Allen's Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church strove to become an autonomous provider of education to the free black community in the late 1790s and early 1800s as a way to avoid the direct influence of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS) and provide an education tailored to the needs of Philadelphia's black population. By taking education into their own hands, free blacks sought to fight inequalities by dissociating themselves from the system of inequalities represented and supported by the PAS. Though members of the PAS and leaders of the free black community shared the goal of raising the socioeconomic status of blacks and reducing poverty through education, the education provided by the AME Church aimed to provide a practical, moral education tailored to the needs of a black community struggling to obtain work in competition with recent immigrant groups, and not one - such as offered by the PAS - which provided arbitrary measures of success in a white community which disregarded black educational achievements. This case study can be placed into the broader context of blacks' ambitions of social equality with whites despite the structures of inequality - specifically regarding the lack of access to affordable, practical education - in the early republic in Philadelphia designed to keep them in a subjugated social position. [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.

In the early republic, Americans witnessed the popularization of the natural sciences in the midst of the religious growth of the Second Great Awakening. Inspired by republican rhetoric and natural theology the natural sciences found a broad audience in Philadelphia and throughout the young nation. At museums and public lectures, Americans were invited to inspect the "book of nature"--God's created universe--up close in an effort to understand the nature of the creator himself. Beyond the elite world of religious scholars and naturalists, this view of science was popularized among Americans as a benefit to the republican moral order as well. This article looks at the ways in which that understanding of the relationship between science and religion was packaged and marketed to the citizens of Philadelphia and the broader United States as the key to preserving the moral and civic order required for a strong republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

In the Autumn of 1780 an epidemic hit the city of Philadelphia. The symptoms of the disease resembled those of present day dengue fever, and subsequent observers argued that the disease was in fact dengue. But was it? The question forces us to confront the challenges of retrospective epidemiology and how we examine the history of a disease. This paper examines the 1780 epidemic from two perspectives. First, it looks at evidence that the disease was dengue and examines what this tells us about the epidemic and the conditions that caused it. Second, it looks at the disease from the perspective of Dr. Benjamin Rush, who treated hundreds of patients during the epidemic. In other words, it examines the disease through the lens of eighteenth century medical ideas. The paper concludes that each approach is valuable and reveals different aspects of the relationship between society and disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The commission that Congregation Mikveh Israel gave to the Philadelphia architect Louis Kahn in 1961 finally ended when he was fired in January 1973, before ground could be broken on the new structure to have it ready for the Bicentennial Celebration in 1976. Kahn's design would have produced one of the great interior spaces of the twentieth century, but disagreement between the architect and the congregation over functional and spiritual aspects led to the eventual sad outcome. Based on newly discovered documents, this article clarifies what is known about the end of the commission, explores the thinking of the congregation that led to Kahn's dismissal, and reveals the steps that were taken to find a replacement firm from a list of Philadelphia architects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like other Atlantic ports, Philadelphia relied on the services of local pilots to steer ships in and out of its harbor. Seagoing vessels faced risks in shallow coastal waters that differed from those on the open ocean, and many crews were grateful for the assistance of skilled pilots. Nonetheless, these local experts occupied an uneasy niche in maritime commerce. Merchants resented the expense of their services, and captains sometimes bristled at the implicit challenge to their authority, even as the pilots themselves pressed for more generous compensation. Pennsylvania attempted to address the issue with regulation, but its efforts only served to underscore tensions within the port economy. Beyond the conflict between pilots and merchants, the particulars of the regulatory regime also pitted trans-Atlantic traders against coasting merchants, and novice pilots against their more experienced brethren. The fight over harbor pilotage therefore reflected broader conflicts over the shape of the Atlantic economy and how its benefits would be distributed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of creeks and rivers in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and its importance to early industry in the state during the 18th and 19th centuries based from a series of scaled surveys undertaken by Philadelphia County officials. These surveys highlight the rich story of early industry and how the landscape near watercourses was commodified by Philadelphians, such as the survey for Falls Road which shows the outlines of businessman John Thoburn's mills and tenant houses.

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.

Over the summer and autumn of 1739 Philadelphia’s two newspapers published competing versions of a hearing in the Pennsylvania assembly that was described as the ‘Affair of the Tanners’. What began as a minor property dispute in the colonial assembly became, with the aid of the local press, a citywide paper war for the support of the urban populace. This article argues the affair provides unique evidence for competing conceptions of the common good in the eighteenth-century colonial city, and was an expression of conflict with deep roots in Philadelphia’s history. The affair also shows how the medium of print could reflect both transatlantic cultural processes as well as distinctly local grievances, as a group of prosperous city artisans and their opponents utilized the city’s newspapers to articulate competing commonwealth ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented which addresses the author's claim that violence has negatively impacted America's organized labor movement and unions, and it mentions how many U.S. political candidates refuse to address the topics of labor unions. The history of organized labor in places such as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is examined, along with the relationship between law and violence in America. U.S. author Robert M. Cover's views are assessed, along with judicial and prosecutorial violence.

The article discusses the impact that Vauxhall Gardens, or pleasure gardens, in London, England had on the development of rural gardens for leisure in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania during the late 18th century, including Gray's Gardens and Harrowgate in Philadelphia. The role that Philadelphia's pleasure gardens played in providing public entertainment events for city residents is discussed.

The emergence of an associational world is often regarded as fundamental to the development of civil society, urban cultural life, and political consciousness in early America. The financial roles of voluntary associations, however, remain less well explored. This article draws on a case study of the St. Andrew's Society of Philadelphia to examine the credit functions of a voluntary association and to consider the relationship between ethnicity and economic practice in the urban Atlantic world. Through a focus on the society's charitable, social, and money-lending activities, it argues that associations had a crucial function in colonial communities as providers of credit in its entangled economic and social forms. In placing the society within the context of both early American associational culture and the history of the Scottish diaspora, the article considers why ''Scottishness'' functioned as a basis for trust. Through its various activities, the society manufactured and enforced a sense of Scottishness that was based on the notion of good credit. Ethnicity was a flexible and fluid concept that incorporated the components of credit and individual worth on the basis of social, occupational, and gender identities, providing a framework for interaction within Philadelphia's particular public sphere and a wider Atlantic economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1793 and 1797 a British musician who fancied himself a flaneur--a stroller, idler, time waster--moved to the United States to earn his living and travel around the country. William Priest's letters to England contain insightful comments about urban life in the new nation, observations that the authors amplify and analyze using both newer geographic information system (GIS) technology and good, oldfashioned techniques of labor historians. Although he arrived in 1793 in the midst of a severe yellow fever epidemic, Billy Priest walked undeterred through Philadelphia, noting a host of details about the nation's capital, ranging from the conditions of daily life to the consequences of so many deaths caused by the disease. Using city directories, censuses, and tax lists, the essay maps a preindustrial city in more detail than has ever previously been possible. Neighborhoods are re-created by occupation, race, gender, and commercial development. In addition, the authors examine the beginnings of one of the earliest organized labor movements by shoemakers, the transition in the work lives of middle- and lower-class women, and the struggles of ex-slaves to free themselves and create a vibrant free black urban community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

A response is provided to articles within the issue by authors David Shields and Fredrika Teute on theater and human sexuality during the American Revolutionary War of 1775 through 1783. An overview of the theatrical performance known as the Meschianza, which was performed by British military personnel in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1789, is provided.

The article discusses the pageant known as the Meschianza for the British Army Commander Sir William Howe in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on May 18, 1778 during the American Revolutionary War. An overview of women's attending the Meschianza in Turkish clothing, which was inspired by the Whig and world traveler Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, is provided.