A Beacon of Liberty for the Enslaved: 250 Years of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society

Posted by on Jun 11, 2025 in | Comments Off on A Beacon of Liberty for the Enslaved: 250 Years of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society   By the early 1700s, French Protestants — largely Calvinists known as Huguenots — suffered in their country from severe religious persecution, among them a boy, Antoine Bénézet (1720–72), and his parents. When their property was seized unless they renounced their faith, they departed their country, making their way to London, where they joined a welcoming group that stood for tolerance,...
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Irish-Townsend House

Posted by on Jun 11, 2025 in | Comments Off on Irish-Townsend House In 2021, members of the New Brighton Historical Society (NBHS) learned that the asking price on the Irish-Townsend House had been slashed by 50 percent. The historic building had been sitting empty and deteriorating for years, and its out-of-state owner wanted to sell. Mike Spratt, president of NBHS, took the walkthrough with the realtor. “The [NBHS] leadership team was amazed how much of the...
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Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, Famed Orator of the Civil War Era

Posted by on Jun 11, 2025 in | Comments Off on Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, Famed Orator of the Civil War Era In the annals of 19th-century America, few figures burned as brightly — and as briefly — as Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (1842–1932). She was born into a Quaker family in Philadelphia, a background that shaped her deep commitment to abolitionism and women’s rights. Raised in a household that mingled with leading abolitionists, Dickinson became an activist at an early age. When she was just 13, she...
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The Burning of Pennsylvania Hall

Posted by on Feb 21, 2025 in | Comments Off on The Burning of Pennsylvania Hall The Pennsylvania State Archives holds a small cache of letters related to an episode in the early 19th-century struggle for Black civil rights in the commonwealth, the burning of Pennsylvania Hall. The letters were written by victims of the crime, the mayor and high sheriff of Philadelphia, and the attorney general of Pennsylvania. Although Pennsylvania had passed the Gradual Abolition Act in...
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Our Beloved Friend: The Life and Writings of Anne Emlen Mifflin by Gary B. Nash and Emily M. Teipe

Posted by on Sep 18, 2023 in | Comments Off on Our Beloved Friend: The Life and Writings of Anne Emlen Mifflin by Gary B. Nash and Emily M. Teipe Our Beloved Friend The Life and Writings of Anne Emlen Mifflin by Gary B. Nash and Emily M. Teipe Pennsylvania State University Press, 370 pp, $124.95 hardcover Our Beloved Friend: The Life and Writings of Anne Emlen Mifflin resurrects the life and work of a neglected but significant Pennsylvania Quaker leader. Born in 1755 to a wealthy family, Anne Emlen came of age during the Revolutionary...
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Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania by Beverly C. Tomek

Posted by on May 13, 2022 in | Comments Off on Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania by Beverly C. Tomek Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania by Beverly C. Tomek Temple University Press, 144 pp., paperback $19.95 For generations, textbook histories discussing Pennsylvania and slavery made Pennsylvania look good. They focused on Quaker antislavery activism, passage of a pathbreaking gradual abolition law, and the emergence of a series of notable antislavery leaders, both African American and white....
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Thaddeus Stevens by Bruce Levine

Posted by on Dec 1, 2021 in | Comments Off on Thaddeus Stevens by Bruce Levine Thaddeus Stevens Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice by Bruce Levine Simon & Schuster, 309 pp., hardcover $28 In most respects a conventional biography, Thaddeus Stevens revisits the life and times of a consequential American character. Levine limns the forces that shaped Stevens’ sensibility and his commitment to racial justice as his most notable cause. Stevens’ family...
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“From My Own Observation and Familiar Acquaintance”: Phebe Earle Gibbons Introduces the Pennsylvania Dutch to the World

Posted by on Jun 4, 2021 in | Comments Off on “From My Own Observation and Familiar Acquaintance”: Phebe Earle Gibbons Introduces the Pennsylvania Dutch to the World   “It was on a Sunday morning in March, when the air was bleak and the roads were execrable, that I obtained a driver to escort me to the farm-house where an Amish meeting was to be held,” wrote Phebe Earle Gibbons (1821–93), describing a Lancaster County Amish religious gathering in the late 1860s. “The floors were bare, but on one of the open doors hung a long white towel,...
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Piecing Together Pandenarium: Archaeology at the Site of a Free Black Community in Western Pennsylvania

Posted by on Mar 22, 2021 in | Comments Off on Piecing Together Pandenarium: Archaeology at the Site of a Free Black Community in Western Pennsylvania In 1854 newly freed African American men, women and children hailing from a plantation in Ablemarle County, Virginia, arrived at a dusty country crossroads in northwestern Pennsylvania’s Mercer County. Estimates vary, but approximately 63 free people settled together on 100 acres of their own land. Local abolitionists prepared for the arrival by building houses along the hill, digging wells, and...
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Reforming Faith by Design: Frank Furness’ Architecture and Spiritual Pluralism Among Philadelphia’s Jews and Unitarians

Posted by on Feb 8, 2021 in | Comments Off on Reforming Faith by Design: Frank Furness’ Architecture and Spiritual Pluralism Among Philadelphia’s Jews and Unitarians Philadelphia never saw anything like it. The strange structure took shape between 1868 and 1871 on the southeast corner of North Broad and Mount Vernon streets, in the middle of a developing residential neighborhood for a newly rising upper middle class. With it came a rather alien addition to the city’s skyline: a boldly striped onion dome capping an octagonal Moorish-style minaret that flared...
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