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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Women’s Suffrage: Pennsylvania’s Ratification of the 19th Amendment

Posted by on Apr 15, 2020 in | Comments Off on Women’s Suffrage: Pennsylvania’s Ratification of the 19th Amendment The struggle for women’s suffrage in Pennsylvania has a long history. Throughout the Colonial Period, 1681–1776, only adult males who owned property could vote. After breaking from the British crown, Pennsylvania’s revolutionary political leaders broadened male voting by abolishing the property qualifications; however, they did not extend the vote to women. A significant precursor to the women’s...
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The Fearless Benjamin Lay by Marcus Rediker

Posted by on Nov 12, 2019 in | Comments Off on The Fearless Benjamin Lay by Marcus Rediker The Fearless Benjamin Lay The Quaker Dwarf Who Became The First Revolutionary Abolitionist by Marcus Rediker Beacon Press, 224 pp., cloth $26.95 Who cares about Benjamin Lay (1682–1759), a 4-foot-tall, malformed, 18th-century member of a minority religious network known as the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)? Until recently, not very many people. But in seven gracefully crafted chapters...
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“I Must Be an Abolitionist”: Pennsylvania Liberty Man Francis Julius LeMoyne

Posted by on Oct 24, 2019 in | Comments Off on “I Must Be an Abolitionist”: Pennsylvania Liberty Man Francis Julius LeMoyne In 1839, when William Lloyd Garrison (1805–79) and his allies lost control of the abolitionist movement in Warsaw, New York, African Americans could only vote in seven states. In the North, free blacks could neither sue nor own weapons, and their wages were disproportionate with those of their white counterparts for the same type of work. The Slave Power seemingly strengthened its influence in...
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Editor’s Letter

Posted by on Oct 22, 2019 in | Comments Off on Editor’s Letter Sometimes Pennsylvania history occurs outside the boundaries of the Keystone State. Throughout the past, Pennsylvanians have traveled to other parts of the U.S. or have gone abroad to make their marks in the commonwealth’s history. Pennsylvania’s involvement in World War I is a good example, when soldiers from the state joined their fellow American servicemen in the Allied fight against the...
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Pennsylvania Heritage Recommends

Posted by on May 8, 2015 in | Comments Off on Pennsylvania Heritage Recommends The Civil War in Pennsylvania: The African American Experience Samuel W. Black, editor of a collection of eight essays comprising The Civil War in Pennsylvania: The African American Experience (Senator John Heinz History Center in partnership with Pennsylvania Civil War 150, 2013, paper, 239 pages, $29.95), contends, “In various ways African Americans have been fighting for freedom for several...
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