When Benjamin Franklin adopted John Bartram's 1739 idea of bringing together the "virtuosi" of the colonies to promote inquiries into "natural secrets, arts and syances," the result was, in 1743, the founding of the American Philosophical Society. Bell records the early years of the Society through sketches of its first members, those elected between 1743 and 1769. This volume includes biographies of some of the Society's best known members such as Franklin, David Rittenhouse, John Bartram, Benjamin Rush, John Dickinson, Thomas Hopkinson and many lesser known merchants, artisans, farmers, physicians, lawyers and clergymen with familiar surnames such as Biddle, Colden, and Morris. Illustrations.
“Whatever Principles are imbibed at College will run thro’ a Man’s whole future Conduct.” —William Livingston, signer of the Constitution Schools for Statesmen explores the fifty-five individual Framers of the Constitution in close detail and argues that their different educations help explain their divergent positions at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Those educations ranged from outlawed Irish “hedge schools” to England’s venerable Inns of Court, from the grammar schools of New England to ambitious new academies springing up on the Carolina frontier. The more traditional schools that focused on Greek and Latin classics (Oxford, Harvard, Yale, William and Mary) were deeply conservative institutions resistant to change. But the Scottish colleges and the newer American schools (Princeton, Philadelphia, King's College) introduced students to a Scottish Enlightenment curriculum that fostered more radical, forward-thinking leaders. Half of the Framers had no college education and were often self-taught or had private tutors; most were quiet at the convention, although a few stubbornly opposed the new ideas they were hearing. Nearly all the delegates who took the lead at the convention had been educated at the newer, innovative colleges, but of the seven who rejected the new Constitution, three had gone to the older traditional schools, while three others had not gone to college at all. Schools for Statesmen is an unprecedented analysis of the sharply divergent educations of the Framers of the Constitution. It reveals the ways in which the Constitutional Convention, rather than being a counterrevolution by conservative elites, was dominated by forward-thinking innovators who had benefited from the educational revolution beginning in the mid-eighteenth century. Andrew Browning offers a new and persuasive explanation of key disagreements among the Framers and the process by which they were able to break through the impasse that threatened the convention; he provides a fresh understanding of the importance of education in what has been called the "Critical Period" of US history. Schools for Statesmen takes a deep dive into the diverse educational world of the eighteenth century and sheds new light on the origins of the US Constitution.
The Sellers brothers, Samuel and George, came to North America in 1682 as part of the Quaker migration to William Penn’s new province on the shores of the Delaware River. Across more than two centuries, the Sellers family—especially Samuel’s descendants Nathan, Escol, Coleman, and William—rose to prominence as manufacturers, engineers, social reformers, and urban and suburban developers, transforming Philadelphia into a center of industry and culture. They led a host of civic institutions including the Franklin Institute, Abolition Society, and University of Pennsylvania. At the same time, their vast network of relatives and associates became a leading force in the rise of American industry in Ohio, Georgia, Tennessee, New York, and elsewhere.Engineering Philadelphia is a sweeping account of enterprise and ingenuity, economic development and urban planning, and the rise and fall of Philadelphia as an industrial metropolis. Domenic Vitiello tells the story of the influential Sellers family, placing their experiences in the broader context of industrialization and urbanization in the United States from the colonial era through World War II. The story of the Sellers family illustrates how family and business networks shaped the social, financial, and technological processes of industrial capitalism. As Vitiello documents, the Sellers family and their network profoundly influenced corporate and federal technology policy, manufacturing practice, infrastructure and building construction, and metropolitan development. Vitiello also links the family’s declining fortunes to the deindustrialization of Philadelphia—and the nation—over the course of the twentieth century.
Publisher's description: Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan is a monumental study of early Irish Protestant and Catholic immigration to America. Through exhaustive research and analysis of the migrants' letters and memoirs, the editors explore why the immigrants left Ireland, how they adapted to colonial and revolutionary America, and how their experiences and attitudes shaped society, culture and politics, and created modern Irish and Irish-American identities, in America and Ireland alike.
This fascinating book explores Benjamin Franklin’s social and political thought. Although Franklin is often considered “the first American,” his intellectual world was cosmopolitan. An active participant in eighteenth-century Atlantic debates over the modern commercial republic, Franklin combined abstract analyses with practical proposals. Houston treats Franklin as shrewd, creative, and engaged—a lively thinker who joined both learned controversies and political conflicts at home and abroad. Drawing on meticulous archival research, Houston examines such tantalizing themes as trade and commerce, voluntary associations and civic militias, population growth and immigration policy, political union and electoral institutions, freedom and slavery. In each case, he shows how Franklin urged the improvement of self and society. Engagingly written and richly illustrated, this book provides a compelling portrait of Franklin, a fresh perspective on American identity, and a vital account of what it means to be practical.
By the time William Penn was planning the colony that would come to be called Pennsylvania, with Philadelphia at its heart, Europeans on both sides of the ocean had long experience with the hazards of city life, disease the most terrifying among them. Drawing from those experiences, colonists hoped to create new urban forms that combined the commercial advantages of a seaport with the health benefits of the country. The Contagious City details how early Americans struggled to preserve their collective health against both the strange new perils of the colonial environment and the familiar dangers of the traditional city, through a period of profound transformation in both politics and medicine. Philadelphia was the paramount example of this reforming tendency. Tracing the city’s history from its founding on the banks of the Delaware River in 1682 to the yellow fever outbreak of 1793, Simon Finger emphasizes the importance of public health and population control in decisions made by the city’s planners and leaders. He also shows that key figures in the city’s history, including Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush, brought their keen interest in science and medicine into the political sphere. Throughout his account, Finger makes clear that medicine and politics were inextricably linked, and that both undergirded the debates over such crucial concerns as the city’s location, its urban plan, its immigration policy, and its creation of institutions of public safety. In framing the history of Philadelphia through the imperatives of public health, The Contagious City offers a bold new vision of the urban history of colonial America.
Focusing on writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Franklin, Samson Occum, Charles Brockden Brown, and others, Transformable Race tells the story of how early Americans imagined, contributed to, and challenged the ways that one's racial identity could be formed in the time of the nation's founding.
Based on papers delivered at the Bicentennial Conference for Lewis & Clark, held in Philadelphia in Aug. 2003, these essays grapple in different ways with the motives underlying the Corps of Discovery & the impact on American culture. The question of failure is used by the authors as a means of interrogating the intellectual & cultural context in which the expedition was framed & in which its results were distributed. Contributors include Robert S. Cox (also the Ed. of the vol.), Domenic Vitiello, S.D. Kimmel, John W. Jengo, Brett Mizelle, & Andrew J. Lewis. Illus.
“A highly ambitious and provocative survey of the cultural history of science and industry” from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries (Journal of Modern History). In 1687, the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica sparked a profound transformation in the world. From that event in the late-seventeenth century to the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, science gradually moved to the center Western thought and economic development. In Practical Matter, Margaret Jacob and Larry Stewart chronicle this dramatic, epochal shift. Despite powerful opposition on the Continent, a Newtonian understanding gained broad-based acceptance and practical application. By the mid-eighteenth century, the race was on to apply Newtonian mechanics to industry and manufacturing. The ascendancy of the new science culminated in the creating of the Crystal Palace Exhibition, London’s temple to scientific and technological progress. With fascinating insight into the changing culture of industry and higher learning, Jacob and Stewart show that there was nothing inevitable about the Scientific Revolution. “It is easy to forget that science might have been stillborn, or remained the esoteric knowledge of court elites. Instead, for better and for worse, science became a centerpiece of Western culture.”
