Statistics on African American education (history, enrollment, and physical facilities of various types of schools for blacks in 1854), adult literacy and occupations, crime and criminals from 1835 to mid-1850s, etc., collected to establish a benchmark by which to judge further improvements in condition of Philadelphia's African Americans.
In 1897 the promising young sociologist William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) was given a temporary post as Assistant in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in order to conduct a systematic investigation of social conditions in the seventh ward of Philadelphia. The product of those studies was the first great empirical book on the Negro in American society. More than one hundred years after its original publication by the University of Pennsylvania Press, The Philadelphia Negro remains a classic work. It is the first, and perhaps still the finest, example of engaged sociological scholarship—the kind of work that, in contemplating social reality, helps to change it. In his introduction, Elijah Anderson examines how the neighborhood studied by Du Bois has changed over the years and compares the status of blacks today with their status when the book was initially published.
In 1897 the promising young sociologist William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) was given a temporary post as Assistant in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in order to conduct a systematic investigation of social conditions in the seventh ward of Philadelphia. The product of those studies was the first great empirical book on the Negro in American society. More than one hundred years after its original publication by the University of Pennsylvania Press, The Philadelphia Negro remains a classic work. It is the first, and perhaps still the finest, example of engaged sociological scholarship--the kind of work that, in contemplating social reality, helps to change it. In his introduction, Elijah Anderson examines how the neighborhood studied by Du Bois has changed over the years and compares the status of blacks today with their status when the book was initially published.
Twenty-three research papers written by Liberman and colleagues at Haskins Laboratories charts the techniques, methods and insights discovered about speech perception over a period of five decades. The topics span a number of research dilemmas, for example creating machine produced speech in 1944 when technology had not risen to the researchers' imagination level. Other subjects such as speech perception research, motor theory research, and investigations in auditory and phonetic modes, are shown in process, i.e. the errors and reversals as well as the successes. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Emilie Davis was a free African American woman who lived in Philadelphia during the Civil War. She worked as a seamstress, attended the Institute for Colored Youth, and was an active member of her community. She lived an average life in her day, but what sets her apart is that she kept a diary. Her daily entries from 1863 to 1865 touch on the momentous and the mundane: she discusses her own and her community’s reactions to events of the war, such as the Battle of Gettysburg, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the assassination of President Lincoln, as well as the minutiae of social life in Philadelphia’s black community. Her diaries allow the reader to experience the Civil War in “real time” and are a counterpoint to more widely known diaries of the period. Judith Giesberg has written an accessible introduction, situating Davis and her diaries within the historical, cultural, and political context of wartime Philadelphia. In addition to furnishing a new window through which to view the war’s major events, Davis’s diaries give us a rare look at how the war was experienced as a part of everyday life—how its dramatic turns and lulls and its pervasive, agonizing uncertainty affected a northern city with a vibrant black community.
This book is the first to trace the fortunes of the earliest large free black community in the U.S. Nash shows how black Philadelphians struggled to shape a family life, gain occupational competence, organize churches, establish social networks, advance cultural institutions, educate their children, and train leaders who would help abolish slavery.
Originally published in 1899, The Philadelphia Negro is a sociological study of the blacks living in Philadelphia in 1896-7. DuBois was hired by the University of Pennsylvania to conduct the study, under what some believe to be false pretenses. Some suspect that the study was meant, by those funding it, to show how the black community was responsible for a number of problems within the city. The report they received, however, was of quite a different nature. The Philadelphia Negro was the first sociological study of black urban Americans ever conducted. It detailed their lives, their social structures, their education, their marriages, and their jobs. The study sought to illuminate ways in which philanthropy could help the people living in Philadelphia's Seventh Ward. It did not presume, as many people did at the time, that blacks lived in poor conditions due to an innate weakness in their race. This scholarly work serves as an excellent reference for students of history and sociology. American writer, civil rights activist, and scholar WILLIAM EDWARD BURGHARDT DUBOIS (1868-1963) was the first black man to receive a PhD from Harvard University. A cofounder of the NAACP, he wrote a number of important books, including Black Folk, Then and Now (1899) and The Negro (1915).
