Remembering Germantown
Remembering Germantown

Author: Irvin Miller

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2008-10-14

Total Pages: 151

ISBN-13: 162584879X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

With grit and gumption, the residents of Germantown propelled their community from a sleepy backwater to a thriving urban neighborhood. Through charming first-person accounts and fascinating narratives culled from sixty years of the Germantown Crier, readers may catch a glimpse of the feisty Germantowners who proudly honor their past without ceasing to move forward. Meet cantankerous Ann Shermer, a nineteenth-century Bethlehem Pike tollkeeper who enforced the fare with the help of her trusty flintlock pistol, and the towns enforcer of morality, civilizer Samuel Harvey. Whether a tale from the storied King of Prussia Inn, which housed greats like George Washington and Gilbert Stuart, or a memory of a childhood encounter with Louisa May Alcott, each vignette in this collection crafts a poignant portrait.

Cresheim Farm
Cresheim Farm

Author: Antje Ulrike Mattheus

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-06-30

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1000891933

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book is a work of political archaeology. It focuses on the people and events at a particular colonial farm in Germantown, Pennsylvania; their stories provide a micro and macro view of economic, social, demographic, and agro-ecological change. Cresheim Farm shows how one mostly unknown but strategically placed piece of land—home to an extraordinary array of people, including early anti-slavery and anti-Nazi activists, the first woman editor of the Saturday Evening Post and a robber baron—can tell, affect and reflect the history of a nation. The writing is historically grounded and academic, future-oriented, deeply researched, and immediate. Cresheim Farm serves as a lens through which to observe and understand social forces, such as the launching point of freedom and democracy movements, white privilege, slavery, and genocidal westward expansion. The past lives on in all of us.

The Battles of Germantown
The Battles of Germantown

Author: David W. Young

Publisher: Temple University Press

Published: 2019-09-13

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781439915547

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

2020 Philip S. Klein Book Prize Winner, Pennsylvania Historical Association Known as America’s most historic neighborhood, the Germantown section of Philadelphia (established in 1683) has distinguished itself by using public history initiatives to forge community. Progressive programs about ethnic history, postwar urban planning, and civil rights have helped make historic preservation and public history meaningful. The Battles of Germantown considers what these efforts can tell us about public history’s practice and purpose in the United States. Author David Young, a neighborhood resident who worked at Germantown historic sites for decades, uses his practitioner’s perspective to give examples of what he calls “effective public history.” The Battles of Germantown shows how the region celebrated “Negro Achievement Week” in 1928 and, for example, how social history research proved that the neighborhood’s Johnson House was a station on the Underground Railroad. These encounters have useful implications for addressing questions of race, history, and memory, as well as issues of urban planning and economic revitalization. Germantown’s historic sites use public history and provide leadership to motivate residents in an area challenged by job loss, population change, and institutional inertia. The Battles of Germantown illustrates how understanding and engaging with the past can benefit communities today.

The Story of Philadelphia
The Story of Philadelphia

Author: Lillian Ione Rhoades

Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag

Published: 1900

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 3849677818

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Philadelphia is especially rich in historic associations. In its halls were enunciated those principles of human rights that gave birth to free institutions. Here were assembled those patriotic men whose wise words and brave deeds laid the foundations and gave shape to the temple of American liberty. Here was written the Declaration of Independence, the most -distinguished state paper ever drafted by human pen. Here stands Independence Hall, in which that Declaration was debated, adopted, and signed. Here, in a little house, still standing, was designed the American flag, that now floats over the grandest nation of all time. Here, in one of our streets, was sent up the silken kite that proved the identity of the electric spark and the lightning's flash. Here are buildings hallowed by the presence of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin.The object of " The Story of Philadelphia" is to present, in condensed form, some of the most interesting events in the history of the city. The story is one of patriotic interest, and no one can follow it without feeling a deeper pride in the city and its institutions.

Memories of War
Memories of War

Author: Thomas A. Chambers

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2012-09-24

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0801465672

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Even in the midst of the Civil War, its battlefields were being dedicated as hallowed ground. Today, those sites are among the most visited places in the United States. In contrast, the battlegrounds of the Revolutionary War had seemingly been forgotten in the aftermath of the conflict in which the nation forged its independence. Decades after the signing of the Constitution, the battlefields of Yorktown, Saratoga, Fort Moultrie, Ticonderoga, Guilford Courthouse, Kings Mountain, and Cowpens, among others, were unmarked except for crumbling forts and overgrown ramparts. Not until the late 1820s did Americans begin to recognize the importance of these places. In Memories of War, Thomas A. Chambers recounts America's rediscovery of its early national history through the rise of battlefield tourism in the first half of the nineteenth century. Travelers in this period, Chambers finds, wanted more than recitations of regimental movements when they visited battlefields; they desired experiences that evoked strong emotions and leant meaning to the bleached bones and decaying fortifications of a past age. Chambers traces this impulse through efforts to commemorate Braddock's Field and Ticonderoga, the cultivated landscapes masking the violent past of the Hudson River valley, the overgrown ramparts of Southern war sites, and the scenic vistas at War of 1812 battlefields along the Niagara River. Describing a progression from neglect to the Romantic embrace of the landscape and then to ritualized remembrance, Chambers brings his narrative up to the beginning of the Civil War, during and after which the memorialization of such sites became routine, assuming significant political and cultural power in the American imagination.