The Making of Tocqueville’s America: Law and Association in the Early United States

When Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about his travels in the United States, he famously celebrated its vibrant voluntary culture as one of the hallmarks of the young nation. Kevin Butterfield’s recent book provides fresh perspective on a familiar phenomenon by positioning these organizations not only in civil society but in an evolving and distinctly American legal culture

Mixed Feelings: Stephen Colwell, Christian Sensibility, and the American State, 1841–61

Stephen Colwell argued that a high tariff could produce a moral political economy in an industrializing United States. He suggested that by providing industrial workers with wages higher than the international market would allow, the policy acted on Christian sensibility and its charge to protect the weak. Yet Colwell could not decide on exactly how the tariff would do so, and his struggle revealed complexity and tension within an important element of the American statebuilding project. He moved from a vision of a robust state protecting workers against predatory merchants to a definition of the tariff as an implement of a circumscribed, associative state that relied on manufacturers to act as its partners. Realizing that they might decline to protect workers by passing the tariff’s profits along as higher wages, he admitted that the state relied on industrialists’ goodwill to make the measure effective

Pardon or Punish? Legal and Community Interpretations of a Nineteenth-Century Infanticide

This article discusses the 1809 conviction of Susanna Cox for first-degree murder following the death of her newborn son. It uses sources from history and oral tradition in order to examine the case’s long- and short-term ramifications for political and social interpretations of capital punishment within Pennsylvania. I explore the impact one case could have on legal history, the treatment of accused and convicted women, issues of linguistic separation within the courtroom, and changing legislative patterns within the Commonwealth. These factors contributed to the case’s ongoing impact on regional and ethnic social memory

Front Matter

This is the front matter for Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Volume 142, Number 1 for January 2018

Silk Stockings and Socialism: Philadelphia’s Radical Hosiery Workers from the Jazz Age to the New Deal

Independent scholar Sharon McConnell-Sidorick’s engaging history of a radical labor union in 1920s Philadelphia speaks to some of the most exciting developments in labor and women’s history

Whispers of Cruel Wrongs: The Correspondence of Louisa Jacobs and Her Circle, 1879–1911

One of the most precious experiences in learning about nineteenth-century life is to read personal letters. Unlike diaries, which are often lists of events, or autobiographies meant as an edited public record, letters are often spontaneous conversations full of interesting tidbits, gossip, rants, and emotional outbursts

Gettysburg: The Quest for Meaning: Essays on How We Remember the Battle and Understand Its Consequences

Occasionally, a monograph such as Gettysburg: The Quest for Meaning is published to little fanfare but invokes a certain sense of academic reflection that is rarely accomplished by other works in the field

Back Matter

This is the back matter for Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Volume 142, Number

Back Matter

The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography is issuing a call for articles to be included in a special issue on women and politics in Pennsylvania history, scheduled for publication in October 2020

The Schenley Experiment: A Social History of Pittsburgh’s First Public High School

Jake Oresick has written a fascinating history of Pittsburgh’s Schenley High School. This concise volume, however, chronicles more than just the history of one school; Oresick also uses Schenley’s story to elucidate the history of Pittsburgh and, to an even wider extent, public education in the United States