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 Blood Demonstration: Teaching the History of the Philadelphia Welfare Rights Organization

Despite a growing body of scholarship that documents civil rights activism in the North during the 1950s and 1960s, college educators continue to rely on traditional understandings of African Americans’ struggle for civil rights as being rooted in the South. Moreover, history professors continue to privilege a male-centered narrative that tends to define the civil rights movement through mass marches and protests. In an effort to challenge this pedagogy, this article describes a method for teaching the history of women’s role in the struggle for social justice in the 1960s through their participation in the Philadelphia Welfare Rights Organization (PWRO). Through the use of primary sources such as the Philadelphia Tribune and the PWRO’s newsletter along with secondarysources such as Lisa Levenstein’s A Movement Without Marches, this article offers a way to expand and complicate students’ understanding of the civil rights and women’s movements of the late twentieth century. Just as importantly, it assists teachers in stressing the significance of African American women’s fight for equality in Pennsylvania history. Supplemental resources are posted on the journals’ web pages

Book Review: Making Good Neighbors: Civil Rights, Liberalism, and Integration in Postwar Philadelphia by Abigail Perkiss

In Making Good Neighbors, Abigail Perkiss presents a detailed history of West Mount Airy, one of the frst neighborhoods in the nation to embrace racially integrated living, and explores the self-conscious efforts of the West Mount Airy Neighbors Association (WMAN) to draw local, national, and international attention to the efforts of its well-educated and historically minded community members

Book Reviews

The Pennsylvania Railroad, Vol.1, Building and Empire, 1846-1817; Across the Divide: Union Soldiers View the Northern Home Front; The Civil War and American Art; An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing "The Gross Clinic" Anew; Ed Bacon: Planning, Politics, and the Building of Modern Philadelphia; The March on Washinton: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Right

Front Matter

This is the front matter for Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 139, No. 3, October 201

Three Miles, Two Creeks: Local Pennsylvania History in the Classroom

This article describes an undergraduate history assignment at Susquehanna University, through which students create virtual museum exhibits on the local history of Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. Students narrate and interpret the Penn’s Creek Massacre of 1755 and the Stump Massacre of 1768. The goal is to tell a cohesive story and offer a clear viewpoint on the events while adhering to the research and design standards used by public history professionals. The historical content of the assignment emphasizes the diversity and violence of the American frontier in the decades before the Revolutionary War. The exhibition format highlights the need to think carefully about audience, voice, and storytelling, three aspects of making history that are often disregarded in student research papers. The ultimate value of the assignment is its ability to increase students’ awareness of the manipulation involved in the process of historical interpretation, even as they attempt to “get it right.

“New and Untried Hands”: Thomas Edison’s Electrification of Pennsylvania Towns, 1883–85

This article places local events in broad technological and organizational contexts and offers an evaluation of their signifcance to the larger project of electrifcation in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Edison’s work in those ffteen-odd months was crucial to sorting out the technological, economic, and organizational arrangements necessary for his dream of constructing power networks in cities and towns across the country. By unwittingly demonstrating the limitations of his own system in eastern Pennsylvania, Edison kept the door open to a rival who would emerge at the other end of the state. George Westinghouse of Pittsburgh recognized the opportunity and, within just a few years, assembled a cadre of skilled engineers, secured the necessary patents, and devised a feasible business model to promote the more economical alternating current (AC) model of distribution

Notes and Documents

What follows are descriptions of some of the collections at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania that have either been acquiredwithin the past year or more fully processed and therefore are more available and accessible to researchers. Full f nding aids or catalog records for these processed collections, and many others, can be found online at http://hsp.org/collections/catalogs-research-tools/f nding-aids and http://discover.hsp.org/. William Redwood Account Books, 1749–1814 (bulk 1775–90) Marriott C. Morris Collection on Cycling, 1839–1937 National Grange Mutual Insurance Company Records,circa 1850–circa 1988 Junior League of Philadelphia Records, 1912–2009 Stiefel Family Papers, circa 1920–2007 Print Club Archives, 1915–93 Frank L. and Edith Cadwallader Howley Papers, circa 1870–circa 1970 Philadelphia Fellowship Commission Phonograph Recordings Collection, circa 1945–53 Joseph Lockard Papers, 1928–88 Tony Reese Papers, circa 1953–2013 Folklife Center of International House Records, circa 1970s–circa 200

Review Essay: Getting History\u27s Words Right: Diaries of Emilie Davis

A remarkable historical source came to light in 1999, when the Historical Society of Pennsylvania acquired pocket diaries for 1863, 1864, and 1865, kept by a young African American woman in Philadelphia. These are small, preprinted books, three dates to a page, that Emilie Davis flled with notes about herself, friends and family, the preachers, teachers, and doctors in her community, the lectures and concerts she attended, and the Civil War. Although it is rare for someone to be such a faithful diarist for just three years, and despite evidence in the diary that Davis also wrote countless letters to friends and family, so far the three wartime diaries are all that we have of Davis. Their survival is highly unusual; that they open a new door into Philadelphia’s midcentury African American community makes them invaluable; and that they give voice to a young, literate woman who, in many respects, owns the city streets makes them extraordinary

Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site

Nestled within the largest contiguous forest in southeastern Pennsylvania, the restored buildings and structures of the Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site commemorate America’s early energy history. The 848-acre park encompasses over 600 acres of woodland and 145 acres of farmland, meadows, and pastures. Today, recreational uses such as hunting, camping, hiking, and fshing have complicated the interpretation of the rural site, but here discerning visitors learn about how industries extracted energy from the natural resources present in the very mountains and forests they have escaped the city to enjoy. Within this idyllic, pastoral landscape, an iron-making operation ran intermittently for over a century (1771–1883)