Consolidating power: Technology, ideology, and Philadelphia\u27s growth in the early republic

This dissertation examines the ways that moneyed Philadelphians invented corporate power in America during the first four decades of the federal republic, specifically focusing on business corporations, such as canal companies and banks, and on a public corporation, Philadelphia\u27s municipal government. Through evidence from company and municipal records and publications, the private papers and correspondence of corporate officers, newspapers, pamphlets, and legislative acts and proceedings, this study identifies the people and the technological and financial processes that contributed to the establishment and entrenchment of corporate economic and political power.;From the 1790s to the 1830s, Philadelphia-area residents demanded cheaper transportation, a better water supply, and more adequate credit facilities and financial institutions. The technical, legal, and monetary requirements of corporations that administered these projects served to increase their leverage in political and economic relations with other individuals and groups, allowing the few who controlled those institutions to exert power over space in unprecedented ways. The men who dominated those corporations justified this increased influence by successfully casting their own interests as being synonymous with those of the public at large. In addition, by the 1810s, a small group of Philadelphians recognized the centrality of transportation and banking to economic growth and coupled them to the corporate form to establish a forum at once withdrawn from public input yet able to exert power in public politics: the meeting-rooms of corporations run by men with close business and family ties.;Most significantly, this study argues that the creation of such a domain held serious consequences for the legacy of the American Revolution. Philadelphia corporations provided broader political and economic independence for more people than before the Revolution; indeed, these companies grew because of the great demand for their services and the freedoms they fostered. However, as corporate associates consolidated their hold over institutions they gained increasing command over what direction growth could take and how its rewards would be distributed. These phenomena contributed greatly to the transformation of America from a gentry-dominated society in the eighteenth century to the corporate-dominated one of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

American Revolution: New Directions for a New Century

This essay maps out the directions I believe we are going, gives examples of recent trailblazing work, and offers suggestions about how we might move forward as we enter another century of scholarship

Little Founders on the Small Screen: Interpreting a Multicultural American Revolution for Children’s Television

From 2002 to 2004, the children’s animated series Liberty’s Kids aired on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), the United States’ public television network. It runs over forty half-hour episodes and features a stellar cast, including such celebrities as Walter Cronkite, Michael Douglas, Yolanda King, Whoopi Goldberg, Billy Crystal, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Liam Neeson, and Annette Bening. Television critics generally loved it, and there are now college students who can trace their interest in the American Revolution to having watched this series when they were children. At the turn of the twenty-first century, it is the most extended and in-depth encounter with the American Revolution that most young people in the United States are likely to have encountered, and is appropriately patriotic and questioning, celebratory and chastening. Although children certainly learn a great deal about multiculturalism from popular culture, the tropes and limitations of depicting history on television trend toward personification, toward reduced complexity and, for children, toward resisting examining the darker sides of human experience. As this essay suggests, the genre’s limits match the limits of a multicultural history in its attempt to show diversity and agency during a time when ‘‘ liberty and justice for all ’’ proved to be more apt as an aspiration at best and an empty slogan at worst than as an accurate depiction of the society that proclaimed it. This essay is not an effort to be, as Robert Sklar put it, a ‘‘ historian cop,’’ policing the accuracy of the series by patrolling for inaccuracies. Rather, it is a consideration of the inherent difficulties of trying to apply a multicultural sensibility to a portrayal of the American Revolution

Thinking about Elites in the Early Republic

This essay is a conceptual exploration designed not only to provoke further consideration and discussion of how we might better analyze elites, but also, by extension, to offer a framework for investigating class and class differences in the early years of America’s nationhood

New Approaches to the Founding of the Sierra Leone Colony, 1786–1808

This special issue of the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History consists of a forum of innovative ways to consider and reappraise the founding of Britain’s Sierra Leone colony. It originated with a conversation among the two of us and Pamela Scully – all having research interests touching on Sierra Leone in that period – noting that the recent historical inquiry into the origins of this colony had begun to reach an important critical mass. Having long been dominated by a few seminal works, it has begun to attract interest from a number of scholars, both young and established, from around the globe.1 Accordingly, we set out to collect new, exemplary pieces that, taken together, present a variety of innovative theoretical, methodological, and topical approaches to Sierra Leone. We expect that these articles will be of great interest to those invested in the history of that particular time and place. But we also believe that the wider readership of this journal will find that the following articles raise provocative questions, both in method and in interpretation, that hold significant implications for the study of colonialism in its broadest historical context. After all, the establishment of the first British settlement colony in Africa illuminates numerous themes recurring often in our studies of empires before and after: early plans reflecting a mix of colonizing experience and untested metropolitan assumptions; colonization as a physical, cultural, economic, racialized and gendered project; complex relations not only between colonizers and colonized but also the formation of new political, diplomatic, and economic patterns beyond the colony’s borders; and the ambiguous status and culture of settlers as colonizers and clients, to name a few

Stockholders in the Bank of Pennsylvania, 1790

A list of stockholders in the Bank of Pennsylvania, sorted alphabetically

Officers of Early Republic Philadelphia Corporations

A large and representative but not exhaustive compilation of the elected and appointed officers of Philadelphia-area business corporations from the 1780s through the 1830s. It includes the officers of banks, insurance companies, turnpike companies, bridge companies, canal companies, river navigation companies, and railroad companies