The city embodies the American spirit: freedom, democracy, innovation, arts, and a love of knowledge.
‘The ingenious Captain Peale” sired a dynasty of painters and started America’s first great museum.
The penitentiary was invented in the United States as a more rational and humane way of punishing. It quickly ran into problems that still overwhelm us.
A fond, canny, and surprising tour of the town where the Constitution was born
Artfully composed still-life photographs from a rare 1871 album transform brushes, sponges, and stationery supplies into symbols of a proud, industrial society
Slovenly, impulsive, impoverished, and grotesque, Constantine Samuel Rafinesque was the greatest naturalist of his age. But nobody knew it.
Did the fifty-five statesmen meeting in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention know that a witch-hunt was taking place while they deliberated? Did they care?
Saluting a departing general, the British dazzled Philadelphians with the grandest party the city had ever seen; the tiny army that had toppled the general bided its time nearby
Although it has been disparaged as “General Washington’s Sewing Circle,” this venture was the first nationwide female organization in America
The Messiah of Time and Motion
How the Philadelphia waterworks became a potent symbol of our lost belief that nature and technology could live together in harmony
Gargantuan, gross, and cynical, the patrician boss Boies Penrose descended from aristocracy to dominate Pennsylvania Republican politics for thirty years
The President's granddaughter, a dazzling young lady of privilege, lived her later years with diminished means
Vain, snobbish, distinctly upper-class in his libertine social habits, Gouverneur Morris nevertheless saw himself justifiably as "A Representative of America"
Fifty European nations came to America on her hundredth birthday—and, for the first time, took her seriously
Under duress in a British prison, Richard Stockton of New Jersey had the singular misfortune to become
They were botanists, but not of the dull variety: William’s journals inflamed the imaginations of the European romantics, and John may have inadvertently touched off the American Revolution
“ To spend and be spent for the Good of Mankind is what I chiefly aim at ”
HISTORICAL REGISTER of the CENTENNIAL EXPOSITION 1876.
OR DON’T PUT OFF UNTIL TOMORROW WHAT YOU CAN RAM THROUGH TODAY
The law was against the poor printer. The governor wanted his scalp. His attorneys were disbarred. Could anything save him—and free speech?
The simple, affectionate water colors of an unassuming Scots immigrant, David J. Kennedy, bring back the Philadelphia of 1876 and our first great world’s fair
Time is taking its toll of the romantic covered bridge, where once you could exchange gossip, argue politics, or court your lady fair.
Maria Monk’s lurid “disclosures” and Samuel Morse’s dire warnings launched a crusade of bigotry that almost won the White House
A leading American historian challenges the long-entrenched interpretation originated by the late Charles A. Beard