The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
Journal Data
| Type | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Historical Society of Pennsylvania (US) |
| ISSN | 0031-4587 / 2169-8546 |
| Scopus | 24159 |
| Wikidata | Q15709983 |
| OpenAlex | S160391435 |
| MAG | 160391435 |
| Website | http://hsp.org/publications/pennsylvania-magazine-of-history-biography |
| Total publications | 167 |
| Coverage period | 2010 - 2018 |
| Country | US |
| Language | EN |
| Indexing | Scopus indexed |
| Cited by | 1 |
| Impact factor | 0.016 |
| SJR | 0.101 (Q4) |
| SNIP | 0.02 |
| CiteScore | 0.2 |
| h-index | 1 |
| Female authorship share | 40.0% |
This journal focuses on history and biography, specifically within Pennsylvania. As a venue for social and cultural history, it has regular intersection with anthropological interests, particularly if it includes ethnographic or theoretical scope in its historical analyses
History · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · American Sports and Literature · Archaeology and Natural History · Architecture, Design, and Social History · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Australian History and Society
She is the beauty of this place”
Elizabeth Elwell represented nineteenth-century reformers’ worst fears: a woman fallen from grace who maintained an exceptional understanding of social norms and an ability to manipulate those norms to meet her needs. While imprisoned at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Elwell documented the extensive web of relationships she managed within the prison. Incarcerated during a transformative period in United States history—the Civil War—E…
Improving Independence
In the midst of the Northwest Indian War, the former surveyor John Adlum’s operations as a land agent and his dealings with Cornplanter and other Allegany Senecas helped place a large portion of northwestern Pennsylvania in the hands of wealthy speculators. This article describes the complexity of the postrevolutionary clashes over land between governments, settlers, speculators, and Native Americans. It also demonstrates the critical role of sur…
Mixed Feelings
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 elemen…
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 sepa…
The Many Lives of James Bird
In late 1814, the US military executed for desertion a young marine from Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, who had served honorably with the fleet of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry during the War of 1812. Only a year prior, James Bird’s hometown newspaper, the Wilkes-Barre Gleaner, had praised his bravery during the Battle of Lake Erie, when Perry and his men routed the British navy. After news of the youth’s death spread in 1814 to 1815, Gleaner edit…
Never Did I See So Universal a Frenzy”
In the late summer and early fall of 1791, the United States experienced its first financial panic. With public confidence in the constitutional regime already low, the Hamilton Treasury faced a collapse in the prices of Bank of the United States script and US securities. Despite the Treasury’s novel and paradigm-setting bailout of financial markets, the panic resulted in profound political and cultural shifts in Philadelphia. The shock of financ…
High School Yearbooks
Catherine D'Ignazio, High School Yearbooks: Using and Preserving The Record, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 141, No. 3, Education in Pennsylvania History (October 2017), pp. 376-381
Christopher Demuth
Christopher Demuth's early years in the Moravian community of Bethlehem, which included the traumatic transition from its "General Economy," shaped and helped prepare him for a new career in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Trained in carpentry and millwork, Demuth went on to be the most successful tobacconist in Lancaster, specializing in snuff, which he sold throughout Pennsylvania, Maryland, and V…
John Seely Hart's “Lectures on the Public Schools of Philadelphia, 1849”
John Seely Hart’s “Lectures on the Public Schools of Philadelphia, 1849” Margery N. Sly (bio) The Special Collections Research Center at Temple University Libraries recently acquired a manuscript volume of thirteen lectures delivered by John Seely Hart (1810–77) in 1849. Transcribed and illustrated by his student Samuel Sparks Fisher (1832–74), these lectures trace Hart’s perspectives on the history of the public schools of Philadelphia from 1809…
Pa'lante in Pennsylvania
Pa’lante in Pennsylvania: Puerto Rican Educational and Cultural Organizing through Aspira Inc. of Pennsylvania Lauren Lefty (bio) Aspira—meaning “aspire” in Spanish—was the first professionally staffed, private, nonprofit organization dedicated to the Puerto Rican community. As a youth development organization, it provided leadership training, academic support, and cultural heritage programming to its mainly Puerto Rican students, known as Aspira…
The Many Names for Jarena Lee
Jarena Lee was the first woman preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. She joined the antislavery movement and had her autobiography printed, first in 1836 and then again in 1849. Despite these significant contributions, she faded from the historical record. This essay synthesizes disparate and in cases contradictory archival, published, and digital sources to uncover her place and date of death. This project thus adds new biogr…
Andrew Curtin and the Politics of Union
This article examines the elections and tenure of Governor Andrew Curtin of Pennsylvania, who secured election in 1860 and reelection in 1863 at the head of a centrist political coalition that first dubbed itself the People's Party and later became the Union Party. Although Republicans constituted the largest proportion of Curtin's supporters, his overall success hinged on Democrat and Whig converts who refused to back a straight Republican ticke…
Philadelphia's Free Military School and the Radicalization of Wartime Officer Education, 1863–64
In 1863 leading voices from Philadelphia’s antislavery circle aligned with veteran Union officers to establish a school that would prepare white soldiers for officer examinations with the United States Colored Troops. The Philadelphia Free Military School offered a stark partisan contrast to the prevailing military education model at West Point, an institution maligned for supposedly failing to inculcate proper notions of political loyalty. The F…
The Michael Zinman Collection of Printing for the Blind
The Michael Zinman Collection of Printing for the Blind Erika Piola (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. The Gospel According to Saint Mark (Philadelphia, 1833), 2. Image courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia. The Library Company of Philadelphia has collected printing for the blind since at least 1838. That year, it acquired the first text printed in raised letters in the United States, the Gospel According to Saint …
The Raymond Walters Diaries
The Raymond Walters Diaries: The Swarthmore College Days (1925–32) Robert Earnest Miller (bio) When Raymond Walters died in October 1970 at the age of eighty-five, the Cincinnati Enquirer summarized his professional accomplishments in this manner: “scholar—author—administrator.” Most of his scholarship, including several books and countless articles, was devoted to the study of the utility and value of higher education. He was a regular contribut…
The Reluctant President
This article examines the University of Pennsylvania’s presidential search of 1952–53, which led to the election of the physicist Gaylord P. Harnwell, in light of other universities’ presidential searches and literature on such searches during that era. It reveals the existence of a competitiv e market for university leaders characterized by three common themes: how universities prioritized keeping their own rising stars; the growing power of the…
Nellie Rathbone Bright
This paper documents the life of Nellie Rathbone Bright, an immigrant daughter, celebrated author, and activist educator, who challenged the boundaries of gender and sexuality and engaged in grassroots political work to alleviate racial inequities in her community and schools. Historians have documented how the national hysteria about communism incited politicians and citizens to disgrace progressive reformers and civil rights activists. Bright’s…
Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and the Historiography of Urban Public Education in Pennsylvania
William W. Cutler III, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and the Historiography of Urban Public Education in Pennsylvania, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 141, No. 3, Education in Pennsylvania History (October 2017), pp. 221-243
To Friends and All Whom It May Concerne”
Pennsylvania Quaker William Southeby wrote one of the earliest American critiques of slavery in 1696 and continued agitating against the institution until his death in 1722. Scholars have been restricted in their attention to Southeby because his 1696 protest and all but one of his other writings have been lost to history. This article reproduces and analyzes a recently discovered transcript of his 1696 address made in 1791 by another Quaker abol…
John Laurance and the Role of Military Justice at Valley Forge
Introducing a fresh metric—general courts-martial per thousand fit-for-duty troops—this article expands Valley Forge historiography by quantifying trial incidence in a forty-two-month context to suggest military justice played a significantly greater role over the winter of privation than previously thought. Courts-martial discipline, the essay argues, served as General Washington's fundamental instrument of command and control until drillmaster …
Selling Gentility and Pretending Morality
In the decade before the American Revolution, advertisements for education commonly advanced appeals to gentility while simultaneously promising that instructors oversaw appropriate moral development of students. As the consumer revolution unfolded and greater numbers of colonists possessed goods formerly reserved primarily for elites, all kinds of educators (schoolmasters and -mistresses, language tutors, dancing and fencing masters) marketed ma…
New Light on the History of Correspondence Schools
New Light on the History of Correspondence Schools Robert L. Hampel (bio) What we now call distance education began long before computers linked students and teachers. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, hundreds of private companies, public universities, and enterprising individuals sold instruction by mail. Nearly any subject could be pursued, but vocational training was the best seller. The company that dominated the field, enrolling nea…
Race and Republicanism in Philadelphia's Aurora
To better understand the relationship between race and partisan politics in the early American republic, this article examines the democratic ideology espoused by William Duane—editor of Philadelphia's Aurora—as it concerned multiracial independence movements in the Western Hemisphere. While Duane's views appear to be wholly contradictory, this paper argues that Anglophobia and antimonarchism consistently animated his ideology, undergirding both …
Benjamin Franklin and the Theater of Empire
Benjamin Franklin and the Theater of Empire Allan Kulikoff (bio) Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire. By Carla J. Mulford. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 426 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $65.) Recent books on Benjamin Franklin cast a wide net, placing Franklin within the Atlantic republic of letters and community of scientists as well as the political economy of empire and capitalism.1 Carla Mulford's Benjamin Fran…
The New Psychology in the Modern University
As provost, William Pepper sought to transform the University of Pennsylvania into a "modern university" in the 1880s. He appointed James McKeen Cattell, who had studied experimental psychology at the University of Leipzig, as one of America's first professors of this emerging laboratory-based science. This article analyzes the course of events that led to this appointment, Cattell's own experimental achievements while in Philadelphia, and, final…
Philadelphia not Philanthropolis
James Alexander Dun, Philadelphia not Philanthropolis: The Limits of Pennsylvanian Antislavery in the Era of the Haitian Revolution, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 135, No. 1 (January 2011), pp. 73-102
Blackbeard off Philadelphia
Arne Bialuschewski, Blackbeard off Philadelphia: Documents Pertaining to the Campaign against the Pirates in 1717 and 1718, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 134, No. 2 (April 2010), pp. 165-178
The Culture of Improvement in the Early Republic
Eric C. Stoykovich, The Culture of Improvement in the Early Republic: Domestic Livestock, Animal Breeding, and Philadelphia's Urban Gentlemen, 1820–1860, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 134, No. 1 (January 2010), pp. 31-58
Something akin to a second birth”
Rebecca Diane Swanger, “Something akin to a second birth”: Joseph Trimble Rothrock and the Formation of the Forestry Movement in Pennsylvania, 1839–1922, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 134, No. 4 (October 2010), pp. 339-363
The Politics of the Page
With every accompaniment of ravage and agony”
James Higgins, “With every accompaniment of ravage and agony”: Pittsburgh and the Influenza Epidemic of 1918–1919, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 134, No. 3 (July 2010), pp. 263-286
In the hearts of those whom you serve”
Saint-Dominguan Refugees of African Descent and the Forging of Ethnic Identity in Early National Philadelphia
Apologetics of Harmony
Philadelphia's Ladies' Liberia School Association and the Rise and Decline of Northern Female Colonization Support
Karen Fisher Younger, Philadelphia's Ladies' Liberia School Association and the Rise and Decline of Northern Female Colonization Support, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 134, No. 3 (July 2010), pp. 235-261
The Language of “Blight” and Easton's “Lebanese Town”
Andrea Smith, Rachel Scarpato, The Language of “Blight” and Easton's “Lebanese Town”: Understanding a Neighborhood's Loss to Urban Renewal, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 134, No. 2 (April 2010), pp. 127-164
Newly Available and Processed Collections at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania
Eric Klinek, HSP Archives Staff, Newly Available and Processed Collections at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 134, No. 1 (January 2010), pp. 77-83
That Charity which begins at Home’
The Records of Camp William Penn
Federal records offer tantalizing evidence of the struggle for freedom in Civil War–era Pennsylvania. Among the more recent additions to the holdings of the National Archives at Philadelphia are records of Camp William Penn. Situated just outside of the city, Camp William Penn was the first camp built exclusively for the training of African American soldiers and the largest training facility for the US Colored Troops. It trained African American …
Newly Available and Processed Collections at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania
Christopher Munden, HSP Archives Staff, Newly Available and Processed Collections at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 135, No. 1 (January 2011), pp. 103-108
Taming Wild Girls
James Adams, Taming Wild Girls: The Midnight Mission and the Campaign to Reform Philadelphia’s Moral Fabric, 1915-1918, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 135, No. 2 (April 2011), pp. 125-149
The Church Advocate
During the nineteenth century, religious newspapers served as an integral source of information for numerous churchgoing individuals. Articles about the finer points of theology, minutes of denominational meetings, and developments regarding domestic and foreign missions filled the pages of these organs and kept ministers and laity informed about current ecclesiastical issues. The Civil War, however, caused editors and correspondents to include m…
Jay Cooke’s Memoir and Wartime Finance
Better known to American history as the gambling robber baron whose failed Northern Pacific Railroad triggered the Panic of 1873, Jay C. Cooke (1821–1905) was the father of modern war finance and a brilliant salesman of the fiscal obligations of citizenship. The son of an Ohio congressman, Cooke moved to Philadelphia in 1839, whetted his appetite for bond sales during the Mexican War, and “on the 1st day of January 1861 in one of the darkest hour…
The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society and the Civil War
Civil War historians, particularly those interested in women’s experiences, stand to learn a great deal by taking a new look at old sources. Among these are the minutes of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS), housed at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. PFASS’s minutes document the society’s monthly meetings and provide a rather comprehensive list of the work the women did. The minute books record what the group accomplished…
Painting and Politics
“My business is now dwindling to nothing. I cannot lose sight of the fact, but for this odious war I would now have plenty of employment at increased prices. Aside from any personal or selfish feeling in the matter, I regard this war as most unholy. I think it madness to attempt to settle our troubles by the sword.” As his comments of August 31, 1861, make clear, Philadelphian John Henry Brown was among those Pennsylvanians who did not approve of…
A Record of Pennsylvania Deserters
A number of years ago Sally McMurry of the Pennsylvania State University came across an intriguing item while digging in the tax records in the basement of the Centre County Library and Historical Museum in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. Sitting on an open metal shelf was a sheaf of papers bound in deteriorating leather. The item was twenty-seven inches long and seventeen inches wide. Curious, McMurry opened it and discovered that it contained 274 pag…
Addendum
Our House? The President’s House at Independence National Historical Park
The Civil War Collections at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania
The sesquicentennial commemoration of the American Civil War is drawing deserved attention to Pennsylvania’s and Pennsylvanians’ involvement in and connection to this tumultuous period, as academics and the general public explore the diverse contributions and experiences of the state and its residents from scholarly or familial perspectives. Of the twenty-one million manuscripts, seven hundred thousand publications, and over five hundred thousand…
Civil War Issues in Pennsylvania
The following is an assessment of historical interpretations of Pennsylvania’s Civil War in modern literature on the subject. Readers should not expect to see the results of archival discovery or of research in original sources in this article. Nor is this meant to be a bibliography. It is, rather, an appraisal of the problems of interpreting Pennsylvania’s role in the Civil War and of the solutions to the problems offered by modern historical wr…
Preserving Pennsylvania’s Civil War Muster Rolls
The Pennsylvania State Archives maintains all of the records created by the regimental units raised by the commonwealth during the Civil War. Unit holdings include muster in and muster out rolls, casualty and deserter lists, official communications, and other records. Most valued among these are the mustering out rolls, which briefly give each soldier’s war story at his time of discharge and, in many cases, beyond it. They are, as historian John …