Encounters with American Ethnic Cultures represents a cultural approach to understanding ethnic diversity in the Philadelphia metropolitan area.
Thirteen chapters, each using an ethnographic field methodology, explore such ethnic experience as the "invisible" (WASPS and African-Americans); "self-chosen" (Welsh-American, Irish-American, and Ukrainian-American); "gender-related" (the Lubovitcher); "religious" (Jewish, Native American, Greek-American, and Puerto Rican); and "dislocated" (Cambodians and the homeless). Ethnographic fieldwork focuses an insider's view on the meaning of ethnic experience in the lives of participants in the research. This volume examines the role and function of various ethnic endeavors in the preservation and maintenance of ethnic identity by contemporary Americans.
This five part volume includes:
Introduction: Ethnic Culture Analysis—A Course of Study, Jane C. Goodale and Philip L. Kilbride
Methodology, Elizabeth R. Ameisen and Carolyn G. Friedman
Part I. Black and WASP in American Cultural Experience: The Invisible Ones
Exclusivity in an Ethnic Elite: Racial Prejudice as Boundary Maintenance, Elizabeth R. Ameisen
Africans and African-Americans: An Ethnohistorical View and Symbolic Analysis of Food Habits, Carolyn G. Friedman
Part II. Self-Chosen Ethnicity
Unique Americans: The Welsh-American Ethnic Group in the Philadelphia Area, Lorraine Murray
Irish-Americans and Irish Dance: Self-Chosen Ethnicity, Erin McGauley Hebard
Art and Identity: Ukrainian-American Ethnicity, Jennifer Krier
Part III. Interpretations of Gender and Ethnicity: The Lubavitcher Experience
Equality Does Not Mean Sameness: The Role of Women within the Lubavitcher Marriage, Philip Baldinger
Strategies for Strength: Women and Personal Empowerment in Lubavitcher Hasidism, Gita Srinivasan
Part IV. Ethnicity and Religion: The Persistence of Collective Representations
Our Lives Revolve around the Holidays: Holidays in the Transmission of Jewish Ethnicity, Anna Dahlem
Fayetteville or Raleigh? An Analysis of an American Indian Baptist Church, Beth Batten
Issues in Greek Orthodoxy That Define and Maintain Greek-American Ethnicity, Karen L. Belsley
Es como si fuera la casa de uno: The Role of the Community Church in Maintaining Puerto Rican Ethnicity, Monica Schoch-Spana
Part V. Dislocation and Ethnicity
Cambodian Marriage: Marriage and How it is Changing among Cambodian Refugees in Philadelphia, Rebecca C. Popenoe
Ethnic Expression in a Jewish Street Person, Andrew Millstein
Conclusion, Philip L. Kilbride and Jane C. Goodale
Philadelphia has been at the heart of many books by award-winning author Beth Kephart, but none more so than the affectionate collection Love. This volume of personal essays and photographs celebrates the intersection of memory and place. Kephart writes lovingly, reflectively about what Philadelphia means to her. She muses about meandering on SEPTA trains, spending hours among the armor in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and taking shelter at Independence Mall during a downpour.
In Love, Kephart shares her loveof Reading Terminal Market at Thanksgiving: “This abundant, bristling market is, in November, the most unlonesome place around.” She waxes poetic about the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds, the mustard in a Salumeria sandwich, and the “coins slipped between the lips of Philbert the pig.”
Kephart also extends her journeys to the suburbs, Glenside and Ardmore—and beyond, to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; Stone Harbor, New Jersey; and Wilmington, Delaware. What emerges is a valentine to the City of Brotherly Love and its environs. In Love, Philadelphia is “more than its icons, bigger than its tagline.”
Most history books paint Philadelphia as a place of revolutionary greatness, but there exists a forgotten, alternative history of the City of Brotherly Love. For example, did you know that
•when Ben Franklin was Deputy Postmaster General for the American colonies, he ignored rival printers' requests for mailing priveleges. Instead, he loaded down the mail carriers with his own papers and enjoyed the use of a private delivery system that cut off the competition.
the Slinky was created by a marine engineer stationed in Philadelphia, who later became an evangelist and Bible salesman in Bolivia, leaving behind his wife, his children, and the Slinky fortune.
50,000 people gathered in Fairmount Park in 1953 hoping to see a vision of the Virgin Mary, who three schoolgirls claimed to have seen near a park bush. Though the Blessed Mother never did appear, visitors to the site left behind offerings of rosaries, flowers, crutches, and over $6,000.
while 11,000 spectators sat in the Spectrum waiting for the Ice Capades to begin, 32-mile-an-hour winds blew a chunk of the roof off the city's newly constructed stadium.
Find these and a hundred more "strange" and fascinating stories in this collection of vignettes. These pieces of the past can't be found in history books—they are surprising side bars to the famous and not-so-famous events and people of historical Philadelphia.
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