BiblioVault - Books about Philadelphia -

AFSCME's Philadelphia Story

Municipal Workers and Urban Power in the Twentieth Century

Francis Ryan

Temple University Press, 2011

AFSCME's Philadelphia Story provides the most comprehensive account of the early years of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which is one of the nation’s largest and most politically powerful unions in the AFL-CIO. Author Francis Ryan details the emergence of the Quaker City's interracial union, charting its beginnings in the political patronage system of one of the nation's most notorious political machines to the first decade of the twenty-first century. Ryan provides new insight into the working class origins of African American political power in the late twentieth century as well as a thorough overview of the role the municipal state played in the urban economy of one of the nation's largest cities.

Ryan describes the work processes and how they changed, and uses workers' testimonies to ground the detailed accounts of issues and negotiations. Beginning in the 1920s and ending in the 2000s, Ryan's study offers a long-term analysis of the growth of a single union in a major American city.

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An Alternative Path

The Making and Remaking of Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital

Naomi Rogers

Rutgers University Press, 1998

When Hahnemann Medical College was founded in Philadelphia in 1848, it was the only institution in the world to offer an M. D. degree in homeopathy, a therapeutic and intellectual alternative to orthodox medicine. This institutional history situates Hahnemann in the broader context of American social changes and chronicles its continual remaking in response to the rise of corporate medicine and constant changes in the Philadelphia community. In the nineteenth century, Hahnemann provided a distinctive and respected identity for its faculty, students, and supporters. In the early twentieth century, it accepted students denied admission elsewhere, especially Jewish and Italian students. It taught a flexible homeopathy that facilitated curricular changes remarkably similar to those at the best contemporary orthodox schools, including selective assimilation of the new experimental sciences, laboratory training, experience in the school's own teaching hospital, and a lengthened course of medical study. Hahnemann is no longer homeopathic, although it remained loyal to its alternative heritage long after the 1910 Flexner Report attempted to eliminate alternative medical education in America. Like many other American medical schools, Hahnemann has had its share of problems, financial and otherwise. The civil rights and radical student movements of the 1960s and 70s, however, pushed the College into a more politically conscious view of itself as a health care provider to the inner city and as a producer of health professionals. In 1993, the College merged with another Philadelphia medical school into a single health care and training institution called the Allegheny University of the HealthSciences. Although Hahnemann is now part of a new system of academic medicine, its institutional legacy endures, as it has in the past, by following alternative paths.

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American School Reform

What Works, What Fails, and Why

Joseph P. McDonald and the Cities and Schools Research Group

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Dissecting twenty years of educational politics in our nation’s largest cities, American School Reform offers one of the clearest assessments of school reform as it has played out in our recent history. Joseph P. McDonald and his colleagues evaluate the half-billion-dollar Annenberg Challenge—launched in 1994—alongside other large-scale reform efforts that have taken place in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and the San Francisco Bay Area. They look deeply at what school reform really is, how it works, how it fails, and what differences it can make nonetheless.

McDonald and his colleagues lay out several interrelated ideas in what they call a theory of action space. Frequently education policy gets so ambitious that implementing it becomes a near impossibility. Action space, however, is what takes shape when talented educators, leaders, and reformers guide the social capital of civic leaders and the financial capital of governments, foundations, corporations, and other backers toward true results. Exploring these extraordinary collaborations through their lifespans and their influences on future efforts, the authors provide political hope—that reform efforts can work, and that our schools can be made better.

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Archaeology at the Site of the Museum of the American Revolution

A Tale of Two Taverns and the Growth of Philadelphia

Rebecca Yamin

Temple University Press, 2019

When the Museum of the American Revolution acquired the land at Third and Chestnut streets in Olde City, Philadelphia, it came with the condition that an archaeological investigation be conducted. The excavation that began in the summer of 2014 yielded treasures in the trash: unearthed privy pits provided remarkable finds from a mid-eighteenth-century tavern to relics from a button factory dating to the early twentieth century. These artifacts are described and analyzed by urban archaeologist Rebecca Yamin in Archaeology at the Site of the Museum of the American Revolution.

Yamin, lead archaeologist on the dig, catalogues items—including earthenware plates and jugs, wig curlers, clay pipes, and liquor bottles—to tell the stories of their owners and their roles in Philadelphia history. As she uncovers the history of the people as well as their houses, taverns, and buildings that were once on the site, she explains that by looking at these remains, we see the story of the growth of Philadelphia from its colonial beginnings to the Second World War.

Archaeology at the Site of the Museum of the American Revolution is a perfect keepsake for armchair archaeologists, introductory students, and history buffs.

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The Art of Defiance

Graffiti, Politics and the Reimagined City in Philadelphia

Tyson Mitman

Intellect Books, 2018

The Art of Defiance is an ethnographic portrait of how graffiti writers see their city and, in turn, how their city sees them. It explores how becoming a graffiti writer helps disenfranchised urban citizens negotiate their cultural identities, build their social capital, and gain a voice within an urban environment that would prefer they remain quiet, passive, and anonymous.

In order to both demystify and complicate our understanding of the practice of graffiti writing, this book pushes past the narrative that links the origins of graffiti to criminal gangs and instead offers a detailed portrait of graffiti as a rich urban culture with its own rules and practices. To do so, it examines the cultural history of graffiti in Philadelphia from the early 1970s onward and explores what it is like to be a graffiti writer in the city today. Ultimately, Tyson Mitman aims to humanize graffiti writers and to show that what they do is not merely destructive or puerile, but, rather, adds something important to the urban experience that is a conscious and deliberate act on the part of its practitioners.

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