Category Archives: Human Sciences

Philly’s New Urban Dining Room

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Can restaurants serve as a means of urban economic development? Sure seems like Philadelphia is trying, as restaurants proliferate in Center City and environs.  If you’re interested in studying this question, I recommend you look at Stephen Nepa’s 2012 dissertation, There Used to be Nowhere to Eat in this Town: restaurant-led development in postindustrial Philadelphia, available through the Temple University Libraries’ digital collections.

You can also read Stephen Nepa’s article in Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum (Fall 2011),  “The New Urban Dining Room: Sidewalk Cafes in Postindustrial Philadelphia” (Temple-only).  With over 300 sidewalk cafes opening up since the late 1990s, this is an important urban phenomenon that deserves study.  Why such an explosion?  Why did it take so long?  What does it mean for the future of our city?

I interviewed Stephen Nepa on July 19, 2012 to talk about “The New Urban Dining Room.”

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—Fred Rowland

 

 

Pennsylvania in Public Memory

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Journalism Professor Carolyn Kitch

Earlier this year, Carolyn Kitch’s book Pennsylvania in Public Memory: Reclaiming the Industrial Past (print) (online-TU only) was published by the Penn State University Press. She investigated industrial heritage sites across the state in an attempt to understand how Pennsylvanians understood their state’s rich history of business and industry.  As one learns from her introduction, she visited 224 sites and events, including museums, heritage sites and festivals, worker memorials, and factory tours. She explains that,

What I did do, I hope, was to visit enough sites, talk to enough people, and read or view enough media to gain some sense of patterns in tourism, museum interpretation, memorials, and other forms of public memory of past industry. This book recounts the stories and imagery that I heard and saw repeatedly across the state and across industries.

On a personal note, I was drawn to Pennsylvania in Public Memory because I’m fascinated in general by the ways communities understand, interpret, and sometimes fantasize and mythologize their collective pasts.  I was also interested in learning whether an understanding of the last century of Pennsylvania industrial history — through sites, museums, and antique trains and trollies — might provide some insights on the way forward out of our current rather dark economic times.  Could the struggle of workers in the past give courage to the present? Could our industrial history provide inspiration and hope to Pennsylvanians?

There are many very good scholarly works coming out on Pennsylvania history and related topics these days, among which journalism professor Carolyn Kitch’s is a good example. I was very pleased that Professor Kitch agreed to speak with me from Harrisburg, via Skype, on Monday, July 9, 2012.

Below are some incidents and sites mentioned in our interview.
Lattimer Massacre
Homestead Strike
Anthrocite Museum
Drake Oil Museum
Grey Towers
Eckley Miners’ Village
Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania
Rivers of Steel National Heritage Center
Historic Bethlehem

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—Fred Rowland

Preaching Death

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Lucy BregmanProfessor Lucy Bregman of the Temple University Religion Department is the author of Preaching Death: The Transformation of Christian Funeral Sermons (Baylor University Press, 2011). She uses collections of funeral sermons and manuals for practicing clergy as a lens through which to illuminate changing notions of death in American society. On Thursday, July 5, 2012 she stopped by my office to talk about her book. At the end of this fascinating interview, she strongly recommends that an interested scholar write a similar book on changes in notions of love and marriage using collections of marriage and wedding sermons and related clergy manuals. Perhaps a doctoral student looking for a good topic will do so.

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—Fred Rowland

Victorian Fetishism

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PetePeter Loganr Logan is a professor of English and the director of the Center for the Humanities at Temple University.  He is the author of Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose (1997) and, more recently, Victorian Fetishism: Intellectuals and Primitives (2009).  On May 15, 2012, he stopped by my office to discuss Victorian Fetishism, which details the development of ideas about the primitive and how these concepts set the boundaries of culture in Victorian Britain.  Drawing from Lucretius, Vico, and Auguste Comte, Peter Logan explains how fetishism – the defining feature of culture’s absence – figured in the works of literary and cultural critic Matthew Arnold, realist novelist George Eliot, and anthropologist Edward Tylor.

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—Fred Rowland

FREE! Foreign Service Institute language courses

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A colleague just brought to my attention that the language courses used by the US to train foreign service workers are now free online (FSI Language Courses).

As stated on its web site:
“These courses were developed by the United States government and are in the public domain.

This site is dedicated to making these language courses freely available in an electronic format. This site is not affiliated in any way with any government entity; it is an independent, non-profit effort to foster the learning of worldwide languages. Courses here are made available through the private efforts of individuals who are donating their time and resources to provide quality materials for language learning.”

————————————————————————————————————– Subject Guides Classics // Islamic Studies // Jewish Studies // Philosophy // Religion ————————————————————————————————————–

Classics Journal: Study on Graduate Programs

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The Classical Journal has come out with a study on MA and PhD classics programs: information on different programs, admissions requirements, curriculum, etc. If you’re interested in graduate study in the classics, have a look. Here it is. ————————————————————————————————————– Subject Guides Classics // Islamic Studies // Jewish Studies // Philosophy // Religion ————————————————————————————————————–

Translation Movement

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Great discussion of the 9th Translation Movement in Baghdad in which much of Greek knowledge was translated into Arabic. It’s a story of Arabs, Greeks, Persians; Muslims, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and pagans; philosophy, medicine, mathematics, astrology/astronomy, optics; Galen, Aristotle, Euclid; Al Kindi, Averroes, and Avicena. A menagerie of scholarship, a feast of knowledge, a heartwarming story of international cooperation. Go here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_20081002.shtml. ————————————————————————————————————– Subject Guides Classics // Islamic Studies // Jewish Studies // Philosophy // Religion ————————————————————————————————————–

Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

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“Founded in 1994, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History promotes the study and love of American history. The Institute serves teachers, students, scholars, and the general public. It helps create history-centered schools, organizes seminars and programs for educators, produces print and electronic publications and traveling exhibitions, sponsors lectures by eminent historians, and administers a History Teacher of the Year Award in every state through its partnership with Preserve America. The Institute also awards the Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and George Washington Book Prizes, and offers fellowships for scholars to work in the Gilder Lehrman Collection.” Some great offerings on this web site: Document of the Week // Past Documents // Treasures of the Collection // Recommended Resources // Podcasts ————————————————————————————————————– Subject Guides Classics // Islamic Studies // Jewish Studies // Philosophy // Religion ————————————————————————————————————–