Take some time to read your classmates’ research plans and about their experiences in archives across the city. Jim and Chelsea each have theirs up. And as evidence that you all are living in the archives, here’s picture of Brian in the City Archives, looking at maps of Center City for clues about the Union League.
Inga Saffron, The Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Architectural Critic provides a review of the book, City Abandoned, on Philadelphia’s abandoned buildings.
Check it out here.
Image: Vincent D. Feldman’s 1994 photo portrait of Ile Ife Museum of Afro-American Culture, Germantown Avenue and Dauphin Street. Walter D. Smedley, architect, 1893
Check out this recent post by a novice researcher from Hidden Cities. This could serve as a great model for your own posts on your research. And from it, you can learn the great advantage of locating the file on our building at the City Archives.
Make sure to note that the City Archives has very limited hours when it is open to researchers like yourself, AND they do not usually respond quickly to research inquiries. It’s best to go down in person (many hours before they close) to dig in.
Elijah Anderson the author of one of our readings, “Down Germantown Ave.,” from Code of the Street, will be speaking about his work The Cosmopolitan Canopy. He will be speaking on the same day we discuss his work in class.
April 14, 2:30 PM, Paley Library Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 1210 Polett Walk
Elijah Anderson is the William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Sociology at Yale University. He is one of the leading urban ethnographers in the United States and the 2013 recipient of the prestigious Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award of the American Sociological Association. His publications include Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (1999), winner of the Komarovsky Award from the Eastern Sociological Society; Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community (1990), winner of the American Sociological Association’s Robert E. Park Award for the best published book in the area of Urban Sociology; and most recently The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life (WW Norton, 2012). For his talk at Temple, Dr. Anderson will discuss this most recent book-in particular the chapter on the food-filled Reading Terminal Market.
For more information look here.
Please read this great post from Hidden City on Philadelphia Consolidation:
http://hiddencityphila.org/2014/02/in-defense-of-consolidation-160-years-later/
Funeral for a Home has a new website.
Make sure to register for the Vernacular Architecture: A Trolley Tour of Philadelphia’s Historic Rowhomes Saturday, April 12 Rowhouse tour led by Bruce Laverty from the Anthenauem here.
Welcome to the website for Hilary Iris Lowe’s course Reading Philadelphia, History 4296
This page will be used to document and share research and will be the primary touch point for student projects.
In this class we will examine writings about Philadelphia as a place and destination, ranging from Dickens’s reflections of Philadelphia in the 1840s to WPA travel guides of the 1930s to guides to the Bicentennial, and focus on the built environment. This writing intensive course is designed to put into practice the skills of historical research and writing that you have acquired as a history major. Each student will write a research paper about an historic building, a neighborhood block, or other extant physical feature of Philadelphia’s historic environment–making use of original research and using primary sources on aspects of Philadelphia history since 1840 that are particularly important in telling the stories associated that place and the people who have worked, lived, or otherwise used it over time. This class, while primarily a class where you will flex your research and writing muscles as new historians, is also one part urban history, one part local history, and one part architectural history. The conversations that go on in each of these fields of inquiry will be visited upon Philadelphia-regional content.
In addition to a regular research paper (and to facilitate it), particular emphasis will be placed on tracing and tracking your research via student blogs. These blogs will document your visits to archives across the city, your original research, and the primary sources you find, and be the central place where you collect data about your places and their occupants, uses, and communities.