First City. Gary B. Nash
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era-based chapters, where particular elements of social and cultural history are provided within a framework of economic and political history. With no attempt to provide exhaustive detail, I take special pains in throwing light on the role that heretofore relatively anonymous groups in urban society—women, racial and religious minorities, and laboring people—have played in shaping the city’s history. In doing so, I join others in attempting to restore to memory lost chapters of the city’s history.
To fix our gaze downward is somewhat at odds with history’s gatekeepers of earlier generations. For the founders of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the city’s other cultural institutions, the great change-makers were men like William Penn, the founder; James Logan, the statesman and scientist; Benjamin Franklin, the diplomat, civic improver, publisher, scientist, and statesman; and a panoply of revolutionary heroes from Washington and Jefferson to Adams and Dickinson. Great men made history; ordinary people followed their lead. Hence remembering the past in heroic, almost providential, terms was an exercise in stabilizing society and legitimating order, authority, and status. Looking backward for inspiration to great leaders could provide balance in times of bewildering change, friction, and outright conflict.
This vision of history’s uses, dominant everywhere in the world for many centuries, has been called by J. H. Plumb “confirmatory history”—a “narration of events of particular people, nations or communities in order to justify authority, to create confidence and to secure stability.”14 Certainly this was the vision of the early nineteenth-century founders of historical societies in the United States. John Fanning Watson, Philadelphia’s first chronicler writing before the Civil War, lamented the passing of “our former golden age of moderation and virtue” and was sickened at the effects of “foreign influence,” which made it impossible for anyone living in an immigrant-filled city such as New York or Philadelphia to “claim [it] to be an American city.”15 Even in a society that regarded its democratic institutions and egalitarian ethos as nearly unique, written history in the United States, as elsewhere, was the personal property of those with political, social, religious, and economic authority. As the Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot puts it, “Lived inequalities yield unequal historical power.”16
But in the past few decades we have seen a flowering of an American history sensitive to gender, race, religion, and class, which is to say, a democratized history. In no small part, this has happened because the old guild of historians has yielded to a much more diverse set of practitioners. With new questions to carry to the sources and new stories to tell, people who previously had slender claims to be the custodians of the past have found their voices. This redistribution of the property in history has offended many people, including some academic historians, because they miss what they remember as a more coherent, worshipful, and annealing rendition of the past. Yet the explosion of historical knowledge has invigorated history and increased its popularity. People who find in accounts of the past figures like themselves—alike in color or class, religion or region, sex or social situation—naturally find history more satisfying than when it is simply organized around a triumphalist version of the past in which the occupants of the national pantheon, representing a very narrow slice of society, get most of the play. Narratives of glory will always have a market, but human empathy with less than oversized figures, as much in history as in literature, has created a market as well. Moreover, only an inclusive history can overcome the defeatist notion that the past was inevitably determined. This is particularly fitting in an open and generally optimistic society that prizes the autonomy of the individual. If the history we are making today is subject to human will, or what historians call human agency, then yesterday’s history must have been fluid and unpredictable rather than moving along some predetermined course. If history did not unfold inevitably in Philadelphia, then surely a great many people must have been significant actors in the unfolding. Such a consciousness of a complex and contingent past quickens people to the idea that they too can contribute to a different future. If presented inclusively, history has a powerful potential to impart a sense of individuality, of the possibilities of choice, of the human capacity for both good and evil.
Woven into this history of Philadelphia is a second theme: how certain Philadelphians in the past wanted to remember the city’s history and how contests over managing and manipulating historical memory arose. “In history,” writes Trouillot, “power begins at the source,” as the production of historical materials begins with historical actors of yore and proceeds with those who follow to assemble and preserve these materials.17 Accordingly, this is the story of how museums, libraries, and historical societies, beginning in the late eighteenth century, became instrumental in transmitting historical memory from one generation to another by collecting, preserving, and exhibiting what they regarded as the stuff of history. But how did these institutional trustees decide what counted as a historical object or a source worth preserving? Such decision-making, as we shall see, has usually been inconsistent, sometimes full of contradictions, and often incapable of controlling the flow of historical materials coming “over the transom.” What has remained constant is the belief that history matters. Continuously under negotiation, inside boardrooms and outside in the community at large, has been a set of questions: What constitutes history? How is historical memory cultivated, perpetuated, deflected, and overturned? What do we need to know about the past, and who is entitled to reconstruct it? How does the past help us make sense of the present? Who has the authority to answer these questions?
By exploring the values and dispositions of Philadelphia’s collecting and exhibiting institutions, I hope to explain what the leaders of Philadelphia’s cultural agencies had in mind as they went about the work of gathering materials that would preserve the past; how the city’s cultural institutions constructed their relations with audiences, appealing to some while discouraging others; how they positioned themselves as authoritative custodians of the past and decorated authors of master narratives; how their audiences absorbed or resisted the memories of the past that their cultural leaders wanted to inscribe on the public mind; and how those outside the select circle of history’s guardians contested official commemorations and constructed alternative remembrances of the past.
Readers will find that this book is much more about attempts to cultivate historical memory than about how well these endeavors succeeded. As we know from a sprawling literature on how individual memory operates—the work of psychologists, brain researchers, oral historians, and sociologists—remembering the past is an imperfect, incomplete, ever-shifting, and fragile matter. Short-term and long-term personal memory operates very differently in the mind of the ordinary individual, and individual historical memory is an equally fickle affair. Assaying public memory—collective understanding of the past—is even harder. Every generation or so, a survey shows that most Americans know almost nothing about the past. Even large proportions of high school students, having just studied American history, get confused about whether the American Revolution preceded or followed the Civil War. In 2000 Congress committed $50 million to cure an abysmal recollection of the nation’s past (according to a study that differs little from a similar assessment conducted in 1940) without an intelligent discussion of how history has been taught in the past, without a consideration about how the management of memory has been roundly contested, and without a moment’s thought about how the average citizen will use a memory of the past—which memory?—to bring about specific outcomes in the world’s largest democracy. Nor have researchers been able to reach firm conclusions about exactly how memory is implanted: By school textbooks? By movies, radio, and television? By tales told by elders around the dining room table? By Colonial Williamsburg, Sturbridge Village, Plimoth Plantation, Valley Forge, and hundreds of other historic sites? By historical novels and popular biographies? Or by Disneyland? My objective in this book is to explore how institutional elites, often challenged by Philadelphians far beneath them in social station, tried to cultivate historical memory. But the task of determining exactly what was remembered in a populous, diverse, and changing Philadelphia awaits another historian who has at hand a methodology not yet invented.
This is a Philadelphia story as it unfolds over more than two centuries. No city’s history is the same as any other’s, and certainly none is quite like Philadelphia’s. But William