Philadelphia: A Narrative History

Paul Kahan has a specific goal in writing Philadelphia: to provide its citizens with a “useable history” (4), one that contemporary citizens can draw upon to better comprehend how the city came to be the way it is and as a guide to address the city’s myriad problems. He highlights how contentious interpreting the city’s history has been, showing how social elites have sought to define that history around a patriotic narrative with shrines such as Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, and Betsy Ross’s house. He offers Philadelphia as a corrective to a history that has obscured the exploitation of Blacks, immigrants, women, and factory workers and ignored the conflict and violence so much a part of Philadelphia’s past. He laments that while the Museum of the American Revolution is well-funded, the Philadelphia City Museum, for which the city charter mandates support, has recently closed, with its artifacts in storage.Kahan identifies four recurrent themes to structure Philadelphia’s history: diversity, conflict, anti-urbanism, and uses of space and form. He celebrates the diversity: ethnic, racial, religious, class, and cultural. The diversity, however, often led to conflict and sometimes to violence: mob actions of the Revolutionary era; attacks on immigrants, abolitionists, and Blacks in antebellum decades; and racial protest in the twentieth century.The anti-urbanism stemmed from a suspicion of Philadelphia by the hinterland. It emerges even before the Revolution in struggles with the Proprietor and issues of frontier defense. Kahan points out that for most of its history Philadelphia has been underrepresented in the state legislature, which consistently denied the city the level of funding it needed. Even in the twenty-first century the city has received less money per capita than rural areas.The fourth theme is how space and the city’s form have been used. Kahan argues that elites repeatedly attempted to use city space and civic architecture to inculcate certain values and influence behavior. He emphasizes the disconnect between elites and everyday citizens in how people use space. William Penn’s famous city plan expected generous house lots and gardens unsuitable for an eighteenth-century walking city. Later, there were crude, if not cruel, efforts to modify the behavior of the indigent and the criminal, most notoriously in Eastern State Penitentiary. In the twentieth century, planners and civic leaders, who often did not even live in the city, again tried to shape it to prioritize certain kinds of values. Examples include Independence Mall, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Society Hill, and urban renewal projects that demolished thousands of homes and displaced hundreds of businesses.There are, however, several additional themes running through the text although not specifically labeled as such. Most notably is the insidious and enduring racism that not only manifested in race riots, but was embedded in public policies that reinforced segregation, relegated Black children to an inferior education, denied Blacks mortgages with which to build wealth, and, more recently, incarcerated thousands on flimsy grounds. Racism is also embedded in the anti-urbanism, as for over a century both state and federal policies have repeatedly weakened the city and imposed burdens without the resources to deal with them.Kahan also highlights the conservativism of the city’s elites. He suggests that as the economy shifted from international trade to more regional manufacturing the elites became more insular, although he also points out that Philadelphia products were sold throughout the nation and the world. The conservatism more likely is rooted in the city’s Quaker legacy, Quaker suspicion of an activist government and a preference for voluntary initiatives. The conservatism is manifest in class snobbery and culture, but most importantly in politics. Again, it starts with Penn. He established a city corporation but gave it little real power. This led to the tradition of privatism. Benjamin Franklin is rightly lauded for organizing several key voluntary organizations, but it was to fill a vacuum left by the Corporation; privatism may not have been the citizens’ first choice. Public/private partnerships have been a hallmark of many twentieth-century civic projects. Kahan identifies the neoliberalism of recent decades as a continuation of privatism.Kahan does a good job of connecting local developments to national events and policies. He highlights the city’s pioneering role in the women’s and LGBTQ rights movements, but there are some topics that do get short shrift. There is more space devoted to sports and popular culture than to the adjustment of European immigrants, Progressive reformers efforts to address slum conditions, or the everyday life of the majority working-class population.The intended audience for this book is those who care about Philadelphia and know it well. But even readers familiar with the city may need some signposts and here the book disappoints. Each chapter has a map, designed to show the growth of the city, but two of the maps are so faint as to be of limited value. One or two maps would have been sufficient to plot the city’s expansion. Further, Kahan notes that Philadelphia is among the country’s most segregated large cities, so a few maps showing where the dominant groups clustered would have been valuable. Throughout the text there are references to two dozen distinct neighborhoods and districts, yet there is no map showing the city’s neighborhoods. Readers not particularly familiar with the city will have a hard time keeping track of these areas or their significance. Specific wards are also frequently cited, yet there is no ward map.Philadelphia has long needed an accessible book-length history, and Paul Kahan has met that need with this comprehensive, and thoroughly researched volume.