Author : Jim Murphy
Publisher : Temple University Press
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 33,89 MB
Release : 2021-06-18
Category : History
ISBN : 1439919240
"An alternative, history-focused guidebook to a selection of Philadelphia's heroes and notable places"--
Author : Scott Bruce
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 145 pages
File Size : 20,50 MB
Release : 2008-04-15
Category : History
ISBN : 1461747465
Snuggled in between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers lies William Penn's "Holy Experiment." The birthing ground for religious freedom became the birthing ground of a new nation and so much more. This "Philadelphia Story" tells it all from the first paper mill to the Mummer's Parade to American Bandstand.
Author : Michael Boyette
Publisher : Quadrant Books®
Page : 407 pages
File Size : 50,21 MB
Release : 2013-10-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1937868338
"A balanced, well-written account which provides the best overall understanding of these events." ?Library Journal "Compelling."?Publishers Weekly "A solid report from an unusual perspective."?Kirkus Reviews "A balanced view."?Booklist On a narrow street in a working-class neighborhood, the police are held at bay by a small band of armed radicals. Two assaults have already failed. After a morning-long battle involving machine guns, explosives, and tear gas, the radicals remain defiant. In a command post across the street from the boarded-up row house that serves as the militants? headquarters, the beleaguered police commissioner weighs his options and decides on a new plan. He will bomb the house. Let It Burn is the true-life story of the confrontation between the Philadelphia Police Department and the MOVE organization?a group that rejected modern technology and fought for what it called "natural law." The police commissioner's decision to drop an "explosive device" onto the house's roof?and then to let the resulting fire burn while adults and children remained in the house?was the final tragic chapter in a decades-long series of clashes that had already left one policeman dead and others injured, dozens of MOVE members behind bars, and their original compound razed to the ground. By the time the fire burned itself out, eleven MOVE members, many of them women and small children, would be dead. Sixty-one houses in the neighborhood would be destroyed. There would be a city inquiry, numerous civil suits, and two grand-jury inquests following the confrontation. Michael Boyette served on one of the grand juries, where he had a front-row seat as the key players and witnesses?including Mayor Wilson Goode and future Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell?recounted their roles in the tragedy. After the grand jury concluded its investigation, he and coauthor Randi Boyette conducted additional independent research?including exclusive interviews with police who had been on the scene and with MOVE members?to create this moment-by-moment account of the confrontation and the events leading up to it.
Author : John A. Jackson
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 45,85 MB
Release : 2004-11-15
Category : Music
ISBN : 0190287659
"If You Don't Know Me By Now," "The Love I Lost," "The Soul Train Theme," "Then Came You," "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now"--the distinctive music that became known as Philly Soul dominated the pop music charts in the 1970s. In A House on Fire, John A. Jackson takes us inside the musical empire created by Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff, and Thom Bell, the three men who put Philadelphia Soul on the map. Here is the eye-opening story of three of the most influential and successful music producers of the seventies. Jackson shows how Gamble, Huff, and Bell developed a black recording empire second only to Berry Gordy's Motown, pumping out a string of chart-toppers from Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, the Spinners, the O'Jays, the Stylistics, and many others. The author underscores the endemic racism of the music business at that time, revealing how the three men were blocked from the major record companies and outlets in Philadelphia because they were black, forcing them to create their own label, sign their own artists, and create their own sound. The sound they created--a sophisticated and glossy form of rhythm and blues, characterized by crisp, melodious harmonies backed by lush, string-laden orchestration and a hard-driving rhythm section--was a glorious success, producing at least twenty-eight gold or platinum albums and thirty-one gold or platinum singles. But after their meteoric rise and years of unstoppable success, their production company finally failed, brought down by payola, competition, a tough economy, and changing popular tastes. Funky, groovy, soulful--Philly Soul was the classic seventies sound. A House on Fire tells the inside story of this remarkable musical phenomenon.
Author : John Edgar Wideman
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 22,96 MB
Release : 2020-10-06
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1982148853
One of John Wideman’s most ambitious and celebrated works, the lyrical masterpiece and PEN/Faulkner winner inspired by the 1985 police bombing of the West Philadelphia row house owned by black liberation group Move. In 1985, police bombed a West Philadelphia row house owned by the Afrocentric cult known as Move, killing eleven people and starting a fire that destroyed sixty other houses. At the heart of Philadelphia Fire is Cudjoe, a writer and exile who returns to his old neighborhood after spending a decade fleeing from his past, and who becomes obsessed with the search for a lone survivor of the event: a young boy seen running from the flames. Award-winning author John Edgar Wideman brings these events and their repercussions to shocking life in this seminal novel. “Reminiscent of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man” (Time) and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, Philadelphia Fire is a masterful, culturally significant work that takes on a major historical event and takes us on a brutally honest journey through the despair and horror of life in urban America.
Author : Frank Taylor
Publisher : CreateSpace
Page : 416 pages
File Size : 16,85 MB
Release : 2013-02-03
Category :
ISBN : 9781482355987
Published in 1913, this is the history of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania during the Civil War. Contains history on all aspects including Negro troops, hospitals, training camps, Fort Delaware, militias, volunteer firemen, Gettysburg, war songs, necrology, Sons of Veterans, and much more.
Author : Catherine Drinker Bowen
Publisher : Back Bay Books
Page : 372 pages
File Size : 14,30 MB
Release : 1986-09-30
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780316103985
A classic history of the Federal Convention at Philadelphia in 1787, the stormy, dramatic session that produced the most enduring of political documents: the Constitution of the United States. From Catherine Drinker Bowen, noted American biographer and National Book Award winner, comes the canonical account of the Constitutional Convention recommended as "required reading for every American." Looked at straight from the records, the Federal Convention is startlingly fresh and new, and Mrs. Bowen evokes it as if the reader were actually there, mingling with the delegates, hearing their arguments, witnessing a dramatic moment in history. Here is the fascinating record of the hot, sultry summer months of debate and decision when ideas clashed and tempers flared. Here is the country as it was then, described by contemporaries, by Berkshire farmers in Massachusetts, by Patrick Henry's Kentucky allies, by French and English travelers. Here, too, are the offstage voices--Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine and John Adams from Europe. In all, fifty-five men attended; and in spite of the heat, in spite of clashing interests--the big states against the little, the slave states against the anti-slave states--in tension and anxiety that mounted week after week, they wrote out a working plan of government and put their signatures to it.
Author : Kevin Purcell
Publisher : Xlibris Corporation
Page : 172 pages
File Size : 35,26 MB
Release : 2012
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1465350780
In this true story set in the 1970s, you'll look through the eyes of then 14-year-old Kevin Purcell, who's now a professional advertising writer, as he watches his perfect childhood neighborhood turn into a racial battleground, where two young kids are stabbed to death, including one of Kevin's friends. Read as the author describes what it was like as young kids, black and white, from working-class families suddenly find themselves on the front lines of racial upheaval.
Author : Zachary M. Schrag
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 31,20 MB
Release : 2021-06-01
Category : History
ISBN : 1643137298
A gripping and masterful account of the moment one of America's founding cities turned on itself, giving the nation a preview of the Civil War to come. America is in a state of deep unrest, grappling with xenophobia, racial, and ethnic tension a national scale that feels singular to our time. But it also echoes the earliest anti-immigrant sentiments of the country. In 1844, Philadelphia was set aflame by a group of Protestant ideologues—avowed nativists—who were seeking social and political power rallied by charisma and fear of the immigrant menace. For these men, it was Irish Catholics they claimed would upend morality and murder their neighbors, steal their jobs, and overturn democracy. The nativists burned Catholic churches, chased and beat people through the streets, and exchanged shots with a militia seeking to reinstate order. In the aftermath, the public debated both the militia’s use of force and the actions of the mob. Some of the most prominent nativists continued their rise to political power for a time, even reaching Congress, but they did not attempt to stoke mob violence again. Today, in an America beset by polarization and riven over questions of identity and law enforcement, the 1844 Philadelphia Riots and the circumstances that caused them demand new investigation. At a time many envision America in flames, The Fires of Philadelphia shows us a city—one that embodies the founding of our country—that descended into open warfare and found its way out again.
Author : Fran Capo
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 177 pages
File Size : 40,66 MB
Release : 2011-02-08
Category : History
ISBN : 0762799927
This guide is a collection of thirty fascinating events that helped make Pennsylvania what it is today. From the witches of PA to the Expedition that changed the world, authors Fran Capo and Scott Bruce write with a comedic yet dramatic flair and an easy to read style that will entertain readers as they learn more about the colorful, and sometimes wacky history of Pennsylvania.
