Imagining Philadelphia

When Philadelphia's iconoclastic city planner Edmund N. Bacon looked into his crystal ball in 1959, he saw a remarkable vision: "Philadelphia as an unmatched expression of the vitality of American technology and culture." In that year Bacon penned an essay for Greater Philadelphia Magazine, originally entitled "Philadelphia in the Year 2009," in which he imagined a city remade, modernized in time to host the 1976 Philadelphia World's Fair and Bicentennial celebration, an event that would be a catalyst for a golden age of urban renewal. What Bacon did not predict was the long, bitter period of economic decline, population dispersal, and racial confrontation that Philadelphia was about to enter. As such, his essay comes to us as a time capsule, a message from one of the city's most influential and controversial shapers that prompts discussions of what was, what might have been, and what could yet be in the city's future. Imagining Philadelphia brings together Bacon's original essay, reprinted here for the first time in fifty years, and a set of original essays on the past, present, and future of urban planning in Philadelphia. In addition to examining Bacon and his motivations for writing the piece, the essays assess the wider context of Philadelphia's planning, architecture, and real estate communities at the time, how city officials were reacting to economic decline, what national precedents shaped Bacon's faith in grand forms of urban renewal, and whether or not it is desirable or even possible to adopt similarly ambitious visions for contemporary urban planning and economic development. The volume closes with a vision of what Philadelphia might look like fifty years from now.

Some travelers visited the classic destinations of earlier times, such as the great waterworks complex, and some reacted generally to the tone and temper of the city. Together, these accounts fall into patterns that often convey a mythic reading of the city, as a place of uncommon order and symmetry, for example, or a place of great torpor and dullness, or a city extraordinary for the way in which elements of wilderness interpenetrate the metropolitan core.

At the Chautauqua Institution in New York, visitors could walk down Palestine Avenue to "Palestine" and a model of Jerusalem, or along Morris Avenue to a scale model of the "Jewish Tabernacle." At the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904, a replica of Ottoman Jerusalem covered eleven acres, while today, 300 miles to the southeast, a seven-story-high Christ of the Ozarks stands above a modern re-creation of the Holy Land set in the Arkansas hills."--BOOK JACKET.

In National (un)Belonging, Badruddoja focuses on the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, citizenship, and nationalism among contemporary South Asian American women. Critiquing binary and hierarchical thinking prominent in cultural discourse, Badruddoja conveys the multidimensional nature of identity and draws a compelling illustration of why difference matters.

Garrett Green examines the point at which divine revelation and human experience meet, where the priority of grace is acknowledged while allowing its dynamics to be described in analytical and comparative terms as a religious phenomenon.

Winner of the Bancroft Prize In twenty-first-century America, some cities are flourishing and others are struggling, but they all must contend with deteriorating infrastructure, economic inequality, and unaffordable housing. Cities have limited tools to address these problems, and many must rely on the private market to support the public good. It wasn’t always this way. For almost three decades after World War II, even as national policies promoted suburban sprawl, the federal government underwrote renewal efforts for cities that had suffered during the Great Depression and the war and were now bleeding residents into the suburbs. In Saving America’s Cities, the prizewinning historian Lizabeth Cohen follows the career of Edward J. Logue, whose shifting approach to the urban crisis tracked the changing balance between government-funded public programs and private interests that would culminate in the neoliberal rush to privatize efforts to solve entrenched social problems. A Yale-trained lawyer, rival of Robert Moses, and sometime critic of Jane Jacobs, Logue saw renewing cities as an extension of the liberal New Deal. He worked to revive a declining New Haven, became the architect of the “New Boston” of the 1960s, and, later, led New York State’s Urban Development Corporation, which built entire new towns, including Roosevelt Island in New York City. Logue’s era of urban renewal has a complicated legacy: Neighborhoods were demolished and residents dislocated, but there were also genuine successes and progressive goals. Saving America’s Cities is a dramatic story of heartbreak and destruction but also of human idealism and resourcefulness, opening up possibilities for our own time.

In the summer of 1813, as war with Britain intensified, President James Madison secretly dispatched an envoy to the Regency government of Spain with the urgent goal of thwarting a feared British bid to use Spanish Florida as a base from which to attack the United States, and with the further hope of acquiring that territory for America. The man Madison sent to pursue those challenging tasks was Anthony Morris, a friend of Dolley’s from their youth in Philadelphia and a devout Quaker lawyer who had never before journeyed abroad. Morris, a widower, had willingly accepted the president’s call, despite the separation it would impose from his four teenage children. The Morris mission did not proceed as intended, as developments in Spain conspired to alter its scope and prolong its duration. Long after the war had ended, Morris was compelled to persevere at his post as the only American link to an unfriendly Spanish monarchy. As he dutifully carried on, ill-founded accusations by two other frustrated American diplomats slurred his reputation. Meanwhile, he thirsted to rejoin his maturing children, whose lives were taking paths that would have been unlikely had he never left them. Throughout this ordeal, a steadfastly philosophical Anthony Morris strove to counter his distress by thoughtful exploration of a national culture and a religious faith so very different from his own. The full story of this distinctive but little-remembered diplomatic endeavor has not previously been recounted. The telling of it here reveals much about the vexation and confusion endemic to American diplomacy in the age of sail, when events often moved faster than the mails. Interwoven with that historical account is the poignant revelation of the spiritual and cultural growth that Anthony Morris reaped from his odyssey, as displayed in a stream of intimate, charming letters to the daughters he had left at home. Published in the ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Series

In Church and Estate, Thomas Rzeznik examines the lives and religious commitments of the Philadelphia elite during the period of industrial prosperity that extended from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s. The book demonstrates how their religious beliefs informed their actions and shaped their class identity, while simultaneously revealing the ways in which financial influences shaped the character of American religious life. In tracing those connections, it shows how religion and wealth shared a fruitful, yet ultimately tenuous, relationship.