This book is a fascinating re-creation of the lives of women in the time of great social change that followed the end of the French and Indian War in  western Pennsylvania.  Many decades passed before a desolate and violent frontier was transformed into a stable region of farms and towns.  Keeping House: Women’s Lives in Western Pennsylvania, 1790-1850  tells how the daughters, wives, and mothers who crossed the Allegheny Mountains responded and adapted to unaccustomed physical and psychological hardships as they established lives for themselves and their families in their new homes.

Intrigued by late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century manuscript cookbooks in the collection of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, Virginia Bartlett wanted to find out more about women living in the region during that period.  Quoting from journals, letters, cookbooks, travelers’ accounts - approving and critical - memoirs, documents, and newspapers, she offers us voices of women and men commenting seriously and humorously on what was going on around them.

The text is well-illustrated with contemporaneous art-- engravings, apaintings, drawings, and cartoons.  Of special interest are color and black-and-white photographs of furnishings, housewares, clothing, and portraits from the collections of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania.

This is not a sentimental account.  Bartlett makes clear how little say women had about their lives and how little protection they could expect from the law, especially on matters relating to property.  Their world was one of marked contrasts: life in a log cabin with bare necessities and elegant dinners in the homes of Pittsburgh’s military and entrepreneurial elite; rural women in homespun and affluent Pittsburgh ladies in imported fashions.  When the book begins, families are living in fear of Indian attacks; as it ends, the word “shawling” has come into use as the polite term for pregnancy, referring to women’s attempt to hide their condition with cleverly draped shawls.  The menacing frontier has given way to American-style gentility.

An introduction by Jack D. Warren, University of Virginia, sets the scene with a discussion of the early peopling of the region and places the book within the context of women’s studies.

Scott C. Martin examines leisure as a “contested cultural space” in which nineteenth-century Americans articulated and developed ideas about ethnicity, class, gender, and community.  This new perspective demonstrates how leisure and sociability mediated the transition from an agricultural to an industrial society.  Martin argues persuasively that southwestern Pennsylvanians used leisure activities to create identities and define values in a society being transformed by market expansion.  The transportation revolution brought new commercial entertainments and recreational opportunities but also fragmented and privatized customary patterns of communal leisure.

By using leisure as a window on the rapid changes sweeping through the region, Martin shows how southwestern Pennsylvanians used voluntary associations, private parties, and public gatherings to construct social identities better suited to their altered circumstances.  The prosperous middle class devised amusements to distinguish them from workers who, in turn, resisted reformers’ attempts to constrain their use of free time.  Ethnic and racial minorities used holiday observances and traditional celebrations to define their place in American society, while women tested the boundaries of the domestic sphere through participation in church fairs, commercial recreation, and other leisure activities.

This study illuminates the cultural history of the region and offers broader insights into perceptions of free time, leisure, and community in antebellum America.

Klezmer presents a lively and detailed overview of the folk musical tradition as practiced in Philadelphia's twentieth-century Jewish community. Through interviews, archival research, and recordings, Hankus Netsky constructs an ethnographic portrait of Philadelphia’s Jewish musicians, the environment they worked in, and the repertoire they performed at local Jewish lifestyle and communal celebrations.

Netsky defines what klezmer music is, how it helped define Jewish immigrant culture in Philadelphia, and how its current revival has changed klezmer’s meaning historically. Klezmer also addresses the place of musicians and celebratory music in Jewish society, the nature of klezmer culture, the tensions between sacred and secular in Jewish music, and the development of Philadelphia's distinctive “Russian Sher” medley, a unique and masterfully crafted composition.

Including a significant amount of musical transcriptions, Klezmer chronicles this special musical genre from its heyday in the immigrant era, through the mid-century period of its decline through its revitalization from the 1980s to today.