BiblioVault - Books about Philadelphia Region (Pa.)

Encounters with American Ethnic Cultures

Edited by Philip L. Kilbride, Jane C. Goodale, and Elizabeth R. Ameisen

University of Alabama Press, 1990

Encounters with American Ethnic Cultures represents a cultural approach to understanding ethnic diversity in the Philadelphia metropolitan area.

Thirteen chapters, each using an ethnographic field methodology, explore such ethnic experience as the "invisible" (WASPS and African-Americans); "self-chosen" (Welsh-American, Irish-American, and Ukrainian-American); "gender-related" (the Lubovitcher); "religious" (Jewish, Native American, Greek-American, and Puerto Rican); and "dislocated" (Cambodians and the homeless). Ethnographic fieldwork focuses an insider's view on the meaning of ethnic experience in the lives of participants in the research. This volume examines the role and function of various ethnic endeavors in the preservation and maintenance of ethnic identity by contemporary Americans.

This five part volume includes:

Introduction: Ethnic Culture Analysis—A Course of Study, Jane C. Goodale and Philip L. Kilbride

Methodology, Elizabeth R. Ameisen and Carolyn G. Friedman

Part I. Black and WASP in American Cultural Experience: The Invisible Ones

Exclusivity in an Ethnic Elite: Racial Prejudice as Boundary Maintenance, Elizabeth R. Ameisen

Africans and African-Americans: An Ethnohistorical View and Symbolic Analysis of Food Habits, Carolyn G. Friedman

Part II. Self-Chosen Ethnicity

Unique Americans: The Welsh-American Ethnic Group in the Philadelphia Area, Lorraine Murray

Irish-Americans and Irish Dance: Self-Chosen Ethnicity, Erin McGauley Hebard

Art and Identity: Ukrainian-American Ethnicity, Jennifer Krier

Part III. Interpretations of Gender and Ethnicity: The Lubavitcher Experience

Equality Does Not Mean Sameness: The Role of Women within the Lubavitcher Marriage, Philip Baldinger

Strategies for Strength: Women and Personal Empowerment in Lubavitcher Hasidism, Gita Srinivasan

Part IV. Ethnicity and Religion: The Persistence of Collective Representations

Our Lives Revolve around the Holidays: Holidays in the Transmission of Jewish Ethnicity, Anna Dahlem

Fayetteville or Raleigh? An Analysis of an American Indian Baptist Church, Beth Batten

Issues in Greek Orthodoxy That Define and Maintain Greek-American Ethnicity, Karen L. Belsley

Es como si fuera la casa de uno: The Role of the Community Church in Maintaining Puerto Rican Ethnicity, Monica Schoch-Spana

Part V. Dislocation and Ethnicity

Cambodian Marriage: Marriage and How it is Changing among Cambodian Refugees in Philadelphia, Rebecca C. Popenoe

Ethnic Expression in a Jewish Street Person, Andrew Millstein

Conclusion, Philip L. Kilbride and Jane C. Goodale

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From Workshop to Waste Magnet

Environmental Inequality in the Philadelphia Region

Sicotte, Diane

Rutgers University Press, 2016

Like many industrialized regions, the Philadelphia metro area contains pockets of environmental degradation: neighborhoods littered with abandoned waste sites, polluting factories, and smoke-belching incinerators. However, other neighborhoods within and around the city are relatively pristine. This eye-opening book reveals that such environmental inequalities did not occur by chance, but were instead the result of specific policy decisions that served to exacerbate endemic classism and racism.

From Workshop to Waste Magnet presents Philadelphia’s environmental history as a bracing case study in mismanagement and injustice. Sociologist Diane Sicotte digs deep into the city’s past as a titan of American manufacturing to trace how only a few communities came to host nearly all of the area’s polluting and waste disposal land uses. By examining the complex interactions among economic decline, federal regulations, local politics, and shifting ethnic demographics, she not only dissects what went wrong in Philadelphia but also identifies lessons for environmental justice activism today.

Sicotte’s research tallies both the environmental and social costs of industrial pollution, exposing the devastation that occurs when mass quantities of society’s wastes mix with toxic levels of systemic racism and economic inequality. From Workshop to Waste Magnet is a compelling read for anyone concerned with the health of America’s cities and the people who live in them.

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A Guide to the Great Gardens of the Philadelphia Region

Adam Levine

Temple University Press, 2007

Finally, for every resident and visitor to the region, a comprehensive guide to the gardens of eastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and northern Delaware. Magnificently illustrated with nearly 200 full color photographs, A GUIDE TO THE GREAT GARDENS OF THE PHILADELPHIA REGION provides essential information on how to locate and enjoy the finest gardens the area has to offer.

As the horticultural epicenter of the United States, Philadelphia and the surrounding towns, suburbs, and countryside are blessed with more public gardens in a concentrated area than almost any other region in the world. Stretching from Trenton, New Jersey through Philadelphia and down to Newark, Delaware, this area (often called the Delaware Valley) offers more horticultural riches than a visitor can possibly see even in a coupl of weeks of hectic garden-hopping.

In A GUIDE TO THE GREAT GARDENS OF THE PHILADELPHIA REGION you will find:

Detailed coverage of almost 100 gardens

Maps to indicate where area gardens are in relation to each other to plan day trip itineraries

Key information about each major garden, including hours, fees, time needed for a tour, history, acreage, and special features

Over a dozen gardens that have never before been featured in any garden guidebook

Arranged by interest, to help guide readers to gardens that will most meet their needs

Notations about historical houses, cafes/restaurants, gift shops, and chidren's features at each major garden

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Love

A Philadelphia Affair

Beth Kephart

Temple University Press, 2017

Philadelphia has been at the heart of many books by award-winning author Beth Kephart, but none more so than the affectionate collection Love. This volume of personal essays and photographs celebrates the intersection of memory and place. Kephart writes lovingly, reflectively about what Philadelphia means to her. She muses about meandering on SEPTA trains, spending hours among the armor in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and taking shelter at Independence Mall during a downpour.

In Love, Kephart shares her loveof Reading Terminal Market at Thanksgiving: “This abundant, bristling market is, in November, the most unlonesome place around.” She waxes poetic about the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds, the mustard in a Salumeria sandwich, and the “coins slipped between the lips of Philbert the pig.”

Kephart also extends her journeys to the suburbs, Glenside and Ardmore—and beyond, to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; Stone Harbor, New Jersey; and Wilmington, Delaware. What emerges is a valentine to the City of Brotherly Love and its environs. In Love, Philadelphia is “more than its icons, bigger than its tagline.”

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Strange Philadelphia

Stories from the City of Brotherly Love

Lou Harry

Temple University Press, 1995

Most history books paint Philadelphia as a place of revolutionary greatness, but there exists a forgotten, alternative history of the City of Brotherly Love. For example, did you know that

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when Ben Franklin was Deputy Postmaster General for the American colonies, he ignored rival printers' requests for mailing priveleges. Instead, he loaded down the mail carriers with his own papers and enjoyed the use of a private delivery system that cut off the competition.

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the Slinky was created by a marine engineer stationed in Philadelphia, who later became an evangelist and Bible salesman in Bolivia, leaving behind his wife, his children, and the Slinky fortune.

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50,000 people gathered in Fairmount Park in 1953 hoping to see a vision of the Virgin Mary, who three schoolgirls claimed to have seen near a park bush. Though the Blessed Mother never did appear, visitors to the site left behind offerings of rosaries, flowers, crutches, and over $6,000.

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while 11,000 spectators sat in the Spectrum waiting for the Ice Capades to begin, 32-mile-an-hour winds blew a chunk of the roof off the city's newly constructed stadium.

Find these and a hundred more "strange" and fascinating stories in this collection of vignettes. These pieces of the past can't be found in history books—they are surprising side bars to the famous and not-so-famous events and people of historical Philadelphia.

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