One of the myths about families in inner-city neighborhoods is that they are characterized by poor parenting. Sociologist Frank Furstenberg and his colleagues explode this and other misconceptions about success, parenting, and socioeconomic advantage in Managing to Make It. This unique study—the first in the MacArthur Foundation Studies on Successful Adolescent Development series—focuses on how and why youth are able to overcome social disadvantages.
Based on nearly 500 interviews and case studies of families in inner-city Philadelphia, Managing to Make It lays out in detail the creative means parents use to manage risks and opportunities in their communities. More importantly, it also depicts the strategies parents develop to steer their children away from risk and toward resources that foster positive development and lead to success.

"Indispensible to anyone concerned about breaking the cycle of poverty and helplessness among at-risk adolescents, this book has a readable, graphic style easily grasped by those unfamiliar with statistical techniques." —Library Journal

Discuss real estate with any young family and the subject of schools is certain to come up—in fact, it will likely be a crucial factor in determining where that family lives. Not merely institutions of learning, schools have increasingly become a sign of a neighborhood’s vitality, and city planners have ever more explicitly promoted “good schools” as a means of attracting more affluent families to urban areas, a dynamic process that Maia Bloomfield Cucchiara critically examines in Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities.

 

Focusing on Philadelphia’s Center City Schools Initiative, she shows how education policy makes overt attempts to prevent, or at least slow, middle-class flight to the suburbs. Navigating complex ethical terrain, she balances the successes of such policies in strengthening urban schools and communities against the inherent social injustices they propagate—the further marginalization and disempowerment of lowerclass families. By asking what happens when affluent parents become “valued customers,” Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities uncovers a problematic relationship between public institutions and private markets, where the former are used to leverage the latter to effect urban transformations.

Philadelphia native Wendell W. Young III was one of the most important American labor leaders in the last half of the twentieth century. An Acme Markets clerk in the 1950s and ’60s, he was elected top officer of the Retail Clerks Union when he was twenty-four. His social justice unionism sought to advance wages while moving beyond collective bargaining to improve the conditions of the working-class majority, whether in a union or not. Young quickly gained a reputation for his independence, daring at times to publicly criticize the policies of the city’s powerful AFL-CIO leadership and tangle with the city’s political machine.

Editor Francis Ryan, whose introduction provides historical context, interviewed Young about his experiences working in the region’s retail and food industry, measuring the changes over time and the tangible impact that union membership had on workers. Young also describes the impact of Philadelphia’s deindustrialization in the 1970s and ’80s and recounts his activism for civil rights and the anti-war movements as well as on John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. 

The Memoirs of Wendell W. YoungIII  provides the most extensive labor history of late twentieth-century Philadelphia yet written.

Eddie Gottlieb-The Mogul -was one of the most colorful figures in Philadelphia sports history.  A member of the Basketball Hall of Fame, he  founded, played and coached for the legendary South Philadelphia Hebrew Association (SPHAs) basketball team, helped form the National Basketball Association, owned the Warriors franchise, and created the NBA's annual schedule of games for over a quarter-century.  In baseball, he co-owned the Philadelphia Stars in the Negro Leagues and tried unsuccessfully to buy the Philadelphia Phillies.  Locally, he was the city's leading sports booking agent for activities ranging from sandlot baseball to semipro football to professional wrestling. 

Drawing upon sixty-plus interviews and many archival sources, well-known Philadelphia sports historian Rich Westcott vividly portrays Gottlieb's role in a pivotal era in city sports, in the process offering histories of the SPHAs, Warriors, and Stars and the role of Jews and African Americans in the city's sporting history.

What is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia? That was the question posed by the curators, artists, scholars, and students who comprise the Philadelphia-based public art and history studio Monument Lab. And in 2017, along with Mural Arts Philadelphia, they produced and organized a groundbreaking, city-wide exhibition of temporary, site-specific works that engaged directly with the community. The installations, by a cohort of diverse artists considering issues of identity, appeared in iconic public squares and neighborhood parks with research and learning labs and prototype monuments. 

Monument Lab is a fabulous compendium of the exhibition and a critical reflection of the proceedings, including contributions from interlocutors and collaborators. The exhibition and this handbook were designed to generate new ways of thinking about monuments and public art as well as to find new, critical perspectives to reflect on the monuments we have inherited and to imagine those we have yet to build. Monument Lab energizes acivic dialogue about place and history as forces for a deeper questioning of what it means to be Philadelphian in a time of renewal and continuing struggle.

Contributors: Alexander Alberro, Alliyah Allen, Laurie Allen, Andrew Friedman, Justin Geller, Kristen Giannantonio, Jane Golden, Aviva Kapust, Fariah Khan, Homay King, Stephanie Mach, Trapeta B. Mayson, Nathaniel Popkin, Ursula Rucker, Jodi Throckmorton, Salamishah Tillet, Jennifer Harford Vargas, Naomi Waltham-Smith, Bethany Wiggin, Mariam I. Williams, Leslie Willis-Lowry,  and the editors.

Artists: Tania Bruguera, Mel Chin, Kara Crombie, Tyree Guyton, Hans Haacke, David Hartt, Sharon Hayes, King Britt and Joshua Mays, Klip Collective, Duane Linklater, Emeka Ogboh, Karyn Olivier, Michelle Angela Ortiz, Kaitlin Pomerantz, RAIR, Alexander Rosenberg, Jamel Shabazz, Hank Willis Thomas, Shira Walinsky and Southeast by Southeast, and Marisa Williamson.

More than twenty years ago, a New Jersey artist started a project for the Philadelphia Anti-Graffiti Network that encouraged young people to paint murals on a few buildings around the city. Jane Golden could not have known that the Mural Arts Program (MAP) would become the nation's largest public art program and a model for programs throughout the country. With more than 2600 murals throughout Philadelphia, the program has brightened the lives of countless residents and tourists while providing a creative outlet for an astounding array of artists. MAP now works with more than 3000 students around the city, engaging them in a curriculum that teaches not only artistic skills but civic engagement and personal responsibility. In this sequel to the bestselling Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell, published in 2002, More Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell shares with the earlier work its beautiful color photography, along with profiles of the artists. Featured here is the remarkable story of an unlikely artistic collaboration—between boys who live in a residential facility, a community in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, and men who are incarcerated in a maximum-security state correctional facility. The 1/8 of a mile long mural they created, about balanced and restorative justice, was intended to help the young men give something back to a community they had harmed and help the community wrestle with issues around crime and violence. In the process of creating the mural, it became a life-changing experience for all involved. By recounting this story and the many others behind the works of art, More Philadelphia Murals and the Stories They Tell is as inspirational as it is beautiful.

In 1985, police bombed the Philadelphia community occupied by members of the black counterculture group MOVE (short for “The Movement”).  What began fifteen years earlier as a neighborhood squabble provoked by conflicting lifestyles ended in the destruction of sixty-one homes and the death of eleven residents - five of them children.  Some 250 people were left homeless.

Was this tragedy the only solution to the conflict?  Were John Africa and his morally and ecologically idealistic followers “too crazy” to negotiate with? 

The authors interviewed MOVE members and their neighbors, third-party intervenors, and representatives of the Philadelpia administration in the 1970s, and draw on their own knowledge of the field of dispute resolution.  More than simply describing a terrible event, they examine the dynamics of conflict, analyzing attempts at third-party mediation and the possibility of resolution without violence.  Their analytical approach provides insight into other major conflicts, such as the problems of perception and misperception in U.S. - Iranian relations.

In an age when terrorism and hostage-taking are regular features on the six o’clock news, their questioning of traditional views on negotiation with “irrational” adversaries is especially important.

Recovering the Life and Influence of the “Mother of American Cooking,” the Woman Who Changed the Way We Learn How to Prepare Meals

In Philadelphia during the first decades of the nineteenth century, a widow, Mrs. Elizabeth Goodfellow, ran a popular bakery and sweet shop. In addition to catering to Philadelphia’s wealthy families and a reputation of having the finest desserts and sweet dishes in the young country, her business stood out from every other establishment in another way: she ran a small school to learn the art of cooking, the first of its kind in America. Despite her fame—references to her cooking as a benchmark abound in the literature of the period—we know very little about who she was. Since she did not keep a journal and never published any of her recipes, we have to rely on her students, most notably Eliza Leslie, who fortunately recorded many of Goodfellow’s creations and techniques. Goodfellow is known to have made the first lemon meringue pie and for popularizing regional foods, such as Indian (corn) meal. Her students also recall that Mrs. Goodfellow stressed using simple wholesome ingredients that were locally grown, presaging modern culinary fashion.

By assembling the many parts of this puzzle from old recipe books, advertisements, letters, diaries, genealogical records, and other primary sources, researcher and writer Becky Diamond has been able to provide a more complete portrait of this influential figure in cooking history. Mrs. Goodfellow: The Story of America’s First Cooking School begins with what we know about Elizabeth Goodfellow—where she was born, her husbands, her children, where her shop was located. We then travel back in time to discover the kinds of foods that would have been available to Goodfellow and how she may have used them. The book next turns to the rise of both commercial eating establishements and books of recipes. From here, the author explains the rapid expansion of cooking schools, such as the New York Cooking Academy and the Boston Cooking School, made famous through its association with Fannie Farmer, and ends with a discussion of the role of celebrity chefs. Thoroughly researched and including a range of authentic recipes, Mrs. Goodfellow is a delicious exploration of the life and legacy of one of America’s most influential cooks.

On February 2, 1968, the Electric Factory, Philadelphia's first major venue for the era's new music, opened with a show featuring the Chambers Brothers. Performing their neosoul and gospel sounds in a warm and inviting venue, they declared, "My soul's been psychedelicized!"-a feeling that the Factory's cofounder, Larry Magid, has been experiencing ever since.

In My Soul's Been Psychedelicized, Magid presents a spectacular photographic history of the bands and solo acts that have performed at the Electric Factory and at other venues in Factory-produced concerts over the past four decades. The book includes concert posters, photographs, and promotional items featuring both rising stars and established performers, such as Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Bette Midler, Elvis Presley, Tina Turner, Pearl Jam and many, many more.

The images—candid and celebratory—create a one-of-a-kind history of rock and roll, from the wild 1960s to the Live Aid concert in 1985 and the closing of the Philadelphia Spectrum in 2009. Magid's vivid recollections constitute a who's who of pop music and culture. As one of the great concert producers, he shares his unique perspective on the business, talking about how it has changed and how lasting careers have been carefully developed.

For anyone who has ever attended a concert at the Electric Factory—or for anyone who missed a show—My Soul's Been Psychedelicized will bring back great memories of the music and the musicians.