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Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory. by Gary B. Nash (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001) 383 Pp

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Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory. by Gary B. Nash (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001) 383 Pp 652 | KARIN WULF First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory. By Gary B. Nash (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001) 383 pp. $34.95 Nash is the preeminent historian of early Philadelphia; his books on vari- ous aspects of its politics and society, most prominently on the origins of radical urban politics during the Revolutionary era, have deªned much of what we understand about the City of Brotherly Love. In this imagi- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/34/4/652/1696447/jinh.2004.34.4.652.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 native volume, Nash takes on the formation of Philadelphia’s historical identity, focusing primarily on the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries. His central theme, that the shaping of historical memory was highly contentious, will surprise few who have followed the recent fra- cas about public commemorations of the past; one of the volume’s achievements is to illustrate the long tradition of politicizing history. First City illuminates many disparate efforts to enshrine versions of Philadelphia’s—and America’s—past. At times, the cacophony of voices and the multiplicity of stories overwhelm coherence in an ironic reºection of the book’s theme. Nash is at his best when he focuses on elite efforts to assert a vision of the city’s past rooted in the “sacred val- ues” of the Quaker founders, and the generations of leaders that pro- duced the Revolutionary and Constitutional eras (313). Records of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the Library Company of Phila- delphia aid him in reconstructing the role of such eminent institutions in celebrating a largely white, upper-class version of Philadelphia’s history at the expense of a more racially, ethnically, and politically diverse de- piction of the past. Families sanitized their collections of letters and pa- pers, and pressured authors to cast them in a ºattering light. Organiza- tions collected as their patrons directed, for the most part privileging the privileged and ignoring the rest. A homogenizing narrative of Philadel- phia’s history, and early American history more generally, took hold. Some characters and groups who did not ªt this narrative either were ig- nored entirely or their historical contributions largely elided. Despite these efforts, people on the margins of this narrative managed to assert their own historical visions, albeit with mixed success. The legacy of the American Revolution, for example, was con- tested from the moment of the war’s conclusion; Philadelphia’s elites, Nash suggests, were interested in containing the more radical elements of the revolutionary impulse. For example, despite the fact that the artist Charles Wilson Peale had shared the radical political agenda of his friend Thomas Paine—author of Common Sense (Philadelphia, 1776)—the por- trait gallery that he opened in 1782 reºected “a hierarchy of races, from primitive to civilized” and his pantheon of Revolutionary heroes sur- rounded Paine’s portrait with a group that reºected a more conservative view of the war and its outcome (138). Paine’s reputation, and by exten- sion the character of the Revolution itself, would be continually dis- puted. In the mid-nineteenth century, George Lippard, the founder of REVIEWS | 653 the socialist Brotherhood of the Union, launched a movement to re- claim the Revolution from “the thing which generally passes for His- tory” (217). Lippard reasserted the importance of common men, and of radicals like Paine. Although Paine had been quickly dismissed by what Nash terms the “polite history” of the Revolution, especially because of his attacks on Christianity in The Age of Reason (New York, 1794), his brand of expansive democracy appealed to Lippard’s constituency. Frank Etting, the man directed to restore Independence Hall for the Grand Centennial of 876, banished Peale’s portrait of Paine from the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/34/4/652/1696447/jinh.2004.34.4.652.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 building, calling its subject “an obscure political agitator” (280). Not until the 1930s when Richard Gimbel, a grandson of one of Philadel- phia’s premier retailing families, took an active interest in Paine and in collecting his work, was any Paine material of substance housed at the major collecting institutions or his image displayed in any place of prominence. In the book’s ªnal chapter, “Restoring Memory,” Nash states, “Much of memory-making depends on the materials collected and pre- served by museums, libraries, historical societies, and public archives” (325). Although he recounts the many places and ways in which the past is reinterpreted outside the halls of archives and academe, Nash is still, rightly, concerned with the priorities of these institutions, and he singles out some successes in overcoming previous biases in collection and in- terpretation. The Library Company, for example, has since the 1980s become a “magnet for scholars from around the world” after making Af- rican-American materials a collection priority (324). Nash concludes that the value of such measures are obvious: “The Philadelphia story . now streaked with contradictions, ambiguities, and paradoxes ...is much more like life itself as a rich mixture of Philadelphians lived it over the past three centuries” (327). First City, too, is a rich mixture; full of stories about the competing stories of the past, it should arrest the atten- tion of both historians and a general audience. Karin Wulf American University American Exceptionalism, American Anxiety: Wages, Competition, and De- graded Labor in the Antebellum United States. By Jonathan A. Glickstein (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2002) 361 pp. $39.50 Glickstein’s scholarship is about the onset of wage work in antebellum America. In an earlier book, Glickstein asked what this inexorable de- velopment meant for the dignity and intrinsic worth of manual labor.1 This companion book shifts the focus to the extrinsic returns “sweeten- ing” the passage of pre-industrial self-employment. Glickstein’s concern is not with the transformation of work itself—although he is at pains to report the empirical ªndings of economic and labor historians—but 1 Glickstein, Concepts of Free Labor in Antebellum America (New Haven, 1991)..
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