Found in Philadelphia

A city at war with a not-so-distant enemy, hospitals overwhelmed and spilling over into temporary tents, nurses asking citizens to donate critical supplies, it’s Philadelphia in 1863. Philadelphia was central to the Union war machine during the Civil War, but that doesn’t mean it was a bastion of abolitionist sentiment. As the war exposes deep inequality in the city, some citizens see an opportuni...

An important moment of the Civil Rights movement happened right here in Philadelphia, and it took place nearly 100 years earlier than the well-known demonstrations of the twentieth century. Philadelphia in the 1860s was a city on the move. The city was growing fast and developing new city-wide services, but progress wasn’t being felt equally by all of its residents. Philadelphia’s free Black popul...

Early colonial Philadelphia was a place of contention. Colonists had strong opinions about what this Quaker experiment should look like, and they didn’t always agree. From its earliest days, Philadelphia was a diverse place with class divisions, religious discord, and economic inequality. These fractures in the young colony were intensified by the practice of slavery by the wealthy Quaker elite. B...

I became interested in the story of the Germantown Protest of 1688 after hearing about it on another podcast, the  “Seeing White” series by the Scene on Radio  podcast.  I highly recommend the entire series, but  “Episode 33: Made in America”  was where I first heard about the Germantown Protest. I was surprised that I had never heard of it before, being a Philadelphia his...