Benjamin Franklin, naturally, was the first to notice that the Delaware River wasn't a normal or at least ordinary river. In fact, coming downstream you might say the Delaware River ends at Trenton, emptying into what was once clearly a bay separating Pennsylvania from that barrier island we now call southern New Jersey. At Trenton, the bay filled in and attached the sandy island to the mountainous coast in a strip running north from Trenton to New Brunswick. South Jersey is a sandy peninsula if you wish, divided from a second more southerly sandy peninsula that we call the state of Delaware, or the Delmarva Peninsula.
From the viewpoint of migrating Europeans, the dominant issue was trees. The land north of Salem was an oak forest, very suitable for ship building. But bad for farming, because you first had to cut down those trees and pull up their stumps before you could plant anything. For at least the first year after settling, you had to subsist on what you could hunt or
Stephen Girard once personally financed the War of 1812, and J.P. Morgan the Spanish-American War. Since then, American finance has become world finance, immense and too politically sensitive to entrust to bankers, even if their systems could handle the volume. Restoring control of the money supply "to the People" was what the 1913 Federal Reserve was all about. Unfortunately, the monetary system then just grew even bigger and more complex. A mistake might destroy civilization, and in 1929 it seemed it might do it right then. Instead of politicians, we think we need financial experts who never make mistakes, but unfortunately in 1929 many mistakes were made by both bankers and experts. We think we have learned a lot about the monetary system since then, and we think Nobel Prize winners have devised a workable system. For twenty years it has indeed seemed to work, because we haven't had another depression; bad inflation is what Austrians had, so they fear it most, and that's the oth
The New York Times boasts it contains all the news that's fit to print, implying it does not print what isn't fit -- while maybe occasionally printing it. Sensationalism definitely sells newspapers. "Tabloid journalism", "Yellow Journalism", label newspapers which print nothing but sensationalism.
On the other hand, detective novels continue to be the books most noticeably in demand at the Atheneum and other upper-crust bookvending establishments in our town. In other circles, detective novels are called murder mysteries. One even suspects that the scholarly pursuit called Sociology derives a sizeable part of its attraction from the sort of discussion which makes City Editors of family newspapers -- squirm.
Anyway, if you want to know Philadelphia you want to know this side of it. Recorded criminal justice in Philadelphia seems to date back to Charles Pickering, who was convicted of counterfeiting in the Seventeenth century. Literary allusions to c
If you're serious about exploring the northerly rim of local Revolutionary history, you should take several days to do it, starting with a trip up the old King's Highway in New Jersey. That would take you from Cooper's ferry (Camden), to Haddonfield, Moorestown, Mt. Holly, Bordentown, Burlington, Lawrenceville, Princeton, New Brunswick, and Perth Amboy -- and then make a sixty-mile side trip to Morristown, where Washington wintered after chasing the British from Trenton back to winter quarters in New Brunswick. That would be a good place to stay overnight, unless you want go on to New York, or to make a hard three-hour trip down the New Jersey Turnpike to Philadelphia.
Having thus made a one-way drive up the main artery of colonial New York-Philadelphia traffic, you ought to link it with a second day of touring, either down the New Jersey coastline to Cape May, or across the remote hinterlands that the colonial guerillas had to follow to avoid the British. That would involve
It just frenzied Benjamin Franklin to meet young people who couldn't, wouldn't, didn't appreciate the power of compound interest. Money invested at 10% doubles every seven years. Everybody is born with the likelihood of twelve doublings. Two, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096. Your penny at birth could turn into forty dollars at your funeral, unless you never save a penny until time has gone past. If you delay saving until you are in your thirties, just chop off the four biggest right-hand numbers in the sequence; you will save $1.28. Not bad, but you missed the really big opportunities, and can never get them back. As a practical matter, your parents have to get you started as very small children.
Whenever you do grow up and get started, there are goblins hiding behind the trees. Taxes and inflation are provided by your government, maybe wars, too. Your schoolmate chums will offer you life insurance, professional investing advice, brokerage fees, pump and dum
The health industry of America contains many professions and businesses in continual conflict for power and control; at 15% of the Gross Domestic Product, there is much to fight over. For more than fifty years, struggles and frictions have generally taken the form of proposals to change the system to someone's advantage but the disadvantage of others. By 1990 the systems had reached an equilibrium of sorts. Ninety percent of the public was covered by some insurance or government program, most of the remainder were not seriously sick, some who were sick and uninsured were illegal immigrants, charity seemed to take care of the rest. Most dissatisfaction voiced was not so much related to serious hardships that the public could notice, but rather to reimbursement, bureaucratic fumble, and fairness to providers of care. Almost everyone could see some feature to be improved, but no one's protest could be entirely trusted. The mood of the public was one of uneasy grumbling.
We can
A million college students and visitors annually take up residence in Philadelphia, tend to business, then go home. They hear scraps of history and semi-familiar names, strolling past curious buildings of whose history they know very little. This website is for them, recognizing how ex-residents retain enduring curiosity about these Quaker Colonies, even from great distance. Future visitors can use a weekend guide to the funny city where they find themselves; their affection for the town is likely more enduring than they realize. What's also gratifying is to sense possessive local patriotism by working class Philadelphians, the people who talk about "Philly" instead of "fa-Delf-ya" but are no less owners of the place. Because of their shyness, they seem to prefer history from a single voice, even though multi-voice encyclopedias might contain more precision.
We begin with a five-day tour of the highlights. Within it, there's a one-day walking tour of the center city district,
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| The Yellow Fever |
No other city in America is remembered for an epidemic; Philadelphia is remembered for two of them. The Yellow Fever epidemic, for one, that finished any Philadelphia's hopes for a re-run as the nation's capital. And Legionnaire's Disease, that ruined the 1976 bicentennial celebration. One is a virus disease spread by mosquitoes, the other a bacterial disease spread by water cooled air conditioners. Neither epidemic was the worst in the world of its kind, neither disea
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| Comm Volu In Medicine |
Mary Wirshup has a very different medical background from mine, but she's my kind of doctor. I couldn't help wishing, as she addressed our urban luncheon club, there could be thousands more like her, even while understanding more fully than she seems to, the reasons why doctors are driven from her behavior model. As we parted, it felt like saying a last goodbye to the Spartans marching to Thermopylae.
As 46,000
It used to be that no spiders or search engines could index a dynamic URL, namely one that contained a "?" followed by parameters to be used by PHP, ASP or other server-side scripting languages to drive a website using a database.
Nowadays, Google and Yahoo seem to do a perfectly fine job of indexing dynamic URLs but Google has a disclaimer warning that it may still encounter problems with dynamic URLs and the SEO literature is still full of warnings that other spiders and search engines may be blind to everything to the right of the "?".
Furthermore, a *.php extension is an invitation to bad guys to try to break in and wreak many sorts of havoc: this site was hacked by Nigerians a few years ago using PHP tricks and they managed to use it as an email factory until our ISP shut us down. I came on the scene at that point and implemented every safeguard I could find, but the concern still lingers.
Finally, dynamic URLs are not user friendly ...
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| Methodist Church |
There were no signers of the Declaration of Independence who were official Methodists, for the simple reason the Methodist Church was in a sense not created until 1784 when John Wesley, secretly ordained the first ministers. However, there is room to believe the movements creating the Methodist Church also played a central role in American agitation for independence.
The origins are a little confusing. John and http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/682.htm
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| Potomac |
Tn 2002, John McPhee brought out a perfectly splendid book about fish and fishing history in this region, with particular emphasis on shad. He makes the whole topic remarkably interesting, but you have to be a little wistful about the way he demolished a splendid story of fish in Philadelphia during the Revolutionary War. The book is called The Founding Fish.
As everyone knows, George Washington and the Continental Army were starving a
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| Mexico |
When they leave us, all the shad go to the Bay of Fundy. When Monarch butterflies leave us, they head for a thousand-acre spot in the mountains of Mexico, every single one. The butterfly performance is more remarkable, since a butterfly can't make it from Philadelphia to Mexico City in one lifetime. The caterpillar that hatches in Pennsylvania knows where to go, and somehow tells his grandchildren how to get there. Coming back North is somewhat easier; successive generations of butterflies follow the scent of milkweed plants, which is all they will eat.
This remarkable information was provided to usDelaware is a pretty small state to be divided into two civilizations, and in fact it seems safe to predict that division will soon be meaningless. New Castle County and Wilmington are up north in duPont country, with more Ph.D's than anywhere else in America, chatteaux in the suburbs, plenty of Porsche's and other elements of the finer life. The other two counties, "South of the Canal," are rural, marshy, or beach front. Wal-Mart country. Aside from a distinct difference in the weather patterns, all of this is destined to change, and soon. A limited-access toll road, probably mostly intended to carry people to the slot machines of Dover Downs, makes it breezily simple to go from one end of the state to the other in an hour. A ferry from Cape May to Cape Henlopen makes it a shorter simpler way to go from the urban areas of
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| Chancery |
Georgetown, Delaware is a pretty small town, but it's the county seat so it has a courthouse on the town square, with little roads running off in several directions. The courthouse is surprisingly large and imposing, even more surprising when you wander through cornfields for miles before you suddenly come upon it. The county seat of most counties has a few stores and amenities, but on one occasion I hunted for a barbershop and couldn't find one in Georgetown. This little town square is just about the last place you would expect to run into Sidney Pottier and all the top executives of Walt Disney. But they were there, all right, because this was where the Delaware Court of Ch
Captain John Smith of Virginia, sometime friend of Pocahontas, wrote a letter to Captain Henry Hudson that he understood there was a big gap in the continent to the North of the Virginia Capes, and maybe this was the Northwest Passage to China. Hudson set out to look for it.
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| Hudson |
Smith's misjudgment now seems like a credible story if you take the ferry from Lewes, Delaware to Cape May, New Jersey. You are out of sight of land for half an hour o
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| The Global Interdependence Center (GIC) |
The Global Interdependence Center (GIC) holds an annual monetary conference of considerable eminence, and this year it was held on the grounds of Drexel University. A featured speaker was Henry Kaufman, who has long been the voice of Salomon Brothers, a New York investment bank. Since one of the main activities of that firm has long been bond trading, what Mr. Kaufman has to say about the current credit situation is of considerable
 Markets cannot clear without transparency.  |
| Vikram Pandit |
Lots of people, perhaps far too many, borrow money. Many fewer are involved in the institutional lending of money, although still quite a few; but only a handful of those few have much familiarity with the mechanics of bank panic. Meanwhile,
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| Cecilia Beaux |
Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942) was certainly the most famous woman portraitist of her time. She had the misfortune of being a contemporary of Mary Cassatt, who enjoyed the reputation of the finest woman Impressionist at a time when the Art world disdained traditional painting techniques in an Impressionist stampede. So, although these two temperamental artists might never have been chums, much of their famous rivalry was probably invented for them by art world politicians.
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| Carpenters Hall |
The birthplace of our nation is both smaller than you would expect, and larger. The fire marshall now says no more than 83 people may rent it for a sit-down affair, or 103 for a stand-up gathering. However, the internal partitions have been removed from what was once a center-hall building with a meeting room on either side; it now is a large open room in the form of a Greek cross. At the time of the revolution, Benjamin Franklin's Library Company occupied the second floor, so the
Among the ten largest cities in the United States, Philadelphia at 24% has the highest poverty rate. Why that should be so, and what should be done to change it, are questions for another article. Meanwhile, many helpless hopeless people need immediate help with problems of daily survival. No doubt, Philadelphia's long history of practical charity has acted as a magnet for victims of social problems caused elsewhere, and many of our locals who deserve some blame have moved away to more promising environments. For those who remain and want to help the immediate need, these things don't matter, just so long perhaps as emergency measures do not interfere with long-term solutions.
Among many private relief efforts, the Salvation Army is widely acknowledged to be the most efficient and most effective, as well the largest. Before the big event in 2004, it had a $3 billion budget and 3 million volunteers; an army, indeed. Except for Quaker charities, which mean to
On the front page of Philadelphia Reflections is found a button which will download Google Earth, and if you follow instructions on the left column, will give you a satellite tour of every bloglet on the site. At least, it will when we get it finished; it's only about half complete at present. If you are unfamiliar with this approach, we suggest you download the Earth program from the Google site and get acquainted by locating your own house, or Independence Hall, or the Vatican.
In addition, every Topic (listed in the left hand column of the front page of Philadelphia Reflections) will contain a button which generates a tour of the geoTags of that particular Topic, providing there are three or more such tags. You will generally get the best results from tours developed by unknown authors if you turn off ALL of the layers provided in the lower section of the left-hand panel of Google Earth, although you might turn them on, one at a time, if you want to enhan
Try double-clicking any words displayed in light blue. After a pause, the screen displays a map, a photograph, or an original source related to the point being made. To get back to Philadelphia Reflections? Click the back-arrow of your browser, usually found in the top left-hand corner of the screen.
Linked Websites are controlled by their own authors. Therefore, a few links have been abandoned by their authors and lead to a "so sorry" message. If you notice such a thing, leave a note on the Comments line and we'll try to repair it.
The Internet provides new blessings, but new problems as well. Identity theft has now ballooned from a rarity to a fairly serious issue. After a little confusion, the issue was assigned to the U.S. Secret Service, so if it happens to you, that's where you make your anguished call. (1-877-ID-THEFT) or www.consumer.gov/idtheft
There's a certain logic to regarding identity theft as a modern form of counterfeiting, which has been with us since the days of William Penn. Shirley Vaias, representing the Philadelphia regional Secret Service, recently addressed The Right Angle Club of Philadelphia on the topic. It makes sense to learn the Service is headquartered on Independence Mall, across from the Mint. The crude forms of printing in the 18th Century made counterfeiting easy, and ever since the early days, there's been a race between improvements in technology and improvement in counterfeiting. We now have paper with little red fibers in it, watermarks, serial num
Mary Scott was recently introduced to the Right Angle Club by Buck Scott her father and last year's program chairman. Mary is fluent in Mandarin, lives in Beijing, and has a PhD. from Princeton. Although her luncheon talk had some of the features of a very polished travel talk with slides, it was considerably deeper than that.
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| Forbidden City |
We learned the exiting news, easily confirmed by Google Earth, that the streets of both Beijing and Philadelphia are laid out in north-south, east-west squares. As we have noticed, Philadelphia was laid out wi
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| Doylestown, PA |
At the time when Philadelphia and New York were both occupied by the British during the Revolutionary War, a backwoods highway connected the thirteen colonies. Doylestown is 35 miles due north of Philadelphia City Hall, at the point of intersection of this variant of the Ho Chi Minh Trail with the path which Philadelphia Tories took in their flight to Kingston, Ontario. No doubt there were some interesting conversations in Mr. Doyle'
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| Miriam Fisher |
Miriam Fisher Schaefer, at one time the Chief Financial Officer of the American Friends Service Committee, had to cope with the economics of renovating the business headquarters complex for various central Quaker organizations. They're housed in a red-brick building complex, naturally, located on North 15th Street right next to the Municipal Services Building of the Philadelphia City Hall complex. The original building within the complex is the Race Street Meetinghouse, funds for which were originally
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| Statue of Diana |
The brown stone house at 1710 Spruce Street is seemingly not remarkable, it's just an Edwardian house now converted to lawyers' offices on the first floor. But it's nevertheless a landmark, curiously linked to the 13-foot statue of Diana which dominates the top of the main interior staircase of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Many Philadelphia gossips believe that the model for the statue was Eve
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| Blockley |
For a long time, the Philadelphia General Hospital was the largest hospital in town, even growing briefly to seven thousand patients during the Civil War, but leveling off at about three thousand at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. It is estimated that over 150,000 Civil War casualties were treated in various Philadelphia hospitals. At the end of World War II PGH had shrunk to about 1500 beds, but it was Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 which finally did it in. By 1977 it was costing the City of Philadelphia about five million dollars a year beyond its revenues to run the place with only 300 patient
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| Zoo Opening |
The Philadelphia Zoo claims to be the oldest zoo in America, although New York's Central Park Zoo is older. The explanation for this puzzler is that the Philadelphia Zoo was chartered by the legislature in 1859, but its opening was delayed by the Civil War until 1874. Meanwhile, the Central Park Zoo was opened in 1862. One hopes the true priorities are perfectly clear, although the Romans had zoos, and Montezuma had a spectacularly big one when Cortes arrived. Why all this wandering prologue before a discussion of a Valentine Tour? Well, since the internet is so plagued by dispute about what is suitable for ch
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| Aspirin |
Cost analysts maintain it really costs ten dollars to write a simple business letter, so it's no surprise when hospitals charge ten dollars to administer an aspirin tablet. But there's also another form of hospital overcharging. Mark-ups of prices (publicly listed, at least) of several hundred percent over audited costs are routine in hospital bills. These are not hidden cross-subsidies, either; they emerge on the yearly audit as multi-million dollar "losses", neatly balanced by "contractual allowances". Translated, they are discounts to
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| Gross Clinic |
A Christmas visitor from New York announced he had read in the New York newspapers that Philadelphia's mayor had just saved a painting called The Gross Clinic, for the city of Philadelphia. The Philadelphia physicians who heard this version of events from an outsider reacted frostily, grumpily, and in stone silence. To them, the mayor was just grandstanding again, and whatever the New York newspaper reporters thought they were saying was anybody's conjecture.
The Fair Plan (sixth and Chestnut, Philadelphia) is a fire insurance company with unusual features. Some day, it is to be hoped some scholar will write a book about the highly mixed motives of the people who created it, compared with the unexpected ways it did or did not fulfill original expectations, of both its creators and its enemies. The Fair Plan only issues fire insurance on houses, when other insurance companies have turned that
Secondary schools strive to be known for their well-rounded excellence. That's pretty hard to measure, so
In the middle of the pacifist Quaker farm region, in fact in the middle of William Penn's Quaker Welsh Barony, sitsValley Forge Military Academy. Its location seems even stranger when you consider the nearest town, within easy walking distance, is Wayne, PA described by David Brooks in Bobos in Paradise as the East-Coast epicenter for yuppie education-based elitism, with all its air of entitlement. In fact, Brooks does not mention the Academy once in his three hundred page book about the town. What is VFMA and why is it located where it is? Three names, Baker, Mellon and Annenberg
Until fairly recently, academic institutions have existed as an outgrowth of religion, sort of enlarged monasteries charged with acting in loco parentis. The Catholic Church in Europe had its medieval universities, but could probably have got along without them. It was Protestantism, especially American Protestantism, which needed a place to train ministers. Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, Princeton and the other early American colleges were established to train ministers. If there was room, they sometimes took students with no intention of The Latin phrase Quis custodies custodies warns that it's pretty hard to find anyone you can completely trust. Investing for your retirement, you must be careful to avoid transaction fees to pay your agents, and taxes to pay your government to watch your agents, who in turn watch the companies they invest in.
Gradually, the world is coming to accept John Bogle's idea of a market index fund as the best most people can do. Investing in the whole market, it doesn't do much trading, whether buying or selling. Therefore, it has minimum cost The early city of Philadelphia was too tightly compressed and thus generated slums. By contrast, areas today become slums by being abandoned. Is there a middle way between these extremes that doesn't produce slums?
Almost up to the time the national capital moved away to the District of Columbia, the town of Philadelphia was compressed into an area of about a half square mile. Although there was a whole empty continent stretching to the Pacific Ocean on which to build houses, early Philadelphia built row houses and dark little alleys, and packed people into them. These airless unsanit
It was a signal and blessed providence which first induced so rare a genius, so excellent and qualified a man as Penn, to obtain and settle such a great tract as Pennsylvania, say 40,000 square miles, as his proper domains. It was a bold conception; and the courage was strong which led him to propose such a grant to himself, in lieu of payments due to his father. He besides manifested the energy and influence of his character in court negotiations, although so unlikely to be a successful courtier by his profession as a Friend, in that he succeeded to attain the grant even against the will and influence of the Duke of
When confronted with any complicated and contentious issue like medical malpractice, the instinct of Congress is to ask for an impartial survey of the available literature on the topic from GAO. The Government Accountability Office has produced several well-balanced analysis of the situation, readily available to the public on its website. These cautiously worded reports complain that much information on this topic was collected for other purposes. For example, interstate malpractice insurance companies commonly collect information about classes of injury and types of subscribers, but often do not subdivide the information by state of origin. Therefore, it is s Composers and performing artists are both musicians, but belong to different unions, different styles of life, and different payment systems. Composers typically sell their work to publishers of sheet music, to orchestras, to producers of plays and movies, or anyone else who commissions them to write music. About 1914, they decided that wasn't fair, because it pays the same for flops and successes. Somehow, the successful composition should bring greater reward than one that fails. So, ASCAP, the Association of Composers and Publishers was formed, to collect royalties for the composers when their pieces are played. After ninety years of adjusting, their system has become fiendishly clever.
all of the red brick buildings on Independence Square look as though they were part of Independence Hall, but there is one exception. The building facing Fifth Street is Philosophical Hall, one of the four buildings of the American Philosophical Society. Right now, Philosophical Hall is used as a museum. It could be called the first museum in Amer
With increasing frequency, the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal are opened to important people, or important ideas. On April 28, 2006,Professor Martin Feldstein of Harvard wrote an article which purports to show how it is possible to have the American currency fixed for Americans, but float for foreigners. After reading it twice, I conclude he is saying something rather different, and softening some startling announcements with circumlocution. It is my view that he says the following: Inflation is not a worry; targeting 2% inflation with adjustments in short-term interest rates will take care of i The Strittmatter Award is the most prestigious honor given by the Philadelphia County Medical Society, and is named after a famous and revered physician who was President of the society in the 1920s. There is usually a dinner given before the award ceremony, where all of the prior recipients of the award show up to welcome to this year's new honoree.
This is the reason that Henry Bockus and Jonathan Rhoads were sitting at the same table, some time around 1975
Philadelphia was the birthplace of Henry George, at 413 South 10th Street between Pine and Lombard, in 1839. The house has been restored to its 1839 condition and serves as the Philadelphia extension of the Henry George School for Social Studies, where you can take a course or two on the economic theories of Henry George, especially the
Scientist and statesman, of course. We nod to http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1364.htm
I, Joseph Nicholson of the Township of Woolwich and County of Gloucester, do hereby set free from bondage my Negro Tenor, aged about twenty-two years, and do, for myself, my Executors and Administrators, release unto the said Tenor, all my Right, and all claim whatsoever as to her person or to any Estate that may acquire, hereby declaring the said Tenor, absolutely free, without any interruption from me, or any person claiming under me.
A mile or two south of Pottstown, the Schuylkill River encounters a rocky ridge several hundred feet high, and makes a bend around it. The first Treasurer of the United States, Michael Hillegas, built a colonial mansion on the point of the bend, and it has been lovingly restored and preserved by a noted Philadelphia surgeon and his wife. Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury under the Constitution, has his picture on a ten-dollar bill. So it is appropriate that Hillegas, the first Treasurer under the Articles of Confederation, had his picture on many versions of a ten-dollar gold note, back in the days whe
Fort Mifflin has been restored, somewhat, and gets a surprising number of visitors at Hallowe'en. The explanation offered is that it seems somewhat spooky. A far greater number of people go to Philadelphia International Airport, or the several sports stadia constructed nearby in a project whose financing is described as "borrowing to expand the tax base". In so doing, visitors travel at some height above the edge of the now-closed Philadelphia Naval Base, with a large number of very large naval vessels in storage, the so-called http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1061.htm
T he Philadelphia chapter of the PAL is now almost sixty years old; that means its origins are to be found in the great industrial migrations and urban dislocations of World War II. Philadelphia has experienced many upsurges of crime in its long history, and almost without exception crime centers in new immigrant groups. Commentators on prison conditions over the centuries have always remarked on the over-representation of whatever is the most recent immigrant group among the inmates. Crimes related
By 1750, or roughly ninety years after King Charles gave them their charter extending infinitely to the Pacific Ocean, the Connecticut Yankees with Old Testament first names had found their promised land was as disappointing as the King who promised it to them. So, two kings later, an exploratory party was sent west of the Hudson. The party returned with glowing tales of the Wyoming Valley in Northeastern Pennsylvania, just over the Blue Ridge Mountain. Only one white man had ever been there before them, Count Zinzendorf, the adventurous founder of the http://www.philadelphia-reflections.com/blog/1107.htm
The most eminent Scotsman in Colonial America was the Reverend Dr. Witherspoon, an eminent Presbyterian minister and President of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University. Already at the top of the academic heap in Scotland, he was recruited for Princeton on the advice of Benjamin Franklin, who knew his political sentiments well. From England, Witherspoon made the following exhortation to his future compatriots at the critical moment of the Declaration of According to Cheesman A. Herrick, "After Girard had dictated that famous section of his will excluding clergymen, and William J. Duane had written it down, Girard asked Duane what he thought of it. Duane, being quite unprepared for the question, and somewhat at a loss to interpret the section, answered, 'I can only say now, Mr. Girard, that it will make a great sensation.' To this Girard replied, 'I can tell you something else it will do -- it will please the Quakers.'"
General Giuseppe Garibaldi unified Italy, but a great many Italians either didn't want to be unified, or emigrated to America after 1860 to escape the turmoil. The far western tip of Sicily was the most remote place in Europe, was protected by mountains and volcanoes, spoke its own language, and was loyal to no government except its own. Over a period of centuries, secret traditions of feudalism and invisible governance had protected this region from invaders of various sorts. Although religion was a powerful force, theirs had traces of the Greek Ort
When William Penn extended an invitation to all religions to come to a place of religious freedom, he really meant it. All religions were welcomed and tolerated, but the English government was deathly fearful of French Catholics in Canada, and Spanish Catholics in Florida. The Stuart kings were catholic, sort of, but the important issue was protecting colonial real estate more than protecting doctrinal purity. When ships picked up immigrants at European ports, they had to make a stop in England, and any Catholics aboard were removed. That's why one very large and impo The common image of John A. Roebling comes across a little hazy about details, but seems to consist of going down with the Titanic at the age of 31, with being born in Prussia in 1837, with getting the "bends" while building the Brooklyn Bridge, and first sighting General Robert E. Lee's invading army from a balloon, then dragging a cannon up Little Round Top. The obvious inconsistencies in this image do not prove they are fictitious, they prove that Roebling was several people. Mostly this composite centers on Johann Augustus Roebling and his three sons, but spreads out to a large and highly talented family. Roebling achievements are not those of a bee, but of a beehive. Johann was a younger child in a large Prussian family living a hundred miles south of Berlin. The region had been occupied by Napoleon for seven years, and its school had been selected to be expert in science and engineering. Johann was particularly good at math and was singled out for inte
Since 1851, jewelers have clustered on Samson Street mostly between 7th and 8th Streets, and for a block or two in all directions. About 150 jewelry and jewelry-related businesses are located in this district, and their outward appearance suggests progressively improving prosperity for them. Perhaps some of this reflects the fear of impending inflation (national budget deficits and all that), or a possible decline in the value of the dollar, which amounts to the same thing. During inflationary times, the value of commodities increases; gold and diamonds are the ultimate Two things uniquely characterize the work of the Friends Service Committee (AFSC): it's often both dangerous and unpopular. That's not required for relief following Indonesian tidal waves perhaps, but the work that really needs someone to do is often both dangerous and controversial.
The Service Committee was founded in 1917, mostly by Rufus Jones and Henry Cadbury, as a way of helping conscientious objectors to World War I. The Mennonites, the Brethern, and the Quakers were opposed to all wars not just that particular one, but two of those religions are of German ancestry, and
For almost a century, it's been a settled rule that it takes "half an hour" to get from home to work. In a sense, that's just a figure of speech because it rather obviously takes most people longer than that. But in another sense, the thirty-minute rule persists in fact, because that's how long it takes to travel to the outer edge of the suburbs. That time requirement has not changed in decades. As people increasingly live beyond the outer edge of the suburbs, it takes them thirty minutes to get to that point, with "exurban" travel time as an extra, often significantly extra. It would appear from common parlance that the thir Euro coins from 15 Euro countries
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