Author: David R. Contosta
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812214062
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
Three generations of the Houston-Woodward family, one of the wealthiest and most influential in Philadelphia, have been leaders in politics, diplomacy, suburban planning, housing reform, land conservation, and historic preservation. In A Philadelphia Family, David Contosta analyzes the impact the Houstons and Woodwards have had economically, politically, and demographically on Philadelphia, a city known for its reserved and private leading families. The story of the Houston and Woodward families' continuing public service offers a unique perspective on Philadelphia history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Family founder Henry Howard Houston (1820-1895) was one of America's greatest post-Civil War entrepreneurs, a top executive of the Pennsylvania Railroad as well as a leading speculator in oil, mining, and other railroad ventures. Houston created a unique, planned suburb in Chestnut Hill, which his son Samuel and son-in-law George Woodward maintained and expanded in the twentieth century. Woodward, in particular, became an energetic crusader for housing reform. Other family members have distinguished themselves in government service and charitable work. Stanley Woodward served in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, George Woodward was a state senator for 30 years, and Lawrence M. C. Smith was founder and owner of a prominent classical music station in Philadelphia.
Author: Antonne M. Jones
Publisher: Clear Vision
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 168
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Book Description
Living the fast life of violence and drugs leads four young black men--who are on a quest for money, power and fame--to murder and greed.
Author: Janny Scott
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0399185038
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR "[A] poignant addition to the literature of moneyed glamour and its inevitable tarnish and decay…like something out of Fitzgerald or Waugh."—The New Yorker A parable for the new age of inequality: part family history, part detective story, part history of a vanishing class, and a vividly compelling exploration of the degree to which an inheritance—financial, cultural, genetic—conspired in one person's self-destruction. Land, houses, and money tumbled from one generation to the next on the eight-hundred-acre estate built by Scott's investment banker great-grandfather on Philadelphia's Main Line. There was an obligation to protect it, a license to enjoy it, a duty to pass it on—but it was impossible to know in advance how all that extraordinary good fortune might influence the choices made over a lifetime. In this warmly felt tale of an American family's fortunes, journalist Janny Scott excavates the rarefied world that shaped her charming, unknowable father, Robert Montgomery Scott, and provides an incisive look at the weight of inheritance, the tenacity of addiction, and the power of buried secrets. Some beneficiaries flourished, like Scott's grandmother, Helen Hope Scott, a socialite and celebrated horsewoman said to have inspired Katherine Hepburn's character in the play and Academy Award-winning film The Philadelphia Story. For others, including the author's father, she concludes, the impact was more complex. Bringing her journalistic talents, light touch, and crystalline prose to this powerful story of a child's search to understand a parent's puzzling end, Scott also raises questions about our new Gilded Age. New fortunes are being amassed, new estates are being born. Does anyone wonder how it will all play out, one hundred years hence?
Author: Rick Santorum
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1497636345
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 503
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Book Description
Rick Santorum made his name in the 2012 presidential race with his principled conservatism. To understand Santorum’s worldview and vision for America, there is no better source than his New York Times bestselling book, It Takes a Family. It Takes a Family is one of the most profound and comprehensive books of political thought ever written by a politician. Santorum offers a penetrating look at the social, political, and economic shifts that have hurt American families—and a principled, genuinely conservative plan for reversing this slide. Here Santorum explains his core beliefs, laying out a humane vision that he believes must inform public policy if it is to be effective and just. Politicians of both parties, he shows, fail to address the way Americans truly live their lives: in families, neighborhoods, churches, and communities. It Takes a Family is animated by an appreciation for the civic bonds that unite a community—an appreciation that lies at the heart of genuine conservatism.
Author: Richard Godbeer
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300248903
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 477
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Book Description
An intimate account of the American Revolution as seen through the eyes of a Quaker pacifist couple living in Philadelphia Historian Richard Godbeer presents a richly layered and intimate account of the American Revolution as experienced by a Philadelphia Quaker couple, Elizabeth Drinker and the merchant Henry Drinker, who barely survived the unique perils that Quakers faced during that conflict. Spanning a half†‘century before, during, and after the war, this gripping narrative illuminates the Revolution’s darker side as patriots vilified, threatened, and in some cases killed pacifist Quakers as alleged enemies of the revolutionary cause. Amid chaos and danger, the Drinkers tried as best they could to keep their family and faith intact. Through one couple’s story, Godbeer opens a window on a uniquely turbulent period of American history, uncovers the domestic, social, and religious lives of Quakers in the late eighteenth century, and situates their experience in the context of transatlantic culture and trade. A master storyteller takes his readers on a moving journey they will never forget.
Author: John W. Jordan
Publisher: Рипол Классик
ISBN: 5880233553
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 958
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Book Description
Author: E. Digby Baltzell
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351495348
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 604
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Book Description
Based on the biographies of some three hundred people in each city, this book shows how such distinguished Boston families as the Adamses, Cabots, Lowells, and Peabodys have produced many generations of men and women who have made major contributions to the intellectual, educational, and political life of their state and nation. At the same time, comparable Philadelphia families such as the Biddles, Cadwaladers, Ingersolls, and Drexels have contributed far fewer leaders to their state and nation. From the days of Benjamin Franklin and Stephen Girard down to the present, what leadership there has been in Philadelphia has largely been provided by self-made men, often, like Franklin, born outside Pennsylvania.Baltzell traces the differences in class authority and leadership in these two cites to the contrasting values of the Puritan founders of the Bay Colony and the Quaker founders of the City of Brotherly Love. While Puritans placed great value on the calling or devotion to one's chosen vocation, Quakers have always placed more emphasis on being a good person than on being a good judge or statesman. Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia presents a provocative view of two contrasting upper classes and also reflects the author's larger concern with the conflicting values of hierarchy and egalitarianism in American history.
Author: Mark E. Reinberger
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421411636
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 465
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Book Description
Cedar Grove, The Cliffs, Grumblethorpe, Mount Airy, Bartram's House and Garden: Accommodation of the Vernacular
Author: Roger L. Geiger
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351499890
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 724
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Book Description
This proper Philadelphia story starts with the city's golden age at the close of the eighteenth century. It is a classic study of an American business aristocracy of colonial stock with Protestant affiliations as well as an analysis of how fabulously wealthy nineteenth-century family founders in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, supported various exclusive institutions that in the course of the twentieth century produced a national upper-class way of life. But as that way of life became an end of itself, instead of an effort to consolidate power and control, the upper-class outlived its function; this, argues Baltzell, is precisely what took place in the Philadelphia class system.Philadelphia Gentlemen emphasizes that class is largely a matter of family, whereas an elite is largely a matter of individual achievement. The emphasis in Philadelphia on old classes, in contrast to the emphasis in New York and Boston on individual achievement and elite striving, helps to explain the dramatically different outcomes of ruling class domination in major centers of the Eastern Establishment. In emphasizing class membership or family prestige, the dynamics of industrial and urban life passed by rather than through Philadelphia. As a result in the race for urban preeminence, Philadelphia lost precious time and eventually lost the struggle for ruling preeminence as such.When the book initially appeared, it was hailed by The New York Times as "a very, very important book." Writing in the pages of the American Sociological Review, Seymour Martin Lipset noted that "Philadelphia Gentlemen says important things about class and power in America, and says them in ways that will interest and fascinate both sociologists and laymen." And in the American Historical Review, Baltzell's book was identified simply as "a gold mine of information." In short, for sociologists, historians, and those concerned with issues of culture and
Author: John Woolf Jordan
Publisher: Genealogical Publishing Com
ISBN: 0806352396
Category : Pennsylvania
Languages : en
Pages : 1726
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Book Description
