Imagining Philadelphia

Imagining Philadelphia PDF Author: Scott Gabriel Knowles
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812205960
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 185

Get Book Here

Book Description
When Philadelphia's iconoclastic city planner Edmund N. Bacon looked into his crystal ball in 1959, he saw a remarkable vision: "Philadelphia as an unmatched expression of the vitality of American technology and culture." In that year Bacon penned an essay for Greater Philadelphia Magazine, originally entitled "Philadelphia in the Year 2009," in which he imagined a city remade, modernized in time to host the 1976 Philadelphia World's Fair and Bicentennial celebration, an event that would be a catalyst for a golden age of urban renewal. What Bacon did not predict was the long, bitter period of economic decline, population dispersal, and racial confrontation that Philadelphia was about to enter. As such, his essay comes to us as a time capsule, a message from one of the city's most influential and controversial shapers that prompts discussions of what was, what might have been, and what could yet be in the city's future. Imagining Philadelphia brings together Bacon's original essay, reprinted here for the first time in fifty years, and a set of original essays on the past, present, and future of urban planning in Philadelphia. In addition to examining Bacon and his motivations for writing the piece, the essays assess the wider context of Philadelphia's planning, architecture, and real estate communities at the time, how city officials were reacting to economic decline, what national precedents shaped Bacon's faith in grand forms of urban renewal, and whether or not it is desirable or even possible to adopt similarly ambitious visions for contemporary urban planning and economic development. The volume closes with a vision of what Philadelphia might look like fifty years from now.

Imagining Philadelphia

Imagining Philadelphia PDF Author: Scott Gabriel Knowles
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812205960
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 185

Get Book Here

Book Description
When Philadelphia's iconoclastic city planner Edmund N. Bacon looked into his crystal ball in 1959, he saw a remarkable vision: "Philadelphia as an unmatched expression of the vitality of American technology and culture." In that year Bacon penned an essay for Greater Philadelphia Magazine, originally entitled "Philadelphia in the Year 2009," in which he imagined a city remade, modernized in time to host the 1976 Philadelphia World's Fair and Bicentennial celebration, an event that would be a catalyst for a golden age of urban renewal. What Bacon did not predict was the long, bitter period of economic decline, population dispersal, and racial confrontation that Philadelphia was about to enter. As such, his essay comes to us as a time capsule, a message from one of the city's most influential and controversial shapers that prompts discussions of what was, what might have been, and what could yet be in the city's future. Imagining Philadelphia brings together Bacon's original essay, reprinted here for the first time in fifty years, and a set of original essays on the past, present, and future of urban planning in Philadelphia. In addition to examining Bacon and his motivations for writing the piece, the essays assess the wider context of Philadelphia's planning, architecture, and real estate communities at the time, how city officials were reacting to economic decline, what national precedents shaped Bacon's faith in grand forms of urban renewal, and whether or not it is desirable or even possible to adopt similarly ambitious visions for contemporary urban planning and economic development. The volume closes with a vision of what Philadelphia might look like fifty years from now.

Imagining Philadelphia

Imagining Philadelphia PDF Author: Philip Stevick
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812233773
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
Some travelers visited the classic destinations of earlier times, such as the great waterworks complex, and some reacted generally to the tone and temper of the city. Together, these accounts fall into patterns that often convey a mythic reading of the city, as a place of uncommon order and symmetry, for example, or a place of great torpor and dullness, or a city extraordinary for the way in which elements of wilderness interpenetrate the metropolitan core.

Ed Bacon

Ed Bacon PDF Author: Gregory L. Heller
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812244907
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book Here

Book Description
Ed Bacon is the first biography of the innovative and controversial urban planner who transformed Philadelphia in the mid-twentieth century.

A Greene Country Towne

A Greene Country Towne PDF Author: Alan C. Braddock
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271078928
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book Here

Book Description
An unconventional history of Philadelphia that operates at the threshold of cultural and environmental studies, A Greene Country Towne expands the meaning of community beyond people to encompass nonhuman beings, things, and forces. By examining a diverse range of cultural acts and material objects created in Philadelphia—from Native American artifacts, early stoves, and literary works to public parks, photographs, and paintings—through the lens of new materialism, the essays in A Greene Country Towne ask us to consider an urban environmental history in which humans are not the only protagonists. This collection reimagines the city as a system of constantly evolving constituents and agencies that have interacted over time, a system powerfully captured by Philadelphia artists, writers, architects, and planners since the seventeenth century. In addition to the editors, contributors to this volume are Maria Farland, Nate Gabriel, Andrea L. M. Hansen, Scott Hicks, Michael Dean Mackintosh, Amy E. Menzer, Stephen Nepa, John Ott, Sue Ann Prince, and Mary I. Unger.

I, Eliza Hamilton

I, Eliza Hamilton PDF Author: Susan Holloway Scott
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corporation
ISBN: 1496712528
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Get Book Here

Book Description
A fictionalizaed account of the life of Alexander Hamilton's wife, Elizabeth.

Imagining the Holy Land

Imagining the Holy Land PDF Author: Burke O. Long
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253341365
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book Here

Book Description
At the Chautauqua Institution in New York, visitors could walk down Palestine Avenue to "Palestine" and a model of Jerusalem, or along Morris Avenue to a scale model of the "Jewish Tabernacle." At the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904, a replica of Ottoman Jerusalem covered eleven acres, while today, 300 miles to the southeast, a seven-story-high Christ of the Ozarks stands above a modern re-creation of the Holy Land set in the Arkansas hills."--BOOK JACKET.

The Philadelphia Barrio

The Philadelphia Barrio PDF Author: Frederick F. Wherry
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226894320
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 215

Get Book Here

Book Description
How does a so-called bad neighborhood go about changing its reputation? Is it simply a matter of improving material conditions or picking the savviest marketing strategy? What kind of role can or should the arts play in that process? Does gentrification always entail a betrayal of a neighborhood’s roots? Tackling these questions and offering a fresh take on the dynamics of urban revitalization, The Philadelphia Barrio examines one neighborhood’s fight to erase the stigma of devastation. Frederick F. Wherry shows how, in the predominantly Latino neighborhood of Centro de Oro, entrepreneurs and community leaders forged connections between local businesses and cultural institutions to rebrand a place once nicknamed the Badlands. Artists and performers negotiated with government organizations and national foundations, Wherry reveals, and took to local galleries, stages, storefronts, and street parades in a concerted, canny effort to reanimate the spirit of their neighborhood. Complicating our notions of neighborhood change by exploring the ways the process is driven by local residents, The Philadelphia Barrio presents a nuanced look at how city dwellers can make commercial interests serve the local culture, rather than exploit it.

The Medical Imagination

The Medical Imagination PDF Author: Sari Altschuler
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812294742
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 1872, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "Science does not know its debt to imagination," words that still ring true in the worlds of health and health care today. The checklists and clinical algorithms of modern medicine leave little space for imagination, and yet we depend on creativity and ingenuity for the advancement of medicine—to diagnose unusual conditions, to innovate treatment, and to make groundbreaking discoveries. We know a great deal about the empirical aspects of medicine, but we know far less about what the medical imagination is, what it does, how it works, or how we might train it. In The Medical Imagination, Sari Altschuler argues that this was not always so. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, doctors understood the imagination to be directly connected to health, intimately involved in healing, and central to medical discovery. In fact, for physicians and other health writers in the early United States, literature provided important forms for crafting, testing, and implementing theories of health. Reading and writing poetry trained judgment, cultivated inventiveness, sharpened observation, and supplied evidence for medical research, while novels and short stories offered new perspectives and sites for experimenting with original medical theories. Such imaginative experimentation became most visible at moments of crisis or novelty in American medicine, such as the 1790s yellow fever epidemics, the global cholera pandemics, and the discovery of anesthesia, when conventional wisdom and standard practice failed to produce satisfying answers to pressing questions. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, health research and practice relied on a broader complex of knowing, in which imagination often worked with and alongside observation, experience, and empirical research. In reframing the historical relationship between literature and health, The Medical Imagination provides a usable past for contemporary conversations about the role of the imagination—and the humanities more broadly—in health research and practice today.

The Pragmatic Imagination

The Pragmatic Imagination PDF Author: Steven A. Sass
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512806609
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 456

Get Book Here

Book Description
As prominent as the Wharton School of Business is today, so was the Wharton family in the mercantile world of eighteenth-century Philadelphia. Nineteenth-century scion of this large and wealthy business family, Joseph Wharton amassed a huge new fortune in his American Nickel Company and the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, and through these enterprises helped catapult the nation into the modern age of industry. In 1881, while still in mid-career, he contributed part of his accumulated wealth to endow the Wharton School of Finance and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania. Wharton's purpose was to prepare the city's young men "of inherited wealth and capacity" to assume control of the complex economy that he and his fellow entrepreneurs were then creating. He would have the university provide that cultural background needed by all gentlemen of society, while the new Wharton course would instruct students in those economic experiences necessary for success in the world of practical affairs. Wharton's investment and instructional program began the modern tradition of collegiate management education. Steven A. Sass's The Pragmatic Imagination not only provides a history of the world's oldest and still one of the most prestigious schools of management but also offers a fascinating exploration of the interaction of higher education and economic activity. The volume illuminates the essential tension in professional business education—that between utilitarian training and scholarly speculation—and analyzes the various regimes of conflict, accommodation, and synergy between these two interests. Providing the unifying theme of the history is Joseph Wharton's ambition to create a leadership class for industrial America. Careful attention is devoted to the various strategies adopted to achieve this end and to the forces that facilitated or frustrated the founder's purpose. Essentially an essay on the role of authority in the development of American culture, The Pragmatic Imagination carries the history of Joseph Wharton's experiment from its origins in the ironmaster's entrepreneurial ethos; through the vigorous Mugwumpery of the 1880s; to the gospel of the Progressive Era of civic revival and practical education; into the crises of depression and war; through the flowering of econometrics and operations research; down to the present-day vogue for the M.B.A.

Walter Brueggemann's Prophetic Imagination

Walter Brueggemann's Prophetic Imagination PDF Author: Conrad L. Kanagy
Publisher: Fortress Press
ISBN: 1506493793
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this theological biography of the most prolific Old Testament student of the twenty-first century, Conrad Kanagy portrays Walter Brueggemann within the historical and cultural landscape of his formation. Kanagy follows Walter from his childhood home in Blackburn, Missouri, to Elmhurst College, Eden Theological Seminary, and Union Theological Seminary. Kanagy introduces us to the teachers who most influenced Brueggemann's personal and theological development. We observe Walter Brueggemann's unflappable energy as he moves toward the publication of The Prophetic Imagination, which will land him on the theological map of biblical studies and the American church. This breakthrough will define the rest of Brueggemann's life as he pivots among the biblical text, classroom, church, and world. The book addresses the riddle of The Prophetic Imagination's surprising emergence and enduring resilience, peering deeply into the theologian's interior life, about which little has been understood by even those closest to him. If all "theology is biography," we have missed much about Brueggemann's understanding of God by knowing so little of his person. The book's integration of his work and life within his community across nine decades reveals the most complete portrait to date of this remarkable prophet, pastor, preacher, teacher, and friend. Still, after all the careful research, much of who Walter Brueggemann is remains a mystery. He rejects reductionist portraits of himself, the biblical text, and God. He recognizes that the worlds we construct theologically are messy, perhaps because he sees the "wild and woolly" God of the world as more than a bit messy: a God who cannot be fully measured, a God who pivots just when we imagined we knew the way, and a God whose mystery and preference for openness and unpredictability are enough to keep any one of us on our toes.