Greater Philadelphia - by Carolyn T Adams & Howard Gillette & Andrew Heath & Charlene Mires & Jean R Soderlund (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Informed by current scholarship and richly illustrated with full-color photographs and maps, Greater Philadelphia: A New History for the Twenty-First Century brings to the public an up-to-date, diverse history of Philadelphia across its many dimensions.

Volume 1 adopts "Greater Philadelphia" to indicate a regional scope, but not one limited by a fixed geographical boundary. Instead, "Greater Philadelphia" refers to the interdependence between the city and its periphery across parts of three states: southeastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and northern Delaware. The Greater Philadelphia Region represents a collection of stories fundamental to the Philadelphia area's history and evolution based on the belief that regions work best when residents, divided in space but linked in multiple ways through social and economic connections, possess shared knowledge about the people and the places that surround them.

Volume 2 begins with Philadelphia's role during the American Revolution, as the nation's first capital until 1800, and as home to one of the North's largest free African American communities in the antebellum period. From the Civil War to woman suffrage, from the Lenape people to the Gray Panthers, from Black Power to Occupy Philadelphia, the book chronicles the ongoing dynamics of citizenship and nationhood as they unfolded in the Philadelphia region from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries. Greater Philadelphia and the Nation demonstrates how Philadelphia, and its periphery across southeastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and northern Delaware, create, challenge, and sustain the nation.

Volume 3 reveals the influence of empires and nations on Greater Philadelphia while also emphasizing the dynamic role the region and its people have played in shaping the modern world. Exploring the immigrants who peopled the Delaware Valley, the faiths they practiced, the environment they shaped, the wars they waged, and the global connections they forged, Greater Philadelphia and the World reveals a city and its surroundings that has been continually molded by its links to the Atlantic, the Americas, and the Pacific.

About the Author

Carolyn T. Adams, Emeritus Professor and Dean of Liberal Arts at Temple University, has published a half dozen books, including four focused on the Philadelphia region.

Howard Gillette, Jr. is Professor of History Emeritus at Rutgers University-Camden and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. He is the author of Camden After the Fall and The Paradox of Urban Revitalization, among other works.

Andrew Heath is Senior Lecturer of American History at the University of Sheffield and author of In Union There Is Strength: Philadelphia in the Age of Urban Consolidation, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Charlene Mires is Professor of History at Rutgers University-Camden and Editor-in-Chief of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. Her books include Independence Hall in American Memory, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Jean R. Soderlund is Professor of History Emeritus at Lehigh University. Her books include Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.