Philadelphia 
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SOURCE: New York Times
11/13/2020
35 Years After MOVE Bombing That Killed 11, Philadelphia Apologizes
Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on a row house occupied by members of a Black militant group in 1985, starting a fire that destroyed 60 homes and killed 11 people.
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SOURCE: Paris Review
10/5/2020
Memory Haunts: John Edgar Wideman's Fictionalized Account of the 1985 MOVE Bombing
by Imani Perry
Wideman's account of events leading to the bombing of MOVE by Philadelphia police "is not just a map of the city but of the nation and our collective condition."
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SOURCE: WHYY
6/7/2020
Crews Paint over Frank Rizzo Mural in South Philadelphia
The nonprofit organization Mural Arts Philadelphia plans to replace it with "a new mural project that can reflect the fabric of S. 9th Street."
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4/19/2020
Thomas Jefferson, Yellow Fever, and Land Planning for Public Health
by M. Andrew Holowchak
Although Thomas Jefferson was generally an anti-urbanist, he did offer insight into the role of land use in helping towns and cities control epidemics and promote public health.
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4/12/2020
The Local Impact of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic in Philadelphia
by Jeffrey Anderson and Janet Golden
Insufficient attention was paid to the first influenza death in the city. The United States was in the throes of the Great War, and the Kaiser, not the flu, was on the minds of Philadelphians.
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SOURCE: Nieman Reports
1/21/20
What Happens to News When Journalists and Historians Join Forces
How the Philadelpia Inquirer teamed up with Villanova University’s Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest and the Lenfest Center for Cultural Partnerships to research three issues--infrastructure, immigration, and the opioid crisis--that could benefit from a historical perspective.
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SOURCE: New York Times
11/1/19
244-Year-Old Rifle Stolen Decades Ago Is Returned to Museum
The Johann Christian Oerter rifle, taken from Valley Forge State Park in 1971, will go on display at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia.
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SOURCE: Morning Call
8/4/2019
Philly’s American Revolution museum steps up to help migrants succeed
The free, eight-session evening program aims to strengthen immigrants' understanding of the nation's revolution and evolution.
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SOURCE: NPR
5/13/19
30 Years Later, Making Sense Of The MOVE Bombing
City police had killed nearly a dozen people and, in the process, leveled an entire swath of a neighborhood full of middle-class black homeowners.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
3/22/19
The Women Highlighting Women's History in Feminist Travel Guides
For Women’s History Month, honoring the sisters in the City of Brotherly Love.
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SOURCE: NY Times
3/25/19
A Colonial-Era Cemetery Resurfaces in Philadelphia
Remains buried in the First Baptist cemetery were believed to have been moved in 1860. But many coffins and bones were still there.
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SOURCE: Smithsonian.com
2/5/19
What a Hundred-Year-Old Department Store Can Tell Us About the Overlap of Retail, Religion and Politics
The legacy left behind by the Philadelphia-based retail chain Wanamaker’s is still felt by shoppers today
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SOURCE: Smithsonian
3-23-18
Underground Railroad Safe House Discovered in Philadelphia
Preservationists say they have identified the home of famed black abolitionist William Still, who offered refuge to hundreds of freedom seekers.
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SOURCE: CBS News
9-26-17
Octavius Valentine Catto honored in Philadelphia
Who? That’s the point.
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SOURCE: The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
4-8-17
A Revolutionary museum opens in Philadelphia
For the past 10 years, figuring out how to unfurl the drama of the American Revolution has been the task of R. Scott Stephenson. As vice president of exhibitions, collections and programming, he has examined 3,000 artifacts, many from the Valley Forge Historical Society.
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SOURCE: NYT
3-16-16
Philadelphia prepares for the opening next year of another American Revolution museum
The $119 million museum opens next April.
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SOURCE: Philadelphia Inquirer
8-8-13
Nathaniel Popkin looks back at Tom Sugrue's "Origins of the Urban Crisis"
Nathaniel Popkin is the author of Song of the City: An Intimate History of the American Urban Landscape.Perhaps no book has better clarified the story of 20th century urban decline than the 1996 Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton Press) by Penn historian Tom Sugrue. That book, which won the Bancroft Prize in 1998 and cemented Sugrue’s place among the top urban historians, illuminated the ways in which racism, federal policy, and corporate disinvestment combined to send Detroit—and dozens of other industrial cities—into freefall. Sugrue, who grew up in Detroit and lives in Mount Airy, is a careful observer of both his cities.
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SOURCE: The Advocate
7-18-13
La. voter registration test is mystery for historians
A Philadelphia historian sparked a days-long — and so far fruitless — archival search when she challenged her blog readers to take an “impossible” test purportedly once given to prospective black voters in Louisiana.The test, which asks the taker to “spell backwards, forwards” among other tasks, went viral on the Internet after it posted on a noted civil rights history website. The Tennessee State Archives put a copy in its collections. Teachers are using it in their history lessons. However, history experts in Louisiana do not have a copy of it.“I suspected that was a hoax,” Andrew Salinas, reference archivist for the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, said Wednesday.A former civil rights worker who insists the test was given offered another explanation. Jeff Schwartz said Louisiana might have been reluctant to preserve an embarrassing chapter in its history....
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SOURCE: AP
7-5-13
Efforts continue to save USS Olympia
PHILADELPHIA — Caretakers of a deteriorating piece of maritime military history hope to have its future secured by next summer and continue working to ensure it stays afloat in the meantime.The USS Olympia, a one-of-a-kind steel cruiser from the Spanish-American War, ideally would have been dry-docked every 20 years for maintenance but has not been out of the water since 1945. Since taking stewardship of the National Historic Landmark from a cash-strapped nonprofit in 1996, the Independence Seaport Museum has spent about $5 million on short-term repairs, inspections and maintenance but cannot afford to keep the ship.A field of six organizations initially vying for the Olympia has been narrowed to two preservation groups — one in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the 5,500-ton warship was launched in 1892, and one in Port Royal, S.C., a strategic support post for the Atlantic fleet during the Spanish-American War....
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SOURCE: WaPo
6-1-13
‘History Detectives’ host’s collection of black propaganda posters subject of Philly exhibit
PHILADELPHIA — A new exhibit created by a University of Pennsylvania professor and host of a popular public television show examines how wartime propaganda has been used to motivate oppressed populations to risk their lives for homelands that considered them second-class citizens.“Black Bodies in Propaganda: The Art of the War Poster,” opens Sunday and continues until March 2 at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Lectures, film screenings and other programming will be rolled out over the course of the exhibit’s run.The exhibit’s 33 posters, dating from the Civil War to both World Wars and the African independence movements, are part of the personal collection of Tukufu Zuberi, a Penn professor of sociology and African studies and a host of the PBS series “History Detectives.”...
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