Historic Philadelphia Quotes

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Fill'd with death, ya pens'll hang ya.

In August 1946, exactly one year after the end of World War II, a tanker sailed into the port of Philadelphia laden with 115,000 barrels of oil for delivery to a local refinery. The cargo, loaded a month earlier in Kuwait, was described at the time as the first significant “shipment of Middle East oil to the United States.” Two years later, Saudi oil was imported for the first time, in order, said the U.S. buyer, “to meet the demand for petroleum products in the United States.”1 That year—1948—marked an historic turning point. The United States had not only been a net exporter of oil, but for many years the world’s largest exporter, by far. Six out of every seven barrels of oil used by the Allies during World War II came from the United States. But now the country was becoming a net importer of oil. By the late 1940s, with a postwar economic boom and car-dependent suburbs spreading out, domestic oil consumption was outrunning domestic supplies.

We are trapped in the jaws of something shaking the life out of us.” With these words from his historical novel, Philadelphia Fire, John Edgar Wideman conveys a sense of what it means to be caught out on stage, vulnerable at the point of having one’s life taken, shaken out, by what I have term “the theatrics of state terror.” Wideman’s

Chapter I The Philadelphia into which Frank Algernon Cowperwood was born was a city of two hundred and fifty thousand and more. It was set with handsome parks, notable buildings, and crowded with historic memories. Many of the things that we and he knew later were not then in existence—the telegraph, telephone, express company, ocean steamer, city delivery of mails.

For a team facing a 12-run deficit, the game is all but over. Almost always. Three times in major league history, though, a club has come from down by a dozen to win. The Chicago White Sox were the first in 1911; fourteen years later, the Philadelphia Athletics duplicated the feat. Then seventy-six years would pass before it happened again. Enter the 2001 Cleveland Indians, battling for their sixth playoff spot in seven years. Hosting the red-hot Seattle Mariners, who would win a major league record 116 games that season, the Tribe found themselves trailing 12–0 after just three innings. In the middle of the seventh, Seattle led 14–2—at which point the Indians began their historic comeback. Scoring three in the seventh, four in the eighth, and five in the ninth, Cleveland forced extra innings. In the bottom of the eleventh, utility man Jolbert Cabrera slapped a broken-bat single to score Kenny Lofton for one of the more remarkable wins in the annals of baseball. On August 6, 2001, not even a 12-run deficit could stop the Cleveland Indians. Those of us who follow Jesus Christ can expect even greater victories. “I am convinced,” the apostle Paul wrote, “that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38–39). If you’re deep in the hole today, take heart. As God’s child, you’re always still in the game. We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. HEBREWS

Particular messages may be especially appropriate to particular churches in their unique historical situations. A persecuted church might need to hear the message to Smyrna or Philadelphia, while a church that has accommodated to the norms of its host culture, especially to its lust for power and its civil religion, needs to hear the message to Pergamum or Laodicea. In fact, Harry Maier proposes that privileged Christians in the West need to read Revelation “as a Laodicean.”20

To write the history of neighborhood strife during this period of time without describing the efforts of people like Louis Wirth and his collaboration with the psychological warfare establishment during World War II, or the American Friends Service Committee and their work in both Philadelphia and Chicago, or Paul YIvisaker and his creation of the Gray Areas grants for the Ford Foundation and their subsequent takeover by a quintessential establishment figure like McGeorge Bundy, or Leon Sullivan, one of the players created by the Ford Foundation, and his collaboration with Robert Weaver while head of the Federal Housing Administration, is to tell less than half of the story. It is to do a remake of King Kong without the gorilla. It is also a bad example of whiggish history, a genre depressingly familiar to anyone who has done any reading in the conventional accounts of the sexual revolution and the civil rights movement, where effects have no causes and actual people making actual decisions in actual rooms are replaced by broad historical forces and Enlightenment melodramas like the triumph of liberation over bondage and light over darkness.

Famous for its microbrews and restored tin ceiling with golden tiles that cast a warm glow over the entire restaurant, Chetter’s Bar and Grill was a hallmark of the historic Old Kensington area of Philadelphia. If I were in my twenties and still naïve, I’d probably love the place. But it’s too noisy, too full of people who can’t see what’s right in front of them. A

These notoriously destructive White-on-Black race riots started en masse just one year after the end of the Civil War and continued until the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Some historians have claimed that there were anywhere from 250-300 race riots over this period, most of which have been conveniently forgotten about by the American academia and press. Over 25 race riots broke out between April and October 1919 alone, a six-month period poet James Weldon Johnson labeled the "Red Summer." Among the most deadly outbreaks were those in East St. Louis, Illinois (1917); Chester, Pennsylvania (1917); Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1917); Houston, Texas (1917); Washington, D.C. (1919); Chicago, Illinois (1919); Omaha, Nebraska (1919); Charleston, South Carolina (1919), Longview, Texas (1919); Knoxville, Tennessee (1919); Elaine, Arkansas (1919); and Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921). Ward noted,   Although urban race riots in the United States between 1866-1951 were unique episodes rooted in the particular historic situation of each place, they shared certain characteristics. To begin with, the whites always prevailed, and the overwhelming majority of those who died and were wounded in all of these incidents were blacks. They also tended to break out in clusters during times of significant socio-economic, political, and demographic upheaval when racial demographics were altered and existing racial mores and boundaries challenged. Perhaps most importantly, the riots usually provoked defensive stances by members of the black communities who defended themselves and their families under attack. Seldom did the violence spill over into white neighborhoods.

RAYNAL, ABBE. Philosophical and Political History of the British Settlements and Trade in North America. Translated from the French. (Dependence of Great Britain upon colonies and Discussion of taxation. Colonies held as "Shackled in their Industry and Commerce," etc.) 2 Vols. Edinburgh: 1776. Record of Indentures, Individuals Bound Out as Apprentices, Servants, etc., and of German and Other Redemptioners in the ofice of the Mayor of the City of Philadelphia. October 3, 1771 to October 5, 1773. Before Mayors John Gibson and William Fisher. MS. Presented to American Phil. Society by Thos. P. Roberts, 1835. Reproduced in publications of Pennsylvania Germany Society, Vol. XVI, Lancaster, Pa., 1907. 321 closely printed pages averaging about twenty-two names to each double page or above 3,500 names recorded; both recently arrived and transfers recorded. Full description of terms, considerations, previous place of residence, etc. RECORD BEFORE THE MAYOR. (1745.) James Hamilton, Register. MS. contributed by George W. Neifle, Chester, Pa. Pa. Mag. Hist. and Biog., Vols. 30, 31 and 32. REDEMPTIONERS, REGISTRY OF THE "Book A" Germans, etc. (1785-1804); "Book C" (1817-1831). MSS. Library Historical Society of Pennsylvania. RICHARDS, ML H. "German Emigration from New York Province into Pennsylvania," Pennsylvania-German Society Proceedings, Vol. VII Lancaster: 1899.

The Mason-Dixon line can almost be said to be the Okra Line, that is, historically: As a rule, Southern writers gave receipts for okra, even when their works were published in the North. Northern writers did not, with the exception of those of Philadelphia, an anomaly explained by the early presence of West Indians who came to very nearly dominate the catering business in that city.

These include Philip Marshall Dale, Medical Biographies: The Ailments of Thirty-Three Famous Persons (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952); Brian Dillon, The Hypochondriacs: Nine Tormented Lives (New York: Faber and Faber, 2010); Douglas Goldman et al., Retrospective Diagnoses of Historical Personalities as Viewed by Leading Contemporary Psychiatrists (Bloomfield, NJ: Schering Corporation, 1958); Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York: Free Press, 1993); Jeffrey A. Kottler, Divine Madness: Ten Stories of Creative Struggle (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006); Philip Mackowiak, Post-Mortem: Solving History’s Great Medical Mysteries (Philadelphia: American College of Physicians, 2007); Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); David Rettew, Child Temperament: New Thinking About the Boundary Between Traits and Illness (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013). Articles

Yet if the book were meant to unveil the secrets of distant times, must it not of necessity have been unintelligible to His first readers - and not only unintelligible, but even irrelevant and useless. If it spake, as some would have us believe, of Huns and Goths and Saracens, of mediæal emperors and popes, of the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution, what possible interest or meaning could it have for the Christian churches of Ephesus, and Smyrna, and Philadelphia, and Laodicea? Especially when we consider the actual circumstances of those early Christians, many of them enduring cruel sufferings and grievous persecutions, and all of them eagerly looking for an approaching hour of deliverance which was now close at hand, - what purpose could it have answered to send them a document which they were urged to read and ponder, which was yet mainly occupied with historical events so distant as to be beyond the range of their sympathies, and so obscure that even at this day the shrewdest critics are hardly agreed on anyone point? Is it conceivable that an apostle would mock the suffering and persecuted Christians of his time with dark parables about distant ages? If this book were really intended to minister faith and comfort to the very persons to whom it was sent, it must unquestionably deal with matters in which they were practically and personally interested. And does not this very obvious consideration suggest the true key to the Apocalypse? Must it not of necessity refer to matters of contemporary history? The only tenable, the only reasonable, hypothesis is that it was intended to be understood by its original readers; but this is as much as to say that it must be occupied with the events and transactions of their own day, and these comprised within a comparatively brief space of time.

interests and, as importantly, the entrance to the St. Lawrence River and therefore the French-controlled cities of Québec and Montréal. Thus the stone stronghold of Fortress Louisbourg was conceived and built. In its heyday, it was North America’s third-busiest port behind Boston and Philadelphia, home port of over 60 fishing schooners and a fleet of some 400 shallops (two-masted open boats for daily inshore fishing ventures). After possession changed several times between France and England as wars waxed and waned, the British finally destroyed it in 1758. In the 1960s, Parks Canada began a long reconstruction of the fortress (and the town within) to 1744 condition using an army of archeologists and unemployed coal miners. It became North America’s largest reconstruction project. Today, Louisbourg is a place to experience life inside a rough New World military stronghold. You arrive by boarding a bus at the interpretation center—no cars allowed near the fortress. As you climb down off the bus and are accosted by costumed guards, the illusion of entering a time warp begins. Farm animals peck and poke about. The smell of fresh baking drifts on salty air that might suddenly be shattered by the blast of a cannon or a round of musket fire. Soldiers march about and intimidate visitors who could be British spies. Children play the games of 3 centuries ago in the streets. Fishermen, servants, officers, and cooks greet guests at the doors of their respective homes and places of work. Meals here consist of rustic, historically accurate beef stew or meat pie sided by rum specifically made for the Fortress (a full meal is about C$15 in one of four restaurants designated by class—upper or lower). If you want a more complete immersion, you can become a colonial French military

Our President holds the ultimate public trust. He is vested with powers so great that they frightened the Framers of our Constitution; in exchange, he swears an oath to faithfully execute the laws that hold those powers in check. This oath is no formality. The Framers foresaw that a faithless President could destroy their experiment in democracy. As George Mason warned at the Constitutional Convention, held in Philadelphia in 1787, “if we do not provide against corruption, our government will soon be at an end.”1 Mason evoked a well-known historical truth: when corrupt motives take root, they drive an endless thirst for power and contempt for checks and balances. It is then only the smallest of steps toward acts of oppression and assaults on free and fair elections. A President faithful only to himself—who will sell out democracy and national security for his own personal advantage—is a danger to every American. Indeed, he threatens America itself.