The secrets behind Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent by Beth Kephart

This week in North Philly Notes, Beth Kephart, provides a self-imposed interview, and tells the story behind the story of her new book, Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent. 

What is the working title of your book?
 
The title of this book, for real and for good, is Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent.  See the cover above?  We’re not changing it. 

Where did the idea come from for the book?

William, my hero, is obsessed with the medicines of the time, for he is searching for a cure for his heartbroken mother.  Dr. Radway lived in Manayunk and his Sarsaparilla Resolvent was world-renowned for curing everything, perhaps even sleep insufficiency, in which case I am ordering me up a bottle.  Today we know this medicinal magic as root beer.  Does anybody have a glass of ice handy? 

What genre does your book fall under?

This lady, who is not a fan of labeling fiction, would, if forced to do it, describe Dr. Radway as historical fiction for middle grade/young adult/adult readers with two teen male protagonists at its heart.  Simply and non-boastfully put, Dr. Radway is a good book for everyone.  I am so good at non-boastful. 

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

There’s a young prostitute, named Pearl, who is integral to this story.  She’s tough, she’s big-hearted, and she saves the day.  Jennifer Lawrence is my Pearl.  William has a grieving, beautiful mother—Marisa Tomei or Amy Adams.  As for William and his best friend, Career, Alex Shaffer (Win Win) and Josh Hutcherson (Hunger Games)  Josh looks exactly like my Career (so long as you give him a pipe to suck on).  Alex was brilliant in Win Win, which is, by the way, one of my favorite indies and the brain child of my friend Mary Jane Skalski.  But I digress.  There are others in the story—the ghost of an older brother (not yet cast), a father in prison (Sean Penn, but younger), and a little sprite of a girl who lives next door.  Let’s give that role to Mackenzie, the youngest dancer in that whacky reality TV show, Dance Moms.  She’s so cute I have to stop myself from reaching through the TV and pinching her cheeks.  But why am I watching that show anyway?  And, since we are on the topic, Are mothers really like that?  Have you ever met anyone like any of those moms?  Okay, back to the topic.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Since this book is a prequel to Dangerous Neighbors, my 1876 Philadelphia Centennial novel, I have been working with my lead character, William, for more than seven years.  A requited love affair, fictionally speaking.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre? 

I try not to compare.

Who or What inspired you to write this book?

My love for Philadelphia history.  My absolute love for William.  I could not let him go.

The Filadelfia Story

In this blog entry, Sabrina Vourvoulias, the managing editor of Al Día, describes the stories that can be found in the photo history, 200 Years of Latino History in Philadelphia. 

I am enamored with stories. My own and my family’s, certainly, but also the stories my friends and neighbors tell. And the ones I overhear when a grandparent explains to a child why something is significant, or a beloved custom.

Even more, I love the stories that emerge when many of us sit together leafing through photo albums — remembering food, festivals, people — in community.

For the past twenty years, Latinos in Philadelphia have read and seen their stories appear weekly in Al Día newspaper. The book 200 Years of Latino History in Philadelphia is simply an extension of that work of documentation. 

In it you’ll find stories about Latinos in Philadelphia that go back to the time of the founding fathers: Like Manuel Torres, for example, the first diplomatic officer from Latin America recognized officially by President James Monroe, who was a resident of the city and is buried at Old St. Mary cemetery alongside Commodore John Barry and Thomas Fitzsimmons.

You’ll see a cabinet card of of Samuel Cruz and his family, newly arrived from Puerto Rico. He would go on to become one of the best respected of the butchers working in the meat-packing district of Northern Liberties, and an integral member of the Puerto Rican community that opened bodegas and settled their families in North Philadelphia. You’ll also see photographs of community-wide celebrations, like the annual St. John the Baptist parade, that took place along Spring Garden Street because that’s where La Milagrosa — the first church in the city to hold a regular Spanish-language Mass and considered “the Plymouth Rock of Latino Catholic Philadelphia” — was located.

There are stories, too, in the photographs of the Puerto Rican community taken by local photojournalist David Cruz in the decade before the Al Día newspaper was established, and in the profoundly moving photo stories he’s shot for Al Día since. In these — many of them focused on the Mexican community — you’ll find stories of tragedy, and resilience, and of the hope for a better life every immigrant packs in his or her bags when they come here.

The value of this book isn’t as an exhaustive history — it isn’t one — but rather it is in the glimpses it provides of the everyday lives of Latinos of the city. It also handily refutes the erroneous assumption that all Latinos are recently arrived, unskilled laborers and undocumented immigrants. There is both honor and great joy in the way every member contributes to the vitality of our community, but our diversity is also a point of pride.

As you leaf through the pages of this book, I hope you’ll see what I did when I took on the task of editing it: There are a million stories in these images. They are worth telling. And worth hearing.

Remembering Harold Washington

Gary Rivlin, author of Fire on the Prairie: Harold Washington, Chicago Politics, and the Roots of the Obama Presidency, reflects back on Chicago’s first black mayor on the anniversary of his passing.

He was the first black mayor of Chicago, a city whose black populace had endured innumerable indignities at the hands of its fabled political machine. Yet to sum up Harold Washington as a racial pioneer and little more is to diminish the man and all that he accomplished. Behind him amassed a multiracial coalition consisting of blacks of all political stripes along with white progressives, Latinos, Asians, and gays, all organized around progressive totems like affordable housing and a more equitable distribution of city resources. Jesse Jackson would get his political start in Chicago; so, too, would a young community organizer named Barack Obama, who found inspiration in Washington. For decades anti-machine crusaders had tried but failed to reform. But even today Washington, who served during the 1980s, still looms as a before-and-after figure in the city’s history. Under Washington, Chicago saw the implementation of any number of good-government reforms, from the freedom-of-information act he signed to the steps he took to tame a bloated, inefficient city budget. He opened up the contracting process to women- and minority-owned businesses, shifted the focus of economic development from downtown to the neighborhoods, and gave voice to Latinos, gays, and other Chicagoans long locked out of City Hall.

Harold Washington died 25 years ago yesterday. His death represents one of those where-were-you-when-you-heard the news moments, at least for Chicagoans of a certain age.  Me, I was in my car, listening to NPR on my way home from some last minute Thanksgiving shopping. There was something strange about how the world learned the news: from Tom Bradley’s office, in Los Angeles, which had sent out a press release offering the mayor’s condolences. I was a staff writer for the city’s alternative weekly, the Chicago Reader, and I nosed around in search of an explanation. It turns out that allies of Washington were keeping the lid on the news of the mayor’s death until their preferred successor could make it to the hospital, where he would appear with the doctors in a press conference. Meanwhile, word of Washington’s passing had spread among a small fraternity of black mayors of large cities. Putting the kibosh on tragic news for political reasons; It was quintessential Chicago.

Like a lot of Chicagoans, I was crushed by the news of Washington’s death. I was sad for myself, no doubt. I had just done the first of what was supposed to be a series of interviews with him: about his life and his time as mayor for the book that eventually would be called Fire on the Prairie. From my narrow perspective, I’d be denied the pleasure of spending time with an interesting and larger-than-life figure. But mainly I was crushed by what it meant for the city and the movement I believed in. Imagine the fierceness of the legislative opposition Barack Obama faced in the last two years of his first term: that was nothing compared to the nastiness and resistance that confronted Washington at every turn through his first few years in office.  Finally, he consolidated his power with his election to a second term. But then six months later, he would be dead and the multiracial progressive coalition that had assembled behind him fell apart.  Within a few years, again Chicago would be run by a Daley.

Celebrating an exciting and insightful analysis of the central role cities and urban spaces have played in globalization

This week, the Urban History Association’s Kenneth Jackson Award Committee provides their comments on Jerome Hodos’ Second Cities, winner of the award for Best Book  in North American Urban History published in 2011. 

With meticulous attention to a long view of historical process and a sociological eye for theoretical frameworks that illuminate complex social phenomenon, Second Cities: Globalization and Local Politics in Manchester and Philadelphia, by  Jerome I. Hodos, has offered an exciting and insightful analysis of the central role cities and urban spaces have played, and continue to play, in the complicated drama called “globalization.”

Hodos removes the contemporary buzz from the word, globalization, and he demonstrates how old, and how central to modern human existence, is humanity’s connectedness though, and awareness of, the world as a single place. Even as humans are able to transport themselves, digital information, money and financing systems, and material goods, at remarkably fast rates, and from decentralized spaces, Hodos shows, in a subtle analysis and with wonderfully straightforward prose, that cities continue to matter. In fact, Hodos skillfully proves that “globalization is a profoundly urban process.”

Probably the most wonderful contribution of this book is the way it forces readers to examine the history and social impact of globalization in places outside the usual suspect cities of New York, London, and Tokyo, or cities such as Shanghai, Mumbai, Dubai and Singapore that, in the past decade or so, have increasingly become economic weathervanes by which to note the emerging directions of the global economy. Instead, Hodos skillfully proves the importance of “second cities,” places like Philadelphia and Manchester, where people actively seek to “hold down the global,” to capture some of the worldwide flows of capital, people, ideas, culture and networks, for themselves. By looking at urban places further down the list of impactful global cities, Hodos reminds readers that globalization is indeed a dynamic process, and that all the time people are jockeying for new positions within an expanding global system of trade, travel, and technology.

“Globalization is about the establishment of new connections as much as it is about the disruption of old ones,” Hodos argues. He adeptly proves that some of the best places in which to witness this process are “second cities,” places that do not necessarily experience or participate in globalization the same way as larger, trendier, or more economically robust cities, but nonetheless reveal important lessons about the trajectory of globalization, and the centrality of cities and urbanity to this process.

Remembering Tiananmen Square and its impact on both personal and political levels on the anniversary of the protests

In this blog entry, Belinda Kong, reflects back on the 1989 massacre and how it inspired her  new book, Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square.

In many ways, I am an unlikely person to have written a book on Tiananmen fictions.  In 1989, I was a thirteen-year-old kid living in Miami, having moved to the States from Hong Kong just three and a half years earlier.  When the Tiananmen demonstrations erupted that spring, I hardly paid any attention; those students in Beijing seemed so remote to me.  I am sure many people have much more vivid memories of watching the protests on TV that spring than I do. 

My own memory is of hearing the news of the massacre the morning after—it would have been June 4th too on this side of the Pacific—from the son of the owner of the Chinese restaurant where my father was working at the time.  I remember being surprised and confused, by the news itself as much as the sight of this Chinese American college student getting incredibly upset.  I remember feeling how unreal it all seemed, the idea that a whole generation of Chinese students could imagine they possessed the power to change their country’s course, camping out for weeks on end in the nation’s most public political space, successfully mobilizing a million citizens to march in the streets in their support, and even facing down government troops and army tanks.  All this seemed to me like a drama unfolding on another planet.

Then, about a dozen years ago, I was in graduate school at the University of Michigan, working on my dissertation on Chinese diaspora literature.  This would become the genesis of my book, Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square.  though at the time, it was not focused on Tiananmen, and it could hardly be called even a rough draft of the eventual product.  Instead, I was thinking about Chinese identity more generally, about how many Chinese writers in the West could be seen as sharing overlapping concerns about “Chineseness,” whether they had been born and raised in China and went abroad as adults or been born in America and knew only English.  I was trying to bring together some of the most globally visible Chinese writers known to me at the time under a very broad rubric of “writing Chineseness,” regardless of their biographical trajectory or cultural education. 

In many ways, the dissertation was too abstract and did not explain why I discussed some authors, such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan in relation to Ha Jin and Gao Xingjian, but not others.  Meanwhile, without conscious design, I kept getting pulled by the literature on Tiananmen, and it took me several years to realize that these were the works that most clarified my thinking about Chineseness.  Almost by accident, I started to clue in that Tiananmen was one pivotal and defining point for both Chinese and diasporic identity in our time, that I had grown up in the wake of its ripple effects, and that many of the writers I was reading were themselves living out the extended legacy of the movement and the massacre.  It took five years or so for this realization to dawn on me, and another five years for me to reframe my book and coalesce it around Tiananmen fictions.

The insight I ultimately arrived at is that Tiananmen was not just a political event but something that has significantly shaped Chinese literature and cultural identity in the post-1989 world.  When we think of Tiananmen, we usually think history, and above all, we think politics—the politics of mass opposition, of calls for democracy vs. totalitarian state power, etc.  Certainly, with Arab spring, this political understanding of Tiananmen resonates with particular force today.  But what is less recognized is that Tiananmen has had a tremendously powerful, productive, and longterm effect on Chinese literature and cultural identity.  And precisely because the topic remains censored to this day in the PRC, precisely because only those abroad could write about it openly and publicly and without evasion, Tiananmen has come to serve as a key point of self-definition for writers in the diaspora.  Tiananmen is a topic that more and more Chinese authors, especially in the West, have come to address in their writing; it is an event that writers continually imagine and reimagine and thereby keep alive and relevant for our contemporary moment, and also a subject that unifies as well as fractures writers.  Above all, Tiananmen has politicized the Chinese literary diaspora: after the massacre, writers show a much stronger tendency to write political fictions that critique either the PRC regime itself or authoritarian uses of state power more generally.  And most strikingly, these fictions on Tiananmen do not remain static but evolve alongside global concerns, as though Tiananmen already anticipates the theoretical vocabularies with which we continually try to make sense of globalization and global life.

Asking how and why industrial hazards persist

In this blog entry, Dangerous Trade co-editor Christopher Sellers discusses industrial dangers, past and present, and how people have sought to discover and correct these hazards.

Over the past few months, a burst of stories have made headlines in the New York Times and elsewhere about dangers of what we buy and use have posed to those in foreign lands. First came a harrowing report last December about what was happening to car batteries that Americans had used up and discarded.  A growing business has emerged of shipping these batteries to Mexico, where around disassembly plants, lead has been steadily escaping into the air and soil, to poison neighborhood children. Then came the coverage of China’s Foxconn, manufacturer of Apple’s i-pad.  We learned that this latest, dazzling digital wonder, brought to us by one of America’s most respected and successful firms, had come with a cost none of us knew about or had bargained for.  Workers in China had paid, instead, with lengthy work-days, exploitative and sometimes toxic working conditions, and distress that could reportedly turn suicidal. 

Scientists and scholars who have followed these industrial dangers for years have to applaud the media’s new in the distant hazards imposed by our own consumer purchases.  The rising awareness suggests the prospect that, finally, more effective ways of mobilizing and intervening against them may arise.  Those of us who have followed this kind of issue, and sought to dig up its history, have to conclude that these sporadic reports offer only a visible tip of what is likely a global iceberg.  International studies suggest that occupational diseases alone kill more throughout the world than malaria.  These numbers do not include the many additional casualties from contaminants in the air, water, and soil.  With rebounding economic growth throughout the world, this toll is no doubt on the rise once again, especially in the developing world.

A starting point for understanding how and why these dangers continue to recur is to recognize that this problem is far from new.  Dangerous Trade: Histories of industrial hazard across a globalizing world, is the first book to take a genuinely global approach to their history, one that encompasses both the developing and the developed world.  

Dangerous Trade explores the contours of this kind of problem not only in our contemporary world, but historically, through the past century and more of what has been a long-standing trade in industry-derived dangers.  In every period when international trade has picked up, the most hazardous industries have tended to cross national boundaries, to gravitate to where regulation and awareness of the attendant hazards remain less.  Looking at examples from colonial Malaysia’s mining industries to the extraction of oil in Mexico, this book’s essays offer rigorously documented accounts of just why and how these dangerous industries arose where they did, and the ways in which locals strove to cope with them.  As these essays make clear, the ways and means by which dangerous activities travel has nevertheless been shifting over the last century. As technology has changed, nations especially in the developed world have come up with new and more effective ways of recognizing and correcting the worst hazards.  The result, however, is hardly one of unadulterated progress. Instead, these hazards endure, if in changing and ever more wily ways. They get shipped elsewhere, where the companies that rely on them, and the consumers who give these companies their business, can once more put their dangers out of mind.  Hence, the resurgence of poisonings from lead, perhaps the longest known and most studied of industrial hazards, but still sickening workers and children from Uruguay to Mexico in our contemporary world.  

This collection constitutes a first effort to ask how and why these problems have persisted, even decades after new efforts have arisen around the globe successfully to identify and address them. A central concern of the collection, as well, is to generalize cross-nationally, about the evolving repertoire through which people in different times and places have sought to discover and correct these dangers, once they arise.  From the early health departments to worker compensation laws of the early twentieth century, to the environmental legislation starting in the sixties and seventies, to latter day campaigns to ban a dangerous substance like asbestos, the tools and targets of those who would ameliorate these dangers have constituted a work in progress.   Often it is precisely the loopholes in an earlier system of control that make a later one necessary.  But a key theme as well is that amelioration has not been a given even once the hazards became unmistakable to the experts and officials in charge.  Expert activism was often important in calling attention to new hazards, but as if not more important in stirring real change was the mobilization of the inexpert.  From the workers in Mexican oil fields to the environmental agitators in late twentieth century France and Uruguay, those who were themselves the victims of these exposures also had to mobilize, to marshal the available political tools to induce governments as well as scientists to consider their problems. 

If these histories suggest just how persistent industrial hazards like lead or asbestos can be, together they also offer many grounds for hope.  Not just failures but success stories abound here, of mobilizations fighting asbestos and lead battery-burning and pesticides and liquefied natural gas facilities. In addition to elucidating these problems’ persistence, these essays thereby offer an abundance of models that may inspire today’s practitioners, activists, policy-makers, and citizens, and on which they may build.

Challenging dominant stereotypes of young people of color

In this blog entry, Bindi Shah, author of Laotian Daughters, describes the impressions formed about an unlikely group of young Laotian girls who became advocates and leaders for social justice and community change.

In the late 1990s I began field work with Asian Youth Advocates, a youth program for second-generation Laotian girls in Richmond, California run by the environmental justice organization Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN). This excerpt from field notes on one of my early research visits portrays them as ordinary inner-city American teenagers interested in fashion, music and boys:

It’s a cold, crisp but sunny Tuesday afternoon in February. As I walk in almost everyone looks and smiles or says “hi.” The front room of this small house in Richmond, which serves as LOP’s offices, is packed today. Twenty-one of the youth members are here, waiting for the Whole Group Training on campaign options to start. Bryanna and Huk are sitting close to the radio, tapping their feet to Eminem rapping “My Name Is…” Once the song ends Bryanna turns the dial to a station that plays alternative and R&B music. Two girls are sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, sharing thumsom, a green papaya salad. Others are sitting on the chairs placed in a circle, munching on nachos, burgers, burritos, and sipping on soda.

A lot of the girls are dressed in black today, black flared trousers, black tops and black jackets. Others sport blue or white flared jeans, short T-shirts or shirts that hug the body, and platform shoes or sneakers. This ‘70s retro style transports me back to my own dress preferences as a teenager, though I wore luminous pink crimplene trousers. In the 1990s, these girls are wearing muted colors, which often bear the logos of Tommy Hilfiger, The Gap, BeBe, Nautica, or The Old Navy. Bryanna wears an oversized orange rain jacket, nylon pants that bunch up around her ankles, and sneakers. Others resemble the style of the majority of their peers in the urban multicultural neighborhoods, blue jeans, long T-shirts and sneakers or high-tops.

Their conversations revolve around boys, school, and clothes. My by-now-trained ear picks up both Black English and standard English, with a smattering of Mien and Lao words that I don’t understand.

At first sight this group of teenage Laotian girls appear unlikely candidates as advocates and leaders for the Laotian community in west Contra Costa County, California. In Laotian Daughters, I unravel popular images of young people of color and draw attention to their engagement with political activism and community building.

Politicians and journalists have tended to portray young people, particularly those growing up in poor, urban neighborhoods as social problems and as experiencing moral decline. For example, a media report on a 2001 University of California study that found Laotian high-school girls had the highest teenage pregnancy rate in California and the highest number of teen births was ominously titled “Asian Teen Mothers, a quiet State of Crisis”. Despite a steady decline in youth crime and violence over the last few decades, we continued to hear from the media, politicians and other professionals that young people were “at risk”, with proclivities for teenage pregnancy, gang involvement, violence, drug addiction, and reliance on public assistance. Such constructions provided a rationale for increased surveillance of and intervention into young people’s lives by schools, police, health services, and the juvenile justice system. In April 2001 Governor Gray Davis of California approved $3.3 million for juvenile crime prevention in Contra Costa County. One of the programs that the funding financed was a program that places probation officers in selected high schools and middle school to provide supervision and services to youths with problems ranging from truancy to major criminal offenses.

It is important to examine youth programs with a social justice agenda because such programs can help challenge such representations of young people of color and reveal how citizenship is not just an adult experience. In a community that is linguistically isolated and lives in a region experiencing extensive environmental pollution, APEN hoped to empower and engage the bilingual second generation to act as advocates for the health of their community and to organize around environmental justice, reproductive health, and broader community issues such as inadequate academic counselling resources in schools and the political challenges to bilingual education. Asian Youth Advocates was a broad, integrated youth program that aimed to nurture a new generation of women leaders, in a community where authority is traditionally vested in elderly Laotian males, as well as address issues of adolescence and cultural identity experienced by the teenage Laotian girls.

In Laotian Daughters I show that if we dig beyond the dominant stereotypes of young people of color, particularly young women of color, we can unearth political engagement and the construction of active citizenship amongst this group. Through political mobilization around issues faced by a new immigrant community, these teenage Laotian girls both re-fashioned Laotian culture and demonstrated that young people can be a positive voice for change. In the process they forged a sense of belonging for Laotians in the American nation.

Continuing the argument about why we need to repeal our failed drug laws

Judge James P. Gray

In this blog entry, author Judge James P. Gray makes a case that our drug laws are not working. He explains why–and why he updated his book Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do about It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs.

On April 8, 1992 I did something quite unusual for a sitting trial court judge: I held a press conference and announced my conclusions as publicly as I could, both as a judge and former federal prosecutor, that our great nation’s policy of Drug Prohibition was not working – and would never work. 

Since that time the situation has demonstrably only gotten worse. Eventually I became so frustrated about the amount of evidence mandating a change away from this failed policy that I organized my thoughts and wrote a book entitled Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do about It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs.

The first half of the book is intended to make people angry at all of the unnecessary problems we have inflicted upon ourselves and the rest of the world because of the policy of Drug Prohibition.  But the second half of the book was intended to give people hope, because it outlines many of the options we have to that failed policy. In fact, many of those options have been proven to be successful both by our own experience and that of other countries.  In many ways, the response to the book was gratifying because it helped to initiate and perpetuate a full, open and honest discussion about this critically important area.

But now the situation is much worse even than when the book was originally published.  So at the request of my publisher and numbers of others, I have written an updated second edition that traces many of the developments of the last ten years. 

Many of these developments have been predictably disastrous, like the fact that our country still leads the world in the incarceration of its people; that tens of  thousands of people, including many children and other innocent bystanders, have been killed in Mexico and elsewhere not because of drugs, but because of drug money; that the continued obscene profits made by juvenile street gangs and adult gangs like the Hell’s Angels, Mexican drug cartels and other thugs are solely facilitated by the continuation of Drug Prohibition; and that all of these illicit drugs are easier to be obtained by children – if they want to – than it is for them to get alcohol, expressly because the illicit dealers don’t ask for I.D. 

But there have also been some definite signs that people in our country and all around the world are beginning to understand the cause and effect of what is happening.  This realization, along with the fact that many of the options used by some other nations like Portugal and Switzerland are working far better than ours, are evidence that we will see some material and positive changes in the not-so-distant future.

Personally I believe that helping us change away from the failed policy of Drug Prohibition is the most patriotic thing I can do for the country I love.  Further, the most effective way of achieving that goal is to let people know that it is all right to discuss drug policy, and that just because we discuss the fact that we have options to our present failed policy does not mean that we condone the use of any of these drugs.  Please join me in this important effort, and I hope that this new edition of Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed will assist all of us in providing a foundation for that positive change.

The Death Spiral of a Health Care System

 In this blog entry, Judith Swazey author of Merger Games, recounts the unfolding of a medical merger that provides truth can be stranger than fiction.

             Merger Games conveys the often unexpectedly dramatic nature of the events that my colleagues and I chronicled from 1994-2003 in a study of a medical merger. That research, and the “reads like a novel/should be made into a movie” book that it generated involved the historic acquisition and union of two medical schools in Philadelphia, The Medical College of Pennsylvania (MCP) and Hahneman University by the nonprofit Allegheny Health Care System. We detailed the fate of the merger process when, after a series of voracious acquisitions under the dominion of its CEO, Sherif Abdelhak, Allegheny financially imploded, becoming the country’s largest nonprofit health care organization to declare bankruptcy. The bankruptcy, in 1998, led to the fire-sale purchase of Allegheny’s Philadelphia-area holdings by the Tenet Health Care Corporation, with management and then full control of the medical and other health science university schools by Drexel University. Allegheny’s death spiral also triggered a cascade of state and federal investigations, lawsuits, and civil and criminal indictments.

            The MCP/Hahnemann/Allegheny story has its own particular elements, especially in its cast of players and their organizations and the effort to fuse two medical schools. The lengthy merger process, still underway when the bankruptcy took place, was a tumultuous, tension-ridden, often acrimonious affair. It involved turf wars between the faculties, staff, students, and graduates of the previously separate medical schools, between the medical school and other schools in the  Allegheny University of the Health Sciences, and between the schools and the corporation; educational problems and stresses for the medical students, who called themselves the “merger guinea pigs;” and clashes between the historically ingrained organizational cultures of MCP and Hahnemann, and, most prominently, between the powerful cultures of the academy and the corporation. Riveting as this story is, it is not unique.

             Mergers are rampant, in non-profit and for-profit sectors of health care and in small and large businesses and corporations. Moreover, the merger landscape is littered with failures. Some 60 percent of business mergers reportedly fail; finances are the most frequent reason, followed by an irreconcilable clash of organizational cultures, whose importance is seldom recognized and dealt with before and during an attempted union Mergers, in short, share many common characteristics and patterns that are documented and illuminated in Merger Games. There are lessons to be learned for those considering or undertaking a merger about what a complicated, lengthy, conflict-ridden undertaking this usually is, and why mergers, akin to marriages, may succeed with a great deal of hard work, may have a broken engagement, or end in a divorce.

Defining the identity of “Second Cities” — explicitly in opposition with global cities

Jerome Hodos, author of Second Cities: Globalization and Local Politics in Manchester and Philadelphia uses the example of Barcelona to define what a “Second City” is, and how they operate in the global world.

Second Cities compares how Philadelphia and Manchester have dealt with globalization over the past two centuries. An important question that people often have about the book is whether one can generalize from the experience of these two places to other cities. What does the book have to tell us about the rest of the world?

Let me pursue this by talking about Barcelona, where I happen to be this spring starting a new research project. It’s an exciting city to be in, about the same size as Philadelphia and with a stunning variety of museums, lectures, and concerts – not to mention FC Barcelona and the buildings of Antoni Gaudi. Moreover, Barcelona has been widely acclaimed as one of the most successful cities of the past thirty years – exemplified above all by the 1992 Olympics, which served as a sort of “coming out” party for Barcelona, and for Spain, in the wake of the country’s late-1970s democratic transition. 

Barcelona was the first Spanish city to industrialize, developing a large cotton textile sector from the early 19th century onward; the neighborhood of Poble Nou was even known as the “Catalan Manchester.” As was the case in both Manchester and Philadelphia, the city diversified into other industries, like machining, and also failed for most of its history to develop a significant financial sector. In the 1950s and 1960s, the city became home to a large automobile industry, and more recently has witnessed expansion of higher education, design, and tourism. Of course, the city has repeatedly invested in transport projects to support its economic growth. It had the first railway in Spain, opened in 1848, and is currently building a high-speed rail line to connect directly to the French TGV system. It systematically redeveloped the port and waterfront in the 1980s in preparation for the Olympics.

All the while the city absorbed a steady stream of migrants, particularly tens of thousands from the southern region of Andalusia. Because these migrants were from a region long considered different and didn’t speak Catalan, the local language, domestic migration to Barcelona took place across a language barrier that functioned similarly to the religious and racial differences between natives and domestic migrants in Philadelphia and Manchester. Today, the city’s population is about 20% foreign-born, including large numbers of Italians, Pakistanis, Dominicans, Ecuadorians, Bolivians, Japanese and Chinese.

Throughout its history, the city has cultivated an identity as European and cosmopolitan rather than Spanish, and has defined itself explicitly in opposition to Madrid, the national capital (just as Manchester and Philadelphia have done with respect to London and New York). It has displayed this identity in three gigantic international events that gave the city a world stage: the world expositions of 1888 and 1929, and the 1992 Olympics. This identity has relied on the city’s 800-year history as the center of a Catalan region that either was independent (and at one time ruled a vast Mediterranean empire stretching as far as Athens), or that chafed under Castilian domination. In fact, the city revolted at least three times against central power, in the 1640s, 1705-14, and the 1930s.

From the Renaixença of the 1860s forward, the city has nurtured several generations of literary nationalists, wedded to the idea that the Catalan culture and nation were distinctive and ought to be protected and promoted. Some of this cultural production was directed at “high culture” efforts, via the literary, architectural and artistic groups centered on the Jocs Florals and Els Quatre Gats, including Joan Miro and Pablo Picasso. But much of it focused squarely on the promotion of Catalan culture and identity, as in the work of Enric Prat de la Riba or Pompeu Fabra. This cultural nationalism was made concrete in a variety of attempts to bolster Barcelona’s autonomy. For example, in the 1890s, nationalist lawyers and writers formed the Lliga Regionalista political party. Today, there is even in Barcelona an official regional government “Institute for Autonomous Studies” that funds and publishes comparative investigations of political institutions in other countries that guarantee regional autonomy. Perhaps most important of all, these politicians and intellectuals codified the Catalan language and promoted it as the region’s mother tongue.

Barcelona, then, vividly exhibits the major characteristics of the second city.

There is of course no guarantee of how widely the characteristics defined in the book can be applied, but I would suggest that perhaps 150 cities around the world might exhibit this complex of features, from Bangalore to Lyon, Monterrey to Turin. Like Manchester, Philadelphia, and Barcelona, they are all diverse, thriving centers of large metropolitan regions with several million residents each. Though the book only focuses on two cities, it contains insights that can speak to many, many more.