Exploring Philadelphia’s Rich History

This week in North Philly Notes, Jim Murphy, author of Real Philly History, Real Fast, explains the stories from the city’s past that intrigued him enough to write a book about them.

History is for everyone. Real Philly History, Real Fast, provides more than 50 short chapters that provide a complete story of figures, places, and events in Philadelphia history in mere minutes.

The book answers intriguing and important questions you may never have thought about. Like why did Charles Willson Peale add the second “L” to his middle name? Who stole the first book from the Library Company of Philadelphia? And where was its most famous painting found?

Or what little-known Revolutionary War hero took the fight right to Britain’s front door, terrifying its citizens and driving the British Empire’s insurance costs through the roof? How did the Acadians come to live in Philly and where did they stay? And what special skill saved black businessman James Forten (not his real name) from a life of West Indian servitude?

But wait there’s more! Real Philly History, Real Fast, answers these probing questions: What Philadelphian has over 40 towns named for him? What statue may be the second most photographed in Philly (behind Rocky, of course)? And where did the Liberty Bell receive its last crack?

Real Philly History, Real Fast will make the city feel familiar to you no matter how long you’ve lived here because it presents its history in a new light.

As an amateur general historian and certified member of the Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides—as well as a constant walker and a lover of Philadelphia—I dig for information in my determination to find great stories wherever I can. I look at each story like a detective with a mystery to solve. I originally spent an average of 25-35 hours on each story in this book, researching facts, checking multiple sources, and then cutting each story down to their very essence.

Of course, no one book can cover all of Philadelphia history. There are more than 300 blue-and-gold Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission signs in Philadelphia alone, not even including the suburban counties. And while this book is geared toward center city, you will find stories on Fort Mifflin, the Lazaretto, Cliveden in Germantown and Taller Puertorriqueño in Fairhill.

One story of particular interest to me was the Mason-Dixon survey. I learned in researching the story that some nationally syndicated publications describe the vista of the Mason-Dixon line as being 3-feet wide. That’s absolutely wrong. The team, which numbered as many as 115 people, cut a vista 24-30 feet wide through dense Pennsylvania forests. Also interesting to me: that survey began on South Street in Philadelphia, a fact many Philadelphians don’t know.

Philadelphia had two superstars who jump-started this city: Penn and Ben. Or William Penn and Ben Franklin. And although they missed meeting each other by about 20 years, they helped make this the fastest growing city in the country. In 1770, Philly passed New York and Boston to become the largest, most important city in the Colonies. That growth was due to William Penn’s unique grid system, his five public squares, his well-regulated market and his ability to attract people here to his City of Brotherly Love. Penn’s attitude toward the Lenni Lenape, his system of government and his religious tolerance were all unique.

These are just a few of the tidbits you will discover in the book, which meant to whet your appetite for more Philadelphia history. As I said, there are countless stories to be told…

Celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

This week in North Philly Notes, we showcase some of our recent Asian American and Pacific Islander titles.

In the Critical Race, Indigeneity and Relationality series

Ocean Passages: Navigating Pacific Islander and Asian American Literatures, by Erin Suzuki

In her pathbreaking book, Ocean Passages, Erin Suzuki explores how movement through—and travel across—the ocean mediates the construction of Asian American and Indigenous Pacific subjectivities in the wake of the colonial conflicts that shaped the modern transpacific. Ocean Passages considers how Indigenous Pacific scholars have emphasized the importance of the ocean to Indigenous activism, art, and theories of globalization and how Asian American studies might engage in a deconstructive interrogation of race in conversation with this Indigenous-centered transnationalism.

In the Asian American History and Culture series

Giving Back: Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving, by L. Joyce Zapanta Mariano

Giving Back shows how integral this system of charitably giving back to their families, their communities, or social development projects and organizations back home is for understanding Filipino diaspora formation. Joyce Mariano “follows the money” to investigate the cultural, social, economic, and political conditions of diaspora giving. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to reveal how power operates through this charity and the ways the global economic and cultural dimensions of this practice reinforce racial subordination and neocolonialism. Giving Back explores how this charity can stabilize overlapping systems of inequality as well as the contradictions of corporate social responsibility programs in diaspora.

Graphic Migrations: Precarity and Gender in India and the Diaspora, by Kavita Daiya

In Graphic Migrations, Kavita Daiya provides a literary and cultural archive of refugee stories and experiences to respond to the question “What is created?” after decolonization and the 1947 Partition of India. She explores how stories of Partition migrations shape the political and cultural imagination of secularism and gendered citizenship for South Asians in India and the United States. Daiya analyzes literature, Bollywood films, Margaret Bourke-White’s photography, digital media, and print culture to show how they memorialize or erase refugee experiences. She also engages oral testimonies of Partition refugees from Hong Kong, South Asia, and North America that address the nation-state, ethnic discrimination, and religious difference. Employing both Critical Refugee Studies and Feminist Postcolonial Studies frameworks, Daiya traces the cultural, affective, and political legacies of the Partition migrations for South Asia and South Asian America.

Illegal Immigrants/Model Minorities: The Cold War of Chinese American Narrative, by Heidi Kim

In the Cold War era, Chinese Americans were caught in a double-bind. The widespread stigma of illegal immigration, as it was often called, was most easily countered with the model minority, assimilating and forming nuclear families, but that in turn led to further stereotypes. In Illegal Immigrants/Model Minorities, Heidi Kim investigates how Chinese American writers navigated a strategy to normalize and justify the Chinese presence during a time when fears of Communism ran high. Kim explores how writers like Maxine Hong Kingston, Jade Snow Wong, and C. Y. Lee, among others, addressed issues of history, family, blood purity, and law through then-groundbreaking novels and memoirs. Illegal Immigrants/Model Minorities also uses legal cases, immigration documents, and law as well as mass media coverage to illustrate how writers constructed stories in relation to the political structures that allowed or disallowed their presence, their citizenship, and their blended identity.

Prisoner of Wars: A Hmong Fighter Pilot’s Story of Escaping Death and Confronting Life, by Chia Youyee Vang, with Pao Yang, Retired Captain, U.S. Secret War in Laos

Retired Captain Pao Yang was a Hmong airman trained by the U.S. Air Force and CIA to fly T-28D aircraft for the U.S. Secret War in Laos. However, his plane was shot down during a mission in June 1972. Yang survived, but enemy forces captured him and sent him to a POW camp in northeastern Laos. He remained imprisoned for four years after the United States withdrew from Vietnam because he fought on the American side of the war. Prisoner of Wars shows the impact the U.S. Secret War in Laos had on Hmong combatants and their families. Chia Vang uses oral histories that poignantly recount Yang’s story and the deeply personal struggles his loved ones—who feared he had died—experienced in both Southeast Asia and the United States. As Yang eventually rebuilt his life in America, he grappled with issues of freedom and trauma.

The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America, by Timothy K. August

The refugee is conventionally considered a powerless figure, eagerly cast aside by both migrant and host communities. In his book, The Refugee Aesthetic, Timothy August investigates how and why a number of Southeast Asian American artists and writers have recently embraced the figure of the refugee as a particularly transformative position. He explains how these artists, theorists, critics, and culture-makers reconstruct their place in the American imagination by identifying and critiquing the underlying structures of power that create refugees in the contemporary world. August looks at the outside forces that shape refugee representation and how these expressions are received. He considers the visual legacy of the Southeast Asian refugee experience by analyzing music videos, graphic novels, and refugee artwork. August also examines the power of refugee literature, showing how and why Southeast Asian American writers look to the refugee position to disentangle their complicated aesthetic legacy.

The United States of India: Anticolonial Literature and Transnational Refraction, by Manan Desai

The United States of India shows how Indian and American writers in the United States played a key role in the development of anticolonial thought in the years during and immediately following the First World War. For Indians Lajpat Rai and Dhan Gopal Mukerji, and Americans Agnes Smedley, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Katherine Mayo, the social and historical landscape of America and India acted as a reflective surface. Manan Desai considers how their interactions provided a “transnational refraction”—a political optic and discursive strategy that offered ways to imagine how American history could shed light on an anticolonial Indian future. Desai traces how various expatriate and immigrant Indians formed political movements that rallied for American support for the cause of Indian independence. These intellectuals also developed new forms of writing about subjugation in the U.S. and India. Providing an examination of race, caste, nationhood, and empire, Desai astutely examines this network of Indian and American writers and the genres and social questions that fomented solidarity across borders.

Walking in the Footsteps of Andrew Wyeth

This week in North Philly Notes, W. Barksdale Maynard, author of Artists of Wyeth Country, offers his tips on taking a trip to Chadds Ford, PA to see where Andrew Wyeth and other artists of the Brandywine Tradition lived and painted.

Even with pandemic restrictions, you can still enjoy a trip to Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, to see where Andrew Wyeth painted. That scenic village on the banks of Brandywine Creek lies just 23 miles from Center City, Philadelphia, and always makes for an enjoyable excursion.

Before now, no guidebook existed to the artistic history of Chadds Ford. Artists of Wyeth Country is the very first. It is filled with historic photographs, color reproductions of artwork, and two maps commissioned especially for this volume. At last you can delve deeply into the art and history of this remarkable American place.  

Why was there no previous guidebook? Partly because Andrew Wyeth was so extremely secretive. Along with his wife, Betsy, he discouraged close investigation of his artistic habits and daily routine, trying to keep his painting locales ultra-private. One well-meaning journalist seeking an interview with Andrew Wyeth was forced to wait thirty-five years.

Artists of Wyeth Country followed Andrew Wyeth’s death at age 91 in 2009, at last shedding light on exactly where the artist painted and what his motivations were, both artistic and personal. The book is a rare unauthorized biography of Andrew Wyeth, full of new discoveries and candid insights.

In a sense, it is a biography of Chadds Ford as well, a place notoriously difficult for the tourist to grasp, full of twisting roads and obscure corners. Adding to the confusion is the much-altered landscape. Where Andrew Wyeth saw rolling fields, today the views are swallowed up by young forests and tangles of invasive shrubs. This complicated place really does require a guidebook.

Trips to Chadds Ford usually include a visit to the Brandywine River Museum of Art, home to the world’s largest collection of Wyeth art, but it is closed until June 2021 for refurbishment on its fiftieth anniversary. 

Instead, follow the six driving tours in Artists of Wyeth Country and explore the countryside on your own. No longer do you need to pester reluctant waitresses at Hank’s Restaurant for directions to the Barns-Brinton House or Mother Archie’s Church—it’s all in the guidebook.

Of course, many of the locations are privately owned, so you will want to observe from your car—unless you visit Brandywine Battlefield Park or other public places listed in the book, where you can get out and walk. (Some remain closed due to the pandemic; others are open by appointment, such as the quirky, engrossing Christian Sanderson Museum.)

To an extraordinary degree, Andrew Wyeth limited his painting activities to a couple of miles of territory, from his meticulously restored colonial estate, Brinton’s Mill, at the foot of Brinton’s Bridge Road (private) to Little Africa, a former black enclave not far from the Delaware line. For seventy years he painted virtually nowhere else, except for summers in Maine. Maynard places his origins in the 1930s Regionalist Movement in painting but dubs him America’s unique Micro-Regionalist.

Andrew Wyeth’s fondness for Kuerner Farm is famous, if somewhat inexplicable. As early as the 1920s, he dreamed of painting this hardscrabble farm a short walk from his childhood home, today’s N. C. Wyeth House & Studio. Betsy assembled the famous coffee-table book Wyeth at Kuerners (1976) to solve the mystery—what did her husband see in this entirely ordinary place that sustained his artistic interest not for a week or two but for much of the twentieth century?

When the Brandywine River Museum is open, it offers tours of the Kuerner farmhouse, along with tours of the N. C. Wyeth House & Studio and Andrew Wyeth Studio. For now you can drive past Kuerner Farm, its fence lines grown scruffier lately, noting the famous Kuerner Hill that rises above it to the west. Here Andrew Wyeth tobogganed as a child, later immortalizing it in such famous paintings as Winter 1946 and Snow Hill. 

The latter painting shows all his favorite models, including Helga Testorf, improbably dancing around a maypole. It was at Kuerner Farm that Andrew Wyeth first met Helga, a nurse to the sickly farmer Karl Kuerner. Artists of Wyeth Country contains many insights into these famous models: in real life, Helga has a radiant smile never seen in Wyeth’s somber paintings of her, and Karl seems to have been far less cruel and frightening than Wyeth claimed. 

Not only was Andrew Wyeth secretive, he enveloped himself in a protective thicket of tall tales, some of which his authorized biographer reported as fact. Among them was the claim that the key to his art and personality lay in his undying love of Halloween. Countless books repeat this fable in lieu of deeper exploration.

Far more important than Halloween was the Battle of the Brandywine. All his life, Andrew Wyeth was engrossed by the story of the largest land battle of the Revolution, fought in and around Chadds Ford on September 11th, 1777.  

British forces surged across the Brandywine at the Wyeth estate, Brinton’s Mill. And cannon thundered from the hilltop above his childhood home. Cannonballs have been unearthed at Kuerner Farm. George Washington was nearly killed by Redcoat artillery fire near today’s Chadds Ford Historical Society. 

Next time you visit Brandywine Battlefield Park (currently closed due to the pandemic), don’t miss Lafayette’s Headquarters, which has unfortunately been renamed the Gideon Gilpin House by recent park administrators, blurring its key historical significance. The centuries-old sycamore tree that shades it appears in Wyeth’s early masterpiece, Pennsylvania Landscape of 1942, and was recently cloned by Longwood Gardens.

To the east, note the mansion called Painter’s Folly. It was a favorite haunt of Andrew Wyeth in his later years, partly as a hideaway from his wife Betsy and his life-companion, Helga, three corners of a vexing emotional triangle. To the startled owners of Painter’s Folly, Andrew Wyeth seemed a kind of Cat in the Hat, suddenly materializing out of nowhere, playfully disrupting their lives through long painting sessions that consumed much of their time and splattered their furniture with pigment—then disappearing without warning for weeks. Happily, Painter’s Folly has recently come into public ownership. 

Chadds Ford is filled with such interesting places as these. For the first time, Artists of Wyeth Country allows you to follow in the exact footsteps of Andrew Wyeth. Take it along with you and begin exploring.

Announcing the new issue of Kalfou

This week in North Philly Notes, we feature the new issue of Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies

One highlight from Vol. 7 No. 2 (2020) is that the issue contains a special collection of articles dedicated to the impact of Lorgia García-Peña‘s work on scholarship and civic life. Harvard’s denial of tenure to her in 2019 sparked an intense nationwide discussion of how ethnic studies is devalued in the academy, and this issue mounts a defense of both her pioneering intersectional work in theorizing Blackness, Afrolatinidad, and dominicanidad as well as of the contemporary necessity of the field of ethnic studies more broadly.

Table of Contents:

Kalfou: A JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE AND RELATIONAL ETHNIC STUDIES

VOLUME 7, ISSUE 2 • FALL 2020

SYMPOSIUM ON THE SCHOLARSHIP AND TEACHING OF LORGIA GARCÍA-PEÑA

THE PRESENT CRISIS

Ethnic Studies Matters • Lourdes Torres

Shattering Silences: Dictions, Contradictions, and Ethnic Studies at the Crossroads • George Lipsitz

When Your Mentee Is Denied Tenure: Reflections on Lorgia García-Peña’s Work • Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández

Three Essays toward Care in and beyond Academia • Camara Brown, Eun-Jin Keish Kim, and Massiel Torres Ulloa

Your Mirada. Gracias. Siempre: Afro-Asia, Intimacies, and Women-of-Color Feminisms • Catherine R. Peters

DOMINICANIDAD AS A CRUCIBLE OF NEW KNOWLEDGE

Latinidad, Dominicanidad, and Anti-Blackness: Two Nations under U.S. Empire • Laura Briggs

Bringing Dominican History from the Footnote to the Center of the Page • Elizabeth S. Manley

FEATURE ARTICLES

Susto, Sugar, and Song: ire’ne lara silva’s Chicana Diabetic Poetics • Amanda Ellis

“The Blackness That Incriminated Me”: Stigma and Normalization in Brothers and Keepers • Adam Burston, Jesse S. G. Wozniak, Jacqueline Roebuck Sakho, and Norman Conti

Contesting Legal Borderlands: Policing Insubordinate Spaces in Imperial County’s Farm Worker Communities, 1933–1940 • Stevie Ruiz

IDEAS, ART, AND ACTIVISM

TALKATIVE ANCESTORS

Gloria E. Anzaldúa on the Illusion of “Safe Spaces”

KEYWORDS

The Knowledge of Justice in America • Julie J. Miller

LA MESA POPULAR

Discovering Dominga: Indigenous Migration and the Logics of Indigenous Displacement • Floridalma Boj Lopez

ART AND SOCIAL ACTION

Three Films of Yehuda Sharim • John T. Caldwell

Songs That Never End: A Film by Yehuda Sharim • George Lipsitz

TEACHING AND TRUTH

Situating Blackness and Antiracism in a Global Frame: Key Works for a Study of the Dominican Republic • Elizabeth S. Manley and April J. Mayes

About the journal:

Kalfou is published bi-annually by Temple University Press on behalf of the University of California, Santa Barbara. It is focused on social movements, social institutions, and social relations. Kalfou seeks to build links among intellectuals, artists, and activists in shared struggles for social justice. The journal seeks to promote the development of community-based scholarship in ethnic studies among humanists and social scientists and to connect the specialized knowledge produced in academe to the situated knowledge generated in aggrieved communities.