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To what extent do international organizations, global policy networks, and transnational policy entrepreneurs influence domestic policy makers? Have we entered a new phase of globalization that, unbeknownst to most citizens, shapes policies that used to be the sole domain of domestic politics?Privatizing Pensionsreveals how international institutions--such as the World Bank, USAID, and other transnational policy actors--have played a seminal role in the development, diffusion, and implementation of new pension reforms that are transforming the postwar social contract in more than thirty countries worldwide, including the United States. Mitchell Orenstein shows how transnational actors have driven change in a policy area once thought to be beyond reform in many countries, and how they have done so by deploying their unique resources and legitimacy to promote new ideas, recruit disciples worldwide, and provide a broad range of technical assistance to government reformers over the long term. He demonstrates that while domestic decision makers may retain veto power over these reforms--which replace traditional social security with individual pension savings accounts--transnational policy makers play the role of \"proposal actors,\" shaping the information, preferences, and resources of their domestic clients. Privatizing Pensionsargues that even the most quintessentially domestic areas of policy have been thoroughly globalized, and that these international influences must be better understood.

From 1951 until 1974, Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia was the site of thousands of experiments on prisoners conducted by researchers under the direction of University of Pennsylvania dermatologist Albert M. Kligman. While most of the experiments were testing cosmetics, detergents, and deodorants, the trials also included scores of Phase I drug trials, inoculations of radioactive isotopes, and applications of dioxin in addition to mind-control experiments for the Army and CIA. These experiments often left the subject-prisoners, mostly African Americans, in excruciating pain and had long-term debilitating effects on their health. This is one among many episodes of the sordid history of medical experimentation on the black population of the United States. The story of the Holmesburg trials was documented by Allen Hornblum in his 1998 book Acres of Skin. The more general history of African Americans as human guinea pigs has most recently been told by Harriet Washington in her 2007 book Medical Apartheid. The subject is currently a topic of heated public debate in the wake of a 2006 report from an influential panel of medical experts recommending that the federal government loosen the regulations in place since the 1970s that have limited the testing of pharmaceuticals on prison inmates. Sentenced to Science retells the story of the Holmesburg experiments more dramatically through the eyes of one black man, Edward \"Butch\" Anthony, who suffered greatly from the experiments for which he \"volunteered\" during multiple terms at the prison. This is not only one black man's highly personal account of what it was like to be an imprisoned test subject, but also a sobering reminder that there were many African Americans caught in the viselike grip of a scientific research community willing to bend any code of ethics in order to accomplish its goals and a criminal justice system that sold prisoners to the highest bidder.

\"It was the summer of 1776. Officials were in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They had an important job. They needed to finish an important piece of writing. This document would create the United States. On July 4, the lawmakers adopted the Declaration of Independence. The building where this happened is now called Independence Hall. This building is older than the United States.\" (News-O-Matic) Read more about Independence Hall.

Printer and publisher, author and educator, scientist and inventor, statesman and philanthropist, Benjamin Franklin was the very embodiment of the American type of self-made man. In 1771, at the age of 65, he sat down to write his autobiography, \"having emerged from the poverty and obscurity in which I was born and bred to a state of affluence and some degree of reputation in the world, and having gone so far through life with a considerable share of felicity.\" The result is a classic of American literature.On the eve of the tercentenary of Franklin's birth, the university he founded has selected the Autobiography for the Penn Reading Project. Each year, for the past fifteen years, the University of Pennsylvania has chosen a single work that the entire incoming class, and a large segment of the faculty and staff, read and discuss together. For this occasion the University of Pennsylvania Press will publish a special edition of Franklin's Autobiography, including a new preface by University president Amy Gutmann and an introduction by distinguished scholar Peter Conn. The volume will also include four short essays by noted Penn professors as well as a chronology of Franklin's life and the text of Franklin's Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania, a document resulting in the establishment of an institution of higher education that ultimately became the University of Pennsylvania.No area of human endeavor escaped Franklin's keen attentions. His ideas and values, as Amy Gutmann notes in her remarks, have shaped the modern University of Pennsylvania profoundly, \"more profoundly than have the founders of any other major university of college in the United States.\" Franklin believed that he had been born too soon. Readers will recognize that his spirit lives on at Penn today.Essay contributors: Richard R. Beeman, Paul Guyer, Michael Weisberg, and Michael Zuckerman.

The achievements accomplished by the civil rights movement are well documented. Less familiar to historians, however, is the protracted struggle for racial equality black firefighters experienced in urban America and especially in Philadelphia. In 1818, when several citizens tried to organize their own African Fire Association or to integrate an all-white fire department, their efforts were met with fierce white resistance. In 1886 Philadelphia did hire its first black firefighter, but it was not until 1974, when Club Valiants, an organization for Philadelphia's black firefighters, sued the city in federal court for more proportional representation that black firefighters gained access to what historically had been a white-dominated organization. This essay examines the social dynamics of race relations within the firefighting community in a historical context.

Of the many important political, economic, and social changes that literally remade the United States during Reconstruction, the celebrations that focused on the centennial of the Declaration of Independence in 1876 can seem relatively trivial but those commemorations were integral parts of re‐ envisioning the nation. The celebrations as a whole held the possibility of finding a new American nationality less than eleven years after the end of the Civil War. The first “histories” of the Centennial Exposition were produced by the same journalists and engineers who had written guidebooks to the Philadelphia exhibition and by visitors to the fair and the nation. In 1876 two complementary trends could be found in the celebration of the centennial of the Declaration of Independence. The centennial year is credited with reviving the celebration of the Fourth of July. Both the centennial year and the Centennial exhibition offer numerous opportunities for future scholarship.

When in the course of human events, some tour guides are caught saying things like \"Ben Franklin had 80 illegitimate children,\" the City Council shall force every tour guide in town to take a history test. The city, in its court filings, calls its law \"an economic regulation\" that has only an \"incidental effect on speech.\"