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"Social control Pennsylvania History 18th century."
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Liberty's Prisoners
Liberty's Prisonersexamines how changing attitudes about work, freedom, property, and family shaped the creation of the penitentiary system in the United States. The first penitentiary was founded in Philadelphia in 1790, a period of great optimism and turmoil in the Revolution's wake. Those who were previously dependents with no legal standing-women, enslaved people, and indentured servants-increasingly claimed their own right to life, liberty, and happiness. A diverse cast of women and men, including immigrants, African Americans, and the Irish and Anglo-American poor, struggled to make a living. Vagrancy laws were used to crack down on those who visibly challenged longstanding social hierarchies while criminal convictions carried severe sentences for even the most trivial property crimes.
The penitentiary was designed to reestablish order, both behind its walls and in society at large, but the promise of reformative incarceration failed from its earliest years. Within this system, women served a vital function, and Liberty's Prisoners is the first book to bring to life the experience of African American, immigrant, and poor white women imprisoned in early America. Always a minority of prisoners, women provided domestic labor within the institution and served as model inmates, more likely to submit to the authority of guards, inspectors, and reformers. White men, the primary targets of reformative incarceration, challenged authorities at every turn while African American men were increasingly segregated and denied access to reform.
Liberty's Prisonerschronicles how the penitentiary, though initially designed as an alternative to corporal punishment for the most egregious of offenders, quickly became a repository for those who attempted to lay claim to the new nation's promise of liberty.
eBook
The Contagious City
By the time William Penn was planning the colony that would come to be called Pennsylvania, with Philadelphia at its heart, Europeans on both sides of the ocean had long experience with the hazards of city life, disease the most terrifying among them. Drawing from those experiences, colonists hoped to create new urban forms that combined the commercial advantages of a seaport with the health benefits of the country.The Contagious Citydetails how early Americans struggled to preserve their collective health against both the strange new perils of the colonial environment and the familiar dangers of the traditional city, through a period of profound transformation in both politics and medicine.
Philadelphia was the paramount example of this reforming tendency. Tracing the city's history from its founding on the banks of the Delaware River in 1682 to the yellow fever outbreak of 1793, Simon Finger emphasizes the importance of public health and population control in decisions made by the city's planners and leaders. He also shows that key figures in the city's history, including Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush, brought their keen interest in science and medicine into the political sphere. Throughout his account, Finger makes clear that medicine and politics were inextricably linked, and that both undergirded the debates over such crucial concerns as the city's location, its urban plan, its immigration policy, and its creation of institutions of public safety. In framing the history of Philadelphia through the imperatives of public health, The Contagious City offers a bold new vision of the urban history of colonial America.
eBook
An “Uncommon Tranquility of Mind”: Emotional Self-Control and the Construction of a Middle-Class Identity in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia
This essay is a study of the creation of a middle-class identity in eighteenth-century Philadelphia during the \"yellow fever epidemic\" of 1793. Given that this epidemic produced a wide variety of documentation, this event provides the historian with a window onto the values, sensibilities, and behaviors of those who either aspired to, or defined themselves as part of, the \"middle class.\" It is clear from these sources that an overriding feature of eighteenth-century middle-class life was an interest in health preservation through self-restraint, with an emphasis on emotional self-control. Navigating between extremes of control and release, bourgeois Philadelphians attempted to walk a fine line between repression and expression. Little evidence can be found in these writings that Philadelphians presented differing standards of behavior for men and women. Consequently, this study complicates the existing literature that has emphasized the dichotomy of male rationality and female emotionality in middle-class culture. Middle-class Philadelphians tended to portray servants and other members of the lower class instead of middle-class women as irrational and incapable of controlling their passions. It was they, then, who became the \"other\" against whom middle-class individuals came to define themselves.
Journal Article