Download or read book When Bosses Ruled Philadelphia written by Peter McCaffery and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1903, Muckraker Lincoln Steffens brought the city of Philadelphia lasting notoriety as "the most corrupt and the most contented" urban center in the nation. Famous for its colorful "feudal barons," from "King James" McManes and his "Gas Ring" to "Iz" Durham and "Sunny Jim" McNichol, Philadelphia offers the historian a classic case of the duel between bosses and reformers for control of the American city. But, strangely enough, Philadelphia's Republican machine has not been subject to critical examination until now. When Bosses Ruled Philadelphia challenges conventional wisdom on the political machine, which has it that party bosses controlled Philadelphia as early as the 1850s and maintained that control, with little change, until the Great Depression. According to Peter McCaffery, however, all bosses were not alike, and political power came only gradually over time. McManes's "Gas Ring" in the 1870s was not as powerful as the well-oiled machine ushered in by Matt Quay in the late 1880s. Through a careful analysis of city records, McCaffery identifies the beneficiaries of the emerging Republican Organization, which sections of the local electorate supported it, and why. He concludes that genuine boss rule did not emerge as the dominant institution in Philadelphia politics until just before the turn of the century. McCaffery considers the function that the machine filled in the life of the city. Did it ultimately serve its supporters and the community as a whole, as Steffens and recent commentators have suggested? No, says McCaffery. The romantic image of the boss as "good guy" of the urban drama is wholly undeserved.
Download or read book The Worlds of William Penn written by Andrew R. Murphy and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Penn was an instrumental and controversial figure in the early modern transatlantic world, known both as a leader in the movement for religious toleration in England and as a founder of two American colonies, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. As such, his career was marked by controversy and contention in both England and America. This volume looks at William Penn with fresh eyes, bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines to assess his multifaceted life and career. Contributors analyze the worlds that shaped Penn and the worlds that he shaped: Irish, English, American, Quaker, and imperial. The eighteen chapters in The Worlds of William Penn shed critical new light on Penn’s life and legacy, examining his early and often-overlooked time in Ireland; the literary, political, and theological legacies of his public career during the Restoration and after the 1688 Revolution; his role as proprietor of Pennsylvania; his religious leadership in the Quaker movement, and as a loyal lieutenant to George Fox, and his important role in the broader British imperial project. Coinciding with the 300th anniversary of Penn’s death the time is right for this examination of Penn’s importance both in his own time and to the ongoing campaign for political and religious liberty
Download or read book Boss Rule in the Gilded Age written by James A. Kehl and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2010-11-23 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Matt Quay was called "the ablest politician this country has ever produced." He served as a United States senator representing Pennsylvania from 1887 to 1904. His career as a Republican Party boss, however, spanned nearly half a century, during which numerous governors and one president owed their election success to his political skills. James A. Kehl was given the first public access to Quay's own papers, and herein presents the inside story of this controversial man who was considered a political Robin Hood for his alleged bribe-taking, misappropriations of funds, and concern for the underprivileged-yet he emerged as the most powerful member of the Republican Party in his state.
Download or read book Border Boss written by J. Gilberto Quezada and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2001-05 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On January 1, 1937, Manuel B. Bravo was sworn in as county judge of Zapata County, a post he would hold for twenty years. In Border Boss: Manuel B. Bravo and Zapata County, J. Gilberto Quezada delineates Bravo’s political career in the Democratic Party and examines his role in some of the important issues of his day, especially Falcon Dam. During Bravo’s years in office, he worked and corresponded with many Texas and national politicians, including James Allred, Lloyd Bentsen, Kika de la Garza, Ralph Yarborough, and, most prominently, Lyndon Johnson. The association between Bravo and Johnson began with the special Senate election of 1941 and is reflected in the more than fifty letters between the two in Bravo's personal papers. In Johnson's 1948 Senate runoff against Coke Stevenson, voting irregularities were alleged in Zapata County when the election returns from Precinct No. 3 were reported missing. Quezada analyzes the Bravo papers for any evidence that Bravo and Johnson had arranged the disappearance and offers possible alternative explanations. From the 1930s to the 1950s Zapata County was one of six South Texas counties where the Tejano majority dominated local politics and held most public offices. Bravo became known as one of the "Mexican bosses" of South Texas, but Quezada draws a more nuanced picture of bossism than has been presented previously, analyzing the role of influential leading families but looking as well at the degree of economic integration into the state and nation as factors in how bossism developed. Those interested in Mexican-American studies and politics and bossism in South Texas will appreciate the window onto South Texas politics and Tejano culture this biography gives.
Download or read book Before Renaissance written by John F. Bauman and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2006-10-29 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before Renaissance examines a half-century epoch during which planners, public officials, and civic leaders engaged in a dialogue about the meaning of planning and its application for improving life in Pittsburgh.Planning emerged from the concerns of progressive reformers and businessmen over the social and physical problems of the city. In the Steel City enlightened planners such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and Frederick Bigger pioneered the practical approach to reordering the chaotic urban-industrial landscape. In the face of obstacles that included the embedded tradition of privatism, rugged topography, inherited built environment, and chronic political fragmentation, they established a tradition of modern planning in Pittsburgh.Over the years a melange of other distinguished local and national figures joined in the planning dialogue, among them the park founder Edward Bigelow, political bosses Christopher Magee and William Flinn, mayors George Guthrie and William Magee, industrialists Andrew Carnegie and Howard Heinz, financier Richard King Mellon, and planning luminaries Charles Mulford Robinson, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., Harland Bartholomew, Robert Moses, and Pittsburgh's Frederick Bigger. The famed alliance of Richard King Mellon and Mayor David Lawrence, which heralded the Renaissance, owed a great debt to Pittsburgh's prior planning experience. John Bauman and Edward Muller recount the city's long tradition of public/private partnerships as an important factor in the pursuit of orderly and stable urban growth. Before Renaissance provides insights into the major themes, benchmarks, successes, and limitations that marked the formative days of urban planning. It defines Pittsburgh's key role in the vanguard of the national movement and reveals the individuals and processes that impacted the physical shape and form of a city for generations to come.
Download or read book Boss Rule written by John Thomas Salter and published by New York, McGraw-Hill. This book was released on 1935 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Electing the Senate written by Wendy J. Schiller and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-21 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How U.S. senators were chosen prior to the Seventeenth Amendment—and the consequences of Constitutional reform From 1789 to 1913, U.S. senators were not directly elected by the people—instead the Constitution mandated that they be chosen by state legislators. This radically changed in 1913, when the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, giving the public a direct vote. Electing the Senate investigates the electoral connections among constituents, state legislators, political parties, and U.S. senators during the age of indirect elections. Wendy Schiller and Charles Stewart find that even though parties controlled the partisan affiliation of the winning candidate for Senate, they had much less control over the universe of candidates who competed for votes in Senate elections and the parties did not always succeed in resolving internal conflict among their rank and file. Party politics, money, and personal ambition dominated the election process, in a system originally designed to insulate the Senate from public pressure. Electing the Senate uses an original data set of all the roll call votes cast by state legislators for U.S. senators from 1871 to 1913 and all state legislators who served during this time. Newspaper and biographical accounts uncover vivid stories of the political maneuvering, corruption, and partisanship—played out by elite political actors, from elected officials, to party machine bosses, to wealthy business owners—that dominated the indirect Senate elections process. Electing the Senate raises important questions about the effectiveness of Constitutional reforms, such as the Seventeenth Amendment, that promised to produce a more responsive and accountable government.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of American Urban History written by David Goldfield and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2007 with total page 1057 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description
Download or read book Vengeance Feminism written by Kali Gross and published by Seal Press. This book was released on 2024-09-24 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From an award-winning historian, an alternative model of feminism driven by the legacy of Black women who took justice into their own hands So often failed by the state, demeaned by racism and sexism, and denied respectable means of redress, Black women have nevertheless patiently resisted myriad injustices. Yet history shows an alternative path. It involved razors, pistols, hatchets, and blackjacks, and playacting for courts and reporters—whatever it took to beat the system. In a world where Black women are castigated and caricatured for being angry, Vengeance Feminism tells the story of those who leaned into their fury, crafting a different kind of ideology that scratched and stabbed and sometimes even succeeded. Vengeance Feminism is about the Black women who hit back—not always figuratively, and not necessarily nobly either. Weaving together historical narrative with Black feminist analysis, Gross illuminates the stories of Black women who fought for their dignity on their own terms, from the nineteenth-century “badger thieves” who robbed men on the streets of Philadelphia to victims of intimate partner violence who defended their honor and bodily autonomy with deadly force. Reckoning with women who lied, robbed, and cheated a racist, misogynistic world, Vengeance Feminism grapples with the volatile power of violence in pursuit of racial and gender justice.
Download or read book Philadelphia s Progressive Orphanage The Carson Valley School written by and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book American Catholic written by Charles Morris and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-08-24 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A cracking good story with a wonderful cast of rogues, ruffians and some remarkably holy and sensible people." --Los Angeles Times Book Review Before the potato famine ravaged Ireland in the 1840s, the Roman Catholic Church was barely a thread in the American cloth. Twenty years later, New York City was home to more Irish Catholics than Dublin. Today, the United States boasts some sixty million members of the Catholic Church, which has become one of this country's most influential cultural forces. In American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America's Most Powerful Church, Charles R. Morris recounts the rich story of the rise of the Catholic Church in America, bringing to life the personalities that transformed an urban Irish subculture into a dominant presence nationwide. Here are the stories of rogues and ruffians, heroes and martyrs--from Dorothy Day, a convert from Greenwich Village Marxism who opened shelters for thousands, to Cardinal William O'Connell, who ran the Church in Boston from a Renaissance palazzo, complete with golf course. Morris also reveals the Church's continuing struggle to come to terms with secular, pluralist America and the theological, sexual, authority, and gender issues that keep tearing it apart. As comprehensive as it is provocative, American Catholic is a tour de force, a fascinating cultural history that will engage and inform both Catholics and non-Catholics alike. "The best one-volume history of the last hundred years of American Catholicism that it has ever been my pleasure to read. What's appealing in this remarkable book is its delicate sense of balance and its soundly grounded judgments." --Andrew Greeley
Download or read book Pennsylvania Government and Politics written by Thomas J. Baldino and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2024-03-12 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive examination of the Keystone State’s formal and informal political institutions and players, past and present, and elucidates the place each holds in governing the commonwealth today. Covering a period of more than three hundred years, this volume presents a clear and succinct overview of • the commonwealth’s political history, culture, and geography; • interactions between office holders, civil servants, special interest groups, and the media; • policy development and implementation; • how laws are created, enacted, and enforced; • hierarchy and interaction among state, county, local, and special district government bodies and officials; • tax collection and disbursement; and • the political upheaval in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 presidential election. Featuring practical appendixes and interviews with current and past office holders, bureaucrats, party leaders, and political journalists, this astute and informative book is an indispensable tool for understanding politics in the Keystone State.
Download or read book Colored Amazons written by Kali N. Gross and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2006-07-12 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Colored Amazons is a groundbreaking historical analysis of the crimes, prosecution, and incarceration of black women in Philadelphia at the turn of the twentieth century. Kali N. Gross reconstructs black women’s crimes and their representations in popular press accounts and within the discourses of urban and penal reform. Most importantly, she considers what these crimes signified about the experiences, ambitions, and frustrations of the marginalized women who committed them. Gross argues that the perpetrators and the state jointly constructed black female crime. For some women, crime functioned as a means to attain personal and social autonomy. For the state, black female crime and its representations effectively galvanized and justified a host of urban reform initiatives that reaffirmed white, middle-class authority. Gross draws on prison records, trial transcripts, news accounts, and rare mug shot photographs. Providing an overview of Philadelphia’s black women criminals, she describes the women’s work, housing, and leisure activities and their social position in relation to the city’s native-born whites, European immigrants, and elite and middle-class African Americans. She relates how news accounts exaggerated black female crime, trading in sensationalistic portraits of threatening “colored Amazons,” and she considers criminologists’ interpretations of the women’s criminal acts, interpretations largely based on notions of hereditary criminality. Ultimately, Gross contends that the history of black female criminals is in many ways a history of the rift between the political rhetoric of democracy and the legal and social realities of those marginalized by its shortcomings.
Download or read book Practicing Democracy written by Daniel Peart and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2015-07-07 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Practicing Democracy, eleven historians challenge conventional narratives of democratization in the early United States, offering new perspectives on the period between the ratification of the Constitution and the outbreak of the Civil War. The essays in this collection address critical themes such as the origins, evolution, and disintegration of party competition, the relationship between political parties and popular participation, and the place that parties occupied within the wider world of United States politics. In recent years, historians of the early republic have demolished old assumptions about low rates of political participation and shallow popular partisanship in the age of Jefferson—raising the question of how, if at all, Jacksonian politics departed from earlier norms. This book reaffirms the significance of a transition in political practices during the 1820s and 1830s but casts the transformation in a new light. Whereas the traditional narrative is one of a party-driven democratic awakening, the contributors to this volume challenge the correlation of party with democracy. They both critique constricting definitions of legitimate democratic practices in the decades following the ratification of the Constitution and emphasize the proliferation of competing public voices in the buildup to the Civil War. Taken together, these essays offer a new way of thinking about American politics across the traditional dividing line of 1828 and suggest a novel approach to the long-standing question of what it meant to be part of "We the People." Contributors:Tyler Anbinder, George Washington University · Douglas Bradburn, Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon · John L. Brooke, The Ohio State University · Andrew Heath, University of Sheffield · Reeve Huston, Duke University · Johann N. Neem, Western Washington University · Kenneth Owen, University of Illinois, Springfield · Graham A. Peck, Saint Xavier University · Andrew W. Robertson, Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Lehman College, CUNY
Download or read book A Republic No More written by Jay Cost and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2016-07-12 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?” Franklin’s response: “A Republic—if you can keep it.” This book argues: we couldn’t keep it. A true republic privileges the common interest above the special interests. To do this, our Constitution established an elaborate system of checks and balances that disperses power among the branches of government, which it places in conflict with one another. The Framers believed that this would keep grasping, covetous factions from acquiring enough power to dominate government. Instead, only the people would rule. Proper institutional design is essential to this system. Each branch must manage responsibly the powers it is granted, as well as rebuke the other branches when they go astray. This is where subsequent generations have run into trouble: we have overloaded our government with more power than it can handle. The Constitution’s checks and balances have broken down because the institutions created in 1787 cannot exercise responsibly the powers of our sprawling, immense twenty-first-century government. The result is the triumph of special interests over the common interest. James Madison called this factionalism. We know it as political corruption. Corruption today is so widespread that our government is not really a republic, but rather a special interest democracy. Everybody may participate, yes, but the contours of public policy depend not so much on the common good, as on the push-and-pull of the various interest groups encamped in Washington, DC.
Download or read book Cities in American Political History written by Richard Dilworth and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2011-09-13 with total page 777 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Profiling the ten most populous cities in the United States during ten critical eras of political development, Cities in American Political History presents a unique singular focus on American cities, their government and politics, industry, commerce, labor, and race and ethnicity. Cities in American Political History analyzes the role that large cities from New York to Chicago to San Jose, have played in U.S. politics and policymaking. Each entry is structured for straightforward comparison across issues and eras. The city profiles include basic data and statistics for the era and are accompanied by maps of each era and the largest cities at that time.
Download or read book Black Citymakers written by Marcus Anthony Hunter and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Citymakers revisits the Black Seventh Ward neighborhood and residents of W.E.B. DuBois's The Philadelphia Negro over the twentieth century. Hunter's analysis demonstrates that black Philadelphians were by not mere victims of large scale socio-economic and political change, but active participants influencing the direction of urban policy and change.
