Philly Firsts: The Famous, Infamous, and Quirky of the City of Brotherly Love by Janice L.BookerPennsylvania Legacies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (November 2002), p. 7Published by: The Historical Society of PennsylvaniaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27764847 .

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Several years ago, |HH Arcadia Press of HHH^I Charleston, SC began IPiHV commissioning highly pic- B ;'|9^H| torial histories of ,.v HyjBWB

neighborhoods' 111^^ and small towns h^^h^^^htk~ around the ^^HH^^^H United States. ^Hh?^^^^I Arcadia actively ̂H||H recruited local ^^^^^QH|B experts, looking j^^^^^^^BH for people who ^^^^^^^^H knew and cared

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ans or writers. The

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m umes, of which five HB recent ones, ^B Meadville by Anne W. Stewart and William B. Moore, Early Coal

Mining in the Anthracite

Region by John Stuart

Richards, Lehigh Township by the Lehigh Township Historical

Society, Chestnut Hill by Thomas Keels and Elizabeth Farmer Jarvis, and The Jewish Community around

North Broad Street by Allen Meyers, are of special interest here. The books provide little if any narrative, but feature pictures with substantial

captions. Many of the pictures are held in private collections, making these books sometimes the only pub he place they can be seen. Within the shared framework, each book has its special aspects: the Chestnut Hill book is full of pictures of rav

ishing buildings and streets, while the North Broad Street and anthracite volumes contain memo

rable and expressive faces. Meadville separates places and faces into two distinct sections, and makes a successful effort to trace the town

through multiple centuries and

diverse experiences, while

Hj Lehigh Township mixes them

fgW up to showcase particular mmM towns within the region. On

the whole, Arcadia Press is

J??? doing a fine job collecting and making available stories that

might otherwise never find their way beyond local lore and family albums.

Pennsylvania*! Voices of the Great War:

Letters, Stories, and Oral Histories of World War L J. Stuart Richards, ed. (Jefferson, North Carolina:

McFarland & Company, 2002. 239 pp., index.)

Richards' 200- m^^^^m

plus page collection UUi^^H letters from ^^^^^^^^H Pennsylvania ser- ^^^^^^^^H vicemen and women BBMHIIIIHIB includes a number IHHHfflM of poignant letters HHHHHHIHH about the realities of ̂^^^MK^^I anguish, boredom, ̂̂ ^^HB?Uj and loneliness, as ^^^^^^^^Hl well as a number of ^^H^HHHHi hugely entertaining evocations of battlefield and hospital highjinks. Richards adds little to the letters; a short introduction narrates the

progress of the fighting, but sets no

particular other context for the let ters. As a primary source on the

subject, this book will be invaluable. For more commentary and compari son to soldier's experiences in other recent wars, readers may also want to have a look at Andrew Carroll, War Letters.

Philly Firsts: The Famous, Infamous, and

Quirky of the City of Brotherly Love Janice L. Booker, (Philadelphia, PA: Camino Books,

1999) Philly Firsts is a small, fascinat

ing compendium of both little known and well-known facts, that

"proudly celebrates the ingenuity, creativity, and perseverance of the denizens of this great city." Did you know that stock traders in

Philadelphia used a light signaling system to bring them financial infor

mation from New York in under 10

minutes, in 1800? Or that Charles

Wimm Goodyear did some of his crucial

experiments on

rubber while in debtor's prison in

Philadelphia? Or that Crystal Bird

Fauset, the first African-American

woman elected to a state legislature anywhere in the United States, rep resented Philadelphia in Harrisburg from 1938 to 1940? But beware,

Ms. Booker did let some errors slip through. That Baldwin locomotive on page 135 may be the company's biggest but it is most certainly not its first. Enjoy the book, and take

pride in the stories you read there, but double check before you wager the house.

Andrew Elliot's Philadelphia Odyssey Edward H. Hart, (Unionviile, NY: Royal Fireworks

Press, 2001) This self-published biography

offers "the story of a young Scottish merchant in America on his way to

becoming a Royal Officer." Hart catches some of the young man's wry wit, as when he records Elliot mus

ing that having, "no hopes of ever

being a man of power & conse

cpience I heartly dispise all your Lords and Governors &c in short

every body thats in a sphere above me." (60) Elliot is nothing if not

ordinary, to his sorrow and our good fortune. His various trades, ambi

tions, and connections, and his com

mentary on the events of 1728 to 1764 give him charm, wit, and bite, suggesting something of the texture of transatlantic cultural, political, and economic life in the late colonial period.

Hart does a creditable

job retrieving and nar

rating the story; other scholars may be

intrigued by it and undertake to push the

analytic possibilities somewhat further than

Hart chooses to do.

November 2002 Pennsylvania LEGACIES

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