Pennsylvania

Student Community Action Tours: Using the Humanities to Develop Leadership and Inspire Change

In the summer of 2012, middle school students in a leadership training program hosted by the advocacy group Asian Americans United in Philadelphia read about local resistance to plans to locate a new Phillies stadium in Chinatown a decade earlier. They then studied a map of the neighborhood and considered how siting the stadium there might have had different meanings for different groups – people who lived in Chinatown, people who worked there, local government, businesses and real estate companies, and the police, for example.

crossties

Summer Fruits of the Humanities

Recent observances around the on-going 150th anniversary of the Civil War have highlighted the great popular interest in how war affected the lives of everyday people. New Jersey now has a window into everyday lives during the American Revolution, thanks to the good work of the Crossroads of the American Revolution National Heritage Area.

Sharon Ann Holt

Home Before The Leaves Fall

“Home Before the Leaves Fall: The Great War 1914-1918,” a collaborative commemoration of World War I by heritage and educational institutions through the City of Philadelphia, kicked off at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania on June 26. Peter John Williams, author of a pictorial history, Philadelphia The War Years delivered a talk that highlighted Philadelphia’s importance as the third largest city in the United States at the start of World War I and as a manufacturing powerhouse known as the “workshop of the world.” Nearly 60, 000 Philadelphia men and 2,000 Philadelphia women served in World War I and thousands more worked in factories and shipyards supporting the war effort. A large naval yard, munitions manufacturing, and an aviation training facility transformed Philadelphia during the years of the Great War into fully mobilized war time economy more commonly associated with the World War II home front.

Michelle Moravec

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