The school district of Philadelphia built up its security program along a very distinct pathway that was largely unrelated to any real needs protection. This program played out in two distinct phases. In the late 1950s, black and white students clashed in the neighborhoods surrounding schools over integration. Black parents called upon the city to provide community policing to protect their children in the communities surrounding schools. As the 1960s progressed and the promised civil rights gains from city liberals failed to materialize, students turned increasingly to Black Nationalist and black power ideology. When this protest activity moved inside their schoolhouses as blacks simultaneously began moving into white neighborhoods, white Philadelphians began to feel threatened in their homes and schools. As black student activism became louder and more militant, white parents called upon the police to protect their children inside the school house, as opposed to the earlier calls for community policing by black parents. White parents, the PPD, and conservative city politicians pushed the district to adopt tougher disciplinary policies to ham string this activism, to which black parents vehemently objected. The district resisted demands to police the schools through the 1960s until finally caving to political pressure in the 1970s. / History

Queer artists have engaged archives throughout modern and contemporary American art, but art historical discourse of their work has centered the writing of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault to theorize these spaces without considering archival scholarship. This text takes up Gabriel Martinez’s Archive series as a case study to critique archival selection theory and better understand how prejudice has affected the preservation of queer folx’s collections. Martinez’s series is situated amongst other Western artworks that center archival records and queer themes throughout the last century. This section places his artwork in dialogue with other artists for whom the archive is the subject of their artwork. The artworks detailed exemplify the multiplicity of ways that queer folx critique and interpret the histories preserved in these institutions. Following this survey of art is an analysis of how archival records are selected for preservation and the inherent subjectivity of this task. Pedagogical writing on archival selection by Frank Boles, Richard Cox, and James O’Toole are consulted to better understand how archivists working in the field are taught to handle this type of work. Most of their writing is focused on traditional archives and fails to articulate the challenges facing counterarchives, spaces formed to compensate for the erasure of queer persons in traditional institutions. This review of archival scholarship ends with a critique of how queer counterarchives have fallen short of their inclusive aims. The final section of this text is dedicated to a close study of Martinez’s Archive series. His photographs document the Harry R. Eberlin photograph collection and the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives in Philadelphia. The historical context of the Eberlin collection and the founding of its host repository are presented in conjunction with Archive series because Martinez’s compositions are inseparable from these histories. Philadelphia queer culture in the 1970s and 1980s is revealed through the retelling of these histories and by examining who was visualized in the images themselves. These images of bars and events simultaneously reveal the gender and racial disparity of patronage within these spaces and exemplify long-standing tensions in the city’s queer spaces. Lastly, this text posits a practice called “pseudo-processing” where artists document and preserve facsimiles of archival records to question the divisions of archival labor from that of an artist performing comparable tasks. / Art History

Christian, Philadelphian, and Gay-Affirming Responses to AIDS, 1982-1992" is an analysis of primary source material from Christian congregations and extra-denominational religious groups, particularly with regards to the way these groups used scripture and theological language to construct a counter-narrative to the prevailing discourse that painted AIDS as God's punishment on sinners. These materials show the way these groups represented themselves both within their own communities and outward, providing a textual record of the way leaders and laypersons alike discussed AIDS and its meaning. This work begins by considering the complicated factors at play: the particular history of Philadelphia and its relationship to its gay communities, historical and contemporary attitudes of Christianity toward sin and disease, and the particular biomedical and political realities of AIDS. It then follows the epidemic through several Philadelphian Christian communities from 1982 to 1992, demonstrating changing Christian attitudes toward sickness and sexuality as reflected in the rhetoric from these organizations, as understandings of AIDS went from the apocalyptic to the wearily optimistic. This dissertation demonstrates that while AIDS was never the whole of gay life in the United States, not even during the years it was most frightening and least understood, the crisis it introduced necessitated gay-affirming articulations of Christian theology – ones that persisted even as they became less necessary, as infection demographics shifted. This work's examination of these texts shows how marginalized Christian communities and their allies can use liberative Christian rhetoric to push back against language of oppression supported by the dominant Christian paradigm. / Religion

This dissertation examines the conflict over slavery and freedom in Philadelphia from 1820 to 1847. As the northernmost southern city in a state that bordered three slave states, Philadelphia maintained a long tradition of abolitionism and fugitive slave activity. Conflicts that arose over fugitive slaves and the kidnapping of free African-Americans forced Philadelphians to confront the politics of slavery. This dissertation argues that until 1847, Pennsylvania was in effect a slave state. The work of proslavery groups, namely slave masters, their agents, white and black kidnappers, and local, state, and national political supporters, undermined the ostensible successes of state laws designed to protect the freedom of African-Americans in Pennsylvania. Commonly referred to as “liberty laws,” this legislation exposed the inherent difficulty in determining the free or enslaved status of not only fugitive slaves but also African-American kidnapping victims. By studying the specific fugitive or kidnapping cases that inspired these liberty laws, one finds that time and again African-Americans and their allies forced white politicians to grapple with the reality that Pennsylvania was not a safe-haven for African-Americans, regardless of their condition of bondage or freedom. Furthermore, these cases often precipitated into desperate rescues and bloody riots on the streets of Philadelphia; these civil wars in miniature reflected the negotiated and compromised realities of living while black in the city. Ordinary African-Americans living in Philadelphia bore the burden of comity, or friendly relations between states, by practicing what I term “street diplomacy”: the up-close and personal struggles over freedom and slavery that had local, state, and national ramifications. In a larger sense, street diplomacy in Philadelphia magnified the stakes of national comity, i.e. the Union, by showcasing how dividing states by their condition of bondage remained impossible due to permeable geographic borders that fostered perpetual fugitive slave and kidnapping crises. Thus, this dissertation argues that African-Americans and their allies’ struggles with slave-masters, slave-catchers, kidnappers and proslavery politicians disrupted the best efforts of white politicians to maintain a compromised and compromising Union. / History

The purpose of this study is to produce an Africological model that lends attention to epistemological questions in African diaspora research through theoretical and culturally based analysis, ultimately to aid the historical and psychological restoration of Africans in diaspora. This work reflects the theoretical and historic stream of scholarship that centers geographic Africa as the adhesive principle of study in shaping and understanding the cultural and political ally-ship between different African diasporic communities. My aim is to illustrate what Africa represents in diaspora and how it was shaped in the conscious minds and actions of early Africans in diaspora from their own vantage point. Secondly, through a case study of the intra-diasporic relationship between Haiti and free Africans of Philadelphia following the Haitian Revolution, this work lays precedence for the expansion of an African diasporic consciousness. The significance of the intra-diasporic relationship is in the mutual recognition that Haitians and Africans in North America considered themselves a common people. Moreover, they developed an international relationship during the early 19th century to serve their mutual interest in African freedom and autonomous development despite Western expansion. My research locates Africa as the place of origin for dispersed and migrating African diasporic communities, operating as a binding source. In this study Africa is explored as a cognitive and geo-political cultural location for African people in diaspora. I support that African diasporic communities exist as extended African cultural locations of awareness which can and have been negotiated by communities depending on their agency, support, and circumstance to achieve collective goals. / African American Studies

This study examines the environmental identity processes of Philadelphians involved in volunteer local everyday urban environmental stewardship through tree plantings and prunings, urban gardening, and neighborhood cleanups. A hybrid theoretical framework for environmental identities that simultaneously incorporates structural, discursive, and material concerns through the ground of everyday life was adapted from the political ecology of the body developed by Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy (2013). Three qualitative methodological techniques were performed: in depth interviews, participatory observation, and neighborhood walking tours. Results highlight the emotional and affective connections that participants held with their neighborhoods, neighbors and other participants, and trees and other nonhuman others. / Geography

The Royal Theater was a public space which happened to be located in the path of the proposed Crosstown Expressway. From preliminary research, including interviews, it is clear the community feared displacement. During the early twentieth-century, before the invention of television, the theater existed as a place of entertainment for the entire community. Children as well as adults attended the theater as a form of escapism and during the days of segregation, The Royal Theater provided an entertainment space for African Americans which could not be found at White theaters. This thesis will attempt to explore what role The Royal Theater, a significant public space in the heart of this community, played in the tumultuous time of the proposed Crosstown Expressway. / History

Abstract Introduction: Early Orthodontic Treatment (EOT) has been extensively studied, but questions still remain regarding the prevalence of its need in the United States. Without information regarding the epidemiology of EOT need, it is difficult to make determinations as to its viability as a Medicaid service. The Index for Preventive and Interceptive Orthodontic Needs (IPION) developed by Coetzee is the only index specifically meant for children in the mixed dentition. The purpose of this study was to utilize the IPION to measure EOT need in two pediatric dental populations in Philadelphia. Methods: 87 children between the ages of 6 and 9 were screened using the IPION. Overall scores, demographic information, and prevalence of specific malocclusions were recorded and analyzed. Results: A substantial proportion of children fell into the definite treatment need category (60.92% ±5.2% when including restorations and caries in the score, 31.03%±5.0% when excluding restorations and caries from the score). Site of screenings, race and sex had no significant effects on prevalence of EOT need, while IPION rubric used (IPION6 versus IPION9) had marginally significant effects on the prevalence of EOT need. Conclusions: There is a significant proportion of children in Philadelphia pediatric dental populations who have unmet EOT needs. Patients, communities, Medicaid, orthodontists and residents could all benefit from treatment of these children if policy were changed to allow EOT to be covered by Medicaid in Pennsylvania. / Oral Biology

Research to date has demonstrated significant relationships between the presence of outdoor drug markets and violent crime. Scholars have neglected however, to consider the role of travel distance on the drugs/violence nexus. The current study examines whether features of the distributions of travel distance to markets of drug buyers, drug sellers, or the interaction between the two distributions predicts drug market violence levels net of surrounding community demographic structure. Reuter and MacCoun's (1992) as yet untested model about the connections between drugs and violent crime, predicts that the interaction of drug seller and buyer distance distributions from varying distances more powerfully drug market violence levels than buyer and average distance averages. This suggests that how the travel patterns of the two major participants in drug markets intersect is key to understanding differences. That model is tested here. In addition, for comparison purposes, impacts of buyer and seller travel median distances are modeled separately. This work uses 5 years (2006-2010) of incident and arrest data from the Philadelphia Police Department. Reuter and MacCoun's model will be tested using the following analytical techniques. First, a methodology for locating and bounding drug markets using a nearest neighbor, hierarchical clustering technique is introduced. Using this methodology 34 drug markets are identified. Second, hierarchical linear models examining buyers and sellers separately predict travel distances to drug markets. Arrestees are nested within markets. This technique separates influences on distance arising from arrestees from drug market distance differences. Third, how market level median travel distance affects within drug market violence is considered. Specifically, the main effects of median buyer travel distance and median seller travel distance on drug market violence are captured using separate Poisson hierarchical linear models. Finally, impacts of the interaction between buyer and seller distance, Reuter and MacCoun's (1992) focus, are explored in another series of generalized hierarchical linear models. The main findings from the dissertation are as follows: 1. Results provide partial support for Reuter and MacCoun's drug market-violence model using multiple operationalizations. Public markets--those in which buyers and sellers travel from outside their own neighborhoods--are expected to be the most violent. 2. Separate raw distance measures for buyers and sellers correlate with within-drug market violence, after controlling for community demographics. 3. A negative effect of socioeconomic status and violence holds even when modeled with drug market variables. 4. As the proportion of crack cocaine sales within drug markets increases so too does within-market violence. Conceptual implications highlight the need to investigate social ties as an intervening variable in the travel distance »» drug market violence relationship. It is not clear from this research whether the travel distances of drug offenders in some way explains the amount or strength of social ties in a drug market, which in turn serves to suppress or elevate within-drug market violence. Policy implications suggest that Reuter and MacCoun's drug market types may connect with specific policing responses. Policing efforts may not receive much support from community residents because dense social networks may discourage reporting illicit activity. Markets drawing dealers and customers from farther away, and located around commercial and recreational centers may be amenable to place-based policing initiatives and coordinated intervention strategies with multiple city agencies. / Criminal Justice

This study is an analysis of the role educational programming has played in reforming inmates in American correctional institutions between the Jacksonian era and the 1970s. A case study, "Seminary of Virtue" focuses on the educational curriculum at Philadelphia's famed Eastern State Penitentiary, a cutting-edge institution that originated the Pennsylvania System of penal discipline. "Seminary of Virtue" argues that Eastern State Penitentiary's extensive and aggressive educational program reflected a general American belief that correctional institutions should educate inmates as a way of reducing recidivism and thereby "reforming" them. While Americans remained committed to educating inmates, Eastern State's curriculum evolved during its century and a half institutional life. As its emphasis shifted from the religiously oriented "reform" of prisoners in the early nineteenth-century to a medical model of "rehabilitation" a half century later, Eastern State's educational program evolved, shifting from a curriculum of rudimentary literacy skills, religious instruction and an apprenticeship of sorts to industrial education in the mid-nineteenth century and then finally to a traditional academic curriculum in the first third of the twentieth century. / History