Philadelphia is a city that constantly gazes back toward its eighteenth-century past. Many of its historic sites rely on legends from the era of the American founding fathers in order to attract visitors. The Powel House, an historic house museum that was once the home of Philadelphia's last colonial and first post-revolutionary mayor Samuel Powel, fits into this category. Yet for The Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks, the consortium that manages the Powel House, there is a pressing need for an expanded audience and increased funding, and the story of the Patriot Mayor does not provide enough fuel to achieve these goals. This essay examines some of the Powel House's lesser-known narratives. It suggests that for historic house museums such as the Powel House that are bound to constricted historical eras, an exploration of the house's entire history is a route toward uncovering new strategies for audience engagement. The essay isolates three specific narratives from the early twentieth century, and contemplates how each individual story can be leveraged for Landmarks' broader goals. / History

Philadelphia, like other major North American cities, has neighborhoods that are informally known as gay neighborhoods. This project examines how Philadelphia's Gayborhood is mediated, and how representations and markings of the Gayborhood are shaped by different discourses, namely tourism and urban development. Marking Philadelphia's Gayborhood justifies the presence of LGBT individuals in the city by linking LGBT lives to economic activity and "positive" urban change. This dissertation reads media texts about Philadelphia's Gayborhood against participant observations of everyday life and events in the Gayborhood, with particular emphasis on the activities of the Philadelphia Gay Tourism Caucus (PGTC). Starting in 2002, the PGTC formed and produced specific tourism materials targeting the LGBT community, including print and television advertising campaigns, the rainbow street signs, and a dedicated map of the Gayborhood. These products highlight the Gayborhood as evidence of Philadelphia's gay-friendliness. Philadelphia's attractiveness for LGBT travelers is rooted in the visible presence of the city's LGBT community; Philadelphia's established LGBT everyday life allows LGBT travelers to come and already belong in the city. To support this message, the PGTC and the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation market the city to both visitors and locals. New media platforms, namely social media, help promote events, both supporting local organizations, as well as creating visible LGBT everyday life to attract visitors. The meanings of the Gayborhood are then explored through its physical markings and LGBT events that emphasize its location. First, Philadelphia's Gayborhood is placed in the context of visibly and symbolically marking a "gay" city. While visual markers may provide indication of LGBT presence, certain symbols become stereotypical and caricatured, limiting the possible meanings of being LGBT-identified in public. Events such as the Pride Parade also serve to define the boundaries of belonging in the LGBT community. A central tension is the distinction between belonging and access, which are often conflated by an emphasis on legal, anti-discrimination discourses. LGBT history is also a central theme of Philadelphia's LGBT tourism promotion. By examining LGBT history walking tours, this project argues that not only do historical projects highlight stories that might otherwise be unseen, they also produce visibility of absences in contemporary discourse. The Gayborhood also functions as an archive exhibit, ultimately supporting a liberal project of belonging through economic and political activities. Parts of the archive are currently present, but access to the LGBT archive requires further inquiry or participation. By considering the Gayborhood as an exhibit of the LGBT archive, we also can consider aspects of the archive as restricted from the public, or still impossible to articulate intelligibly to the public. This project ends with a reconsideration of what it means to articulate and communicate ideas about LGBT identity in space. Current representations and understandings of the Gayborhood still serve a homonormative and homonationalist project that privileges the activities and everyday lives of wealthy, white, gay men. Returning to thinking about gay men's cruising and public sex, this project closes with an examination of how mobile communication technologies and methods allow for public sex to occur in new ways. Marked LGBT neighborhood spaces still have the potential to change how we understand the relationship between sexual lives and public space. / Media & Communication

This study explores a place based pedagogy of Philadelphia jazz history for K-12 students. While many intersections exist between place based programming and jazz public history both nationally and locally, the Philadelphia jazz public history community does not focus on educational programming. Though centered in Philadelphia, this study includes educational materials and field research for both formal and informal educators to increase critical, interdisciplinary African American musical history content in the classroom. The lesson plans found within exemplify a cross section of social studies educational literature, the history of African American narratives in Philadelphia schools, and place based jazz history in the city. / History

This dissertation traces the rhetoric of two Philadelphians, attorney John G. Johnson and Dr. Albert C. Barnes, as they collected art with a specific public in mind, namely working Philadelphians around the turn of the twentieth century. The individual bequests and resulting legacy institutions of Johnson and Barnes serve as rich case studies to assess the efforts of collectors to control the reception of their respective collections by the public. These particular histories, exceptional in their own ways, are juxtaposed to offer an objective view onto previously understudied challenges to the status quo, mounted by a few collectors by way of unique discursive practices and the establishment of distinctive single collection institutions, in the formative period for American art museums around the turn of the twentieth century in Philadelphia. The focus is on the two men’s often shared, but eventually divergent, ideas pertaining to art and the public, which can be tracked to relevant discourses that informed those views. At stake in this investigation is the relative tension between the agency of the collectors and the repurposing of their individual collections by future publics. More plainly, the goal is to study the interrelated narratives of collectors, Johnson and Barnes, as they unfolded over the course of the long twentieth century with an eye to what is gained or lost from the unraveling of the deliberate plans left by the collectors, which in both of these cases, included relocating the art work from the original site, leading to coincident shifts in the manner of display and targeted audience. It is not the point of this study to weigh-in on matters of justice regarding the individual cases, rather the goal is to probe the limits of an art collector’s vision held against the dynamic needs of publics, and evaluate what this might mean for the twenty first century. / Art History

This dissertation examines the relationship between school choice and race. I examine whether the racial composition of schools influences choices and whether choices of private and public choice schools lead to greater segregation and stratification in neighborhood schools. I improve on existing research by adopting the theoretical framework used in neighborhood preferences literature to distinguish between race and race-associated reasons as motivations for avoiding racially integrating schools. This study utilizes geocoded data from the Philadelphia Area Study (PAS) and elementary school catchment maps to examine families' preferences and behaviors in the context of the actual conditions of their assigned schools. Catchment maps are integrated with Census data to determine whether choice schools have a role in white flight and segregation and stratification in neighborhood schools. The findings suggest that families are most likely to avoid neighborhood schools with high proportions of racial minorities. However, attitudes regarding racial climates are more consistent predictors of preferences than the actual racial composition of local schools. Highly segregated neighborhood schools satisfy families who desire racially homogeneous school climates, as do private schools. Families who seek diverse environments are more likely to look to charter and magnet schools. The white flight analysis shows that whites are more likely to leave schools that have modest proportions of black students, and less likely to leave schools that are already integrated. These results suggest that whites react especially strongly to schools with low levels of integration, and those who remain in the few racially balanced schools do so out of a preference for diversity or because they do not have the resources to leave. Public choice schools spur white flight in urban areas, but actually reduce flight in suburban schools. Finally, I find that choice schools do not uniformly affect the degree to which racial groups are spatially segregated from whites, and they also do not uniformly affect the degree to which racial groups attend more or less disadvantaged schools than whites. This suggests that segregation and stratification are two distinct aspects of racial inequality and should be considered separately when evaluating the effectiveness of choice programs. / Sociology

Cities around the United States are looking to urban green infrastructure (UGI) as a critical investment to help address a host of urban challenges, including stormwater management, climate change mitigation, rising heat temperatures and increased risk of flooding. As a result, volunteers are being asked to help construct, maintain, and contribute to UGI projects. Current investigations of UGI highlight the need to consider UGI from an environmental justice perspective, emphasizing a three-pronged approach including distribution, recognition, and procedural justice. This dissertation seeks to investigate UGI equity from a labor perspective, specifically how volunteer labor is acknowledged, valued, and contributed among race, class, and gender. Using UGI initiatives in Philadelphia, PA as a case study, it asks; to what extent are urban sustainability initiatives in Philadelphia relying upon the unpaid labor of citizens in the construction of new, UGI? How might this labor exhibit unrecognized forms of social reproductive labor, when observed from an intersectional feminist perspective? How has the contribution of UGI (such as trees, parks) labor changed over time? Drawing from a range of qualitative methods, including ethnographic fieldwork, online surveys, semi-structured interviews, oral histories and archival analysis, results reveal how volunteers play a significant role in the construction and maintenance of UGI over the past hundred years, including the often-invisible contributions of women and women of color. In applying a feminist labor lens, findings suggest gender and racial inequities in how UGI labor is acknowledged and paid as infrastructure work. Future research must consider intersectional labor dimensions as a key component in achieving a more ‘just’ urban green environment for all. / Geography / Geography

The gun violence epidemic is a deeply complex crisis in America’s cities and urban settings. Despite concerted efforts by government agencies, law enforcement, community organizations, and advocacy groups, gun violence remains a persistent and pervasive problem in the city of Philadelphia. The aims of this writing include a comprehensive analysis of the factors contributing to gun violence in Philadelphia and identification of multi-disciplinary strategies for prevention and intervention. By evaluating existing efforts in Philadelphia, including community-based programs, law enforcement initiatives, and policy reforms, as well as the generation of a theoretical multidisciplinary framework and proposal for gun violence mitigation, this study aims to contribute to the ongoing discourse on gun violence prevention and to inform evidence-based policy and practice in Philadelphia and beyond. / Urban Bioethics

George Lippard, a name scarcely recognized in today's American literature classrooms, was the author of the most popular American novel prior to the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852 - The Quaker City; or, the Monks of Monk Hall. Despite producing such a popular and risqué novel, Lippard and his work have been curiously absent from the American literary and historical canon. In this paper I have chosen to focus on three aspects of the novel that I believe to be important for analysis - Biblical parallels, narrative structure, and female characters. Lippard uses the narrative structure and plot to incite curiosity in his readers and to appeal to audiences' instincts of sexual curiosity, pleasure in revenge, and the punishment of "evil." I will explain how Lippard uses two of the themes to reflect major issues of the time period and one as a metaphor for the plot of the novel. / Master of Arts

In early Philadelphia, 1783-1788, the classics formed a pervasive presence on the city's cultural, political, and physical landscape. As the American nation commenced its republican experiment, references to the classics in Philadelphia especially emerged as a vehicle and vocabulary employed by statesmen for fashioning a people, political culture, and national identity. According to political theories of republicanism, statesmen in Philadelphia had a vested interest in cultivating the virtue of their citizens. As symbols and lessons in patriotism and virtue, classical antiquity was incorporated into civic iconography and national foundation narratives and projected to the broader public. This thesis examines the classical presence in Philadelphia, 1783-1788. It specifically analyses the public presentation and dissemination of the classics in three cultural avenues beyond the walls of the academy, newspapers, spectacles, and orations, in order to evaluate the barriers and opportunities for engagement with the classics by the broader Philadelphia public. I argue that although the gates to a traditional higher education were shut to many of the Philadelphia public, cultural avenues existed that allowed the classics to disseminate to the wider populace. The broader public was invited to engage with the classics when it served a political purpose and lessons in patriotism and virtue were being transmitted. However, this inclusion was often controlled, mediated, and implemented on the terms of the elite. Further, the classics still served as markers of status, and the two contradictory functions held by the classics placed the wider Philadelphia public on the threshold of inclusion and exclusion. / Master of Arts

Experts agree that children need access to green spaces. Many urban children live in degraded environments unsuitable for outdoor play. Children primarily play in school yards. Low-income and African American children are often the victims of social, economic, and educational inequalities leading to the under-allocation of resources for their public schools. Patterns of wealth, advantage and disadvantage are geographically visible in Philadelphia's urban fabric in the segregation of many black and low-income neighborhoods. This is a direct result of historic urban development . Revitalization has aimed at rejuvenating the inner-city economically, but has lead to the displacement of many poor black families and increased segregation of classes. There is a high population of low-income African American children attending public schools in the inner-city. Philadelphia is known for their public-private funding partnerships for community projects and services. Funding problems resulting from low-tax revenue and disinterest of private investors have lead to a disparity in achievement and curriculum between city public schools, private, and suburban public schools. Federal policies attempt to lessen this gap and provide incentives for environmental education programs, but poorer schools lack the funding to expand curriculum and improve or maintain playgrounds. Philadelphia's parks and recreation programs have tried to provide child playscapes to disadvantaged children and schools additional outdoor resources, but racial tensions and neighborhood segregation act as repressors to this success. Guidelines are needed to help create programs and policies that can mitigate disadvantaged children's environmental equity. / Master of Urban and Regional Planning