Philadelphia Stories is a kind of family album. As in their earlier volume, Still Philadelphia: A Photographic History, 1890-1940, Miller, Vogel, and Davis have collected photographs of ordinary lives and daily events from 1920 to 1960 that have shaped the collective memory of people in the Philadelphia area. Through a series of photo essays, Philadelphia Stories evokes the mood of an era that embraced the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and the complacent prosperity of the 1950s. Contemporary photos document physical changes in the metropolitan area: the developing skyline, the streets of rowhouses, the expanding suburbs. Details on homelife, food prices, school activities, local politics, shopping, social mores, and neighborhood customs chronicle experiences that are in many ways distinct to Philadelphians but also indicative of dramatic social, political, and economic shifts in the United States over forty years. Using photojournalism as the dominant style of documentary photography—and consciousness making—the book also features three prototypical family albums. These collections of snapshots taken by local residents to record weddings, holidays, and other family events not only depict how people saw themselves at various times but reveal the kinds of memories they wanted to keep. While major national events create the context for this social history, the book focuses on the daily lives of Philadelphians: as they cope with the Depression, participate in New Deal programs, buy automobiles and television sets, grow Victory Gardens, hold air raid drills, visit the Freedom Train, move to the suburbs, cling to old neighborhoods, and maintain tradition amid flux.Philadelphia Stories celebrates the recent past in the words and images of those who experienced it. It is a family album for all who know and love the city. Author note: Fredric M. Miller is Curator of the Urban Archives Center, Paley Library, Temple University.Morris J. Vogel is Professor of History, Temple University.Allen F. Davis is Professor of History, Temple University.

A forgotten, and often bizarre, history of Philadelphia is unearthed in these quirky vignettes.

For the average tourist, the history of Philadelphia can be like a leisurely carriage ride through Old City. The Liberty Bell. Independence Hall. Benjamin Franklin. The grooves in the cobblestone are so familiar, one barely notices the ride. Yet there are other paths to travel, and the ride can be bumpy. Beyond the famed founders, other Americans walked the streets of Philadelphia whose lives were, in their own ways, just as emblematic of the promises and perils of the new nation. Philadelphia Stories chronicles twelve of these lives to explore the city's people and places from the colonial era to the years before the Civil War. This collective portrait includes men and women, Black and white Americans, immigrants and native born. If mostly forgotten today, banker Stephen Girard was one of the wealthiest men ever to have lived, and his material legacy can be seen by visiting sites such as Girard College. In a different register, but equally impressive, were the accomplishments of Sarah Thorn Tyndale. In a few short years as a widow she made enough money on her porcelain business to retire to a life as a reformer. Others faced frustration. Take, for example, Grace Growden Galloway. Born to an important family, she saw her home invaded and her property confiscated by patriot forces. Or consider the life of Francis Johnson, a Black bandleader and composer who often performed at the Musical Fund Hall, which still stands today. And yet he was barred from joining its Society. Philadelphia Stories examines their rich lives, as well as those of others who shaped the city's past. Many of the places inhabited by these people survive to this day. In the pages of this book and on the streets of the city, one can visit both the people and places of Philadelphia's rich history.

In Philadelphia Stories, Samuel Otter finds literary value, historical significance, and political urgency in a sequence of texts written in and about Philadelphia between the Constitution and the Civil War. Historians such as Gary B. Nash and Julie Winch have chronicled the distinctive social and political space of early national Philadelphia. Yet while individual writers such as Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and George Lippard have been linked to Philadelphia, no sustained attempt has been made to understand these figures, and many others, as writing in a tradition tied to the city's history. The site of William Penn's "Holy Experiment" in religious toleration and representative government and of national Declaration and Constitution, near the border between slavery and freedom, Philadelphia was home to one of the largest and most influential "free" African American communities in the United States. The city was seen by residents and observers as the laboratory for a social experiment with international consequences. Philadelphia would be the stage on which racial character would be tested and a possible future for the United States after slavery would be played out. It would be the arena in which various residents would or would not demonstrate their capacities to participate in the nation's civic and political life. Otter argues that the Philadelphia "experiment" (the term used in the nineteenth-century) produced a largely unacknowledged literary tradition of peculiar forms and intensities, in which verbal performance and social behavior assumed the weight of race and nation.

Philadelphia Stories chronicles the rich lives of twelve of its citizens—men and women, Black and white Americans, immigrants and native born—to explore the city's people and places from the colonial era to the years before the Civil War.

These stories and essays, for the most part, take place in the city of Philadelphia. Taken together, they paint the portrait of a young scholar trying to find his way in the big city. From the halls of academe through his transition into the "real world," the stories chart his progress, his love life, his triumphs and his failures as he tries to find within himself who he is and where he belongs on this planet. Just because most of the characters are still in their twenties doesn't mean the stories should be labeled coming-of-age stories. Most of the stories have no moral, and there are more questions than answers to be garnered from most of them. Finally, not all the stories are uplifting, but at least they are honest and may offer some insight into this perplexing world of which we are all a part.

A collection of the best short fiction, poetry, and essays published by Philadelphia Stories between 2004 and 2014. This volume, published in celebration of Philadelphia Stories' tenth anniversary, includes work by Philadelphia-area writers as well as winners of the magazine's national contests - the Marguerite McGlinn Prize for Fiction and the Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry.