The sexual culture of eighteenth-century Philadelphia was relatively open, particularly when compared with other North American colonial cities. This was due in part to its diverse, multi-national and multi-racial population and traditions, as well as to a steady stream of new ideas. During this period perceptions about gender, sexuality, and marriage were evolving, influenced by new scientific theories, Enlightenment thought, and republican ideology, disseminated by its changing population and the availability of printed sources. In addition, many laws changed as the colony became a state, and within the city new prisons and almshouses were built. Nevertheless, rape, as now, was seldom reported or prosecuted, and especially in the nineteenth century Black women and women considered ‘unrespectable’ were often blamed for enticing men. During the eighteenth century men and women easily moved in and out of relationships, sexual relationships outside marriage were frequently tolerated, and women had some sexual freedom. Prostitution was not confined to one section of the city; neither were the births of illegitimate children. Women could obtain abortifacients, and erotic literature was widely read. However, by the nineteenth century such behaviour was increasingly considered deviant, and Philadelphia was a much less tolerant place.

Eliza Cox Akin and Mary Graham Charles were the wives and partners to two of the most important American caricaturists of the nineteenth-century, James Akin and William Charles. Surviving engravings and historical ephemera reveal that these women contributed to their husbands’ engraving businesses and that Eliza participated in engraving prints. In order to establish an appreciation of the role women played in the early American printmaking world, this chapter examines the lives of Eliza Cox Akin and Mary Graham Charles and considers their position in producing, and within the market for, engravings in the United States during the late 1790s and early 1800s.

This chapter traces British American cities as distinctive political spaces that helped pioneer the concept of citizenship, a term that originally meant a city resident, and stood at the forefront of much of the political protest leading to the war for independence. However, from their inception, most American cities were subordinated to their provincial legislatures which were dominated by rural interests. Meanwhile the concept of citizenship came to be associated more with a set of actions rather than a place people lived. All the largest cities were occupied during the war, forcing residents to make difficult decisions and heightening the distrust leveled against them after the war. After the war, most urban residents remained minorities subordinated to the interests of mostly rural polities. Once the cradles of citizenship, most cities were not further empowered as polities by the American Revolution, but continued to be or were more sharply constrained by rural elites after the war concluded.

Chapter 2 looks at how and to whom targeted citizens’ attribute blame and responsibility for school closure actions. In so doing, it brings forth issues of race, and representation, demonstrating the ability of those affected by closure to assign blame based on who holds the most power over closure decisions. In particular, this chapter shows how targets of closure express decreased support for the school district, generally, and decreased support for political actors associated with the policy, specifically the mayor and/or the governor. Further, it reveals how citizens determine the role of race in shaping who to blame more or less for what they are experiencing.

This chapter, on literatures of labor and poverty, centers on Philadelphia and considers narratives of a group often sidelined in critical discourse: the “free” laboring poor, especially the mobile poor, both black and white. Illuminating the rich, complex interrelationship between oral and literary culture in this period, these narratives reveal a fascination with the voice of the poor that was evident throughout early national culture. The chapter first takes up a variety of poverty narratives, from enforced narratives delivered at the Philadelphia Almshouse to written begging letters to published beggar narratives and other autobiographical texts; it then explores how oral testimonials of the poor shaped the dialogic form of the early American novel.

This essay focuses on the first two Spanish-language texts published in the United States: Santiago Puglia’s 1794 El desengaño del hombre (Man Undeceived) and the anonymous Reflexiones sobre el Comercio de España con sus Colonias en America, en tiempo de Guerra (1799). Read together, these works illustrate how exchange – economic, linguistic, and cultural – informs the beginnings of US Hispanophone literature and reveal how the logic of exchange reflects the uneasy transitions from colony to republic, monarchy to democracy, and agrarianism to commerce. Ultimately, the Hispanophone literature of the period reveals an undecidability between such terms that is itself indicative of both the literature and politics of the early nineteenth-century Americas.

In “Post-Civil War Black Childhoods,” Nazera Sadiq Wright surveys some of the vast body of Black Reconstruction-era literature that features Black children as central characters, with special emphasis on Steward’s serialized Christian Recorder short story “The Gem of the Alley” and attention to work by Collins and Harper. Wright shows how repeated (and often accurate) representations of the little charitable institutions did to protect Black children contrasts with orphaned Black children’s dutiful and intentional displays of charity and good will toward those less fortunate. Wright asserts that, especially in frameworks centered on family reunification, Black child characters express the damage from class and racial divides as well as the healing grace of Black community activism in the post-Civil War era.

This chapter looks closely at how literary societies in New York and Philadelphia served as engines of the creation of a particular kind of Black modernity, as expressed in the speeches, essays, and poetry of the members of such societies.

Chapter 11 discusses the early vaccination in North America. Dr Benjamin Waterhouse pioneered the practice in Boston in August 1800, rebranded cowpox as kinepox and briefly enjoyed a monopoly of the practice. Aware of the hazards associated with smallpox inoculation, Americans welcomed the new prophylaxis. President Thomson Jefferson took up the lancet at Monticello and, largely in a private capacity, helped to entrench and extend the practice. Philadelphia emerged as a new hub of vaccination, seeding its establishment in the southern states and on the western frontier. Serviceable to individuals and communities, the new practice served to bind together the new nation, with slaves often among the first to be vaccinated and prophylaxis being offered, as opportunities arose, to Native Americans. The problem of maintaining a supply of good vaccine in sparsely populated districts and on the frontier appeared more urgent with the outbreak of war with Britain in 1812 and explains the Federal government’s unusual decision to fund a (short-lived) National Vaccine Agency in Baltimore.

Pennsylvania was one of the latest American regions to pursue sericulture, and offers the best illustration of how silken ambitions survived and were reshaped to fit new political and economic environments in the Revolutionary era. Pennsylvanian silk swung from being a dutiful imperial pursuit, albeit one with particular local characteristics, to being an objective very much in step with American independence. It constituted a unique kind of homespun that came to embody not only domestic elegance but also provided ammunition for broader debates over political economy and the future identity of American industrial development. Philadelphia, situated in the heart of the North American colonies, was the first home of the Continental Congress, the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, and the site of the federal capital for ten years between 1790 and 1800. Before all that, it was also the location of the mid-Atlantic’s first silk filature. The production owed much to the creation of a Silk Society by progressive gentlemen, but much of the labour was performed by women in households and communities in the city’s hinterlands.