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Carolyn T. Adams et. al, "Greater Philadelphia: A New History for the Twenty-First Century" (Penn Press, 2025)
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A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the New Books Network. I'm Omari Averitt Phillips, the host of the channel. Today we'll be talking to Dr. Charlene Myers, one of the editors of the new book set Greater A New history for the 21st century. Dr. Charlene Myers, welcome to the show.
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C
Great to be here.
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B
I wonder, Dr. Myers, if you could just begin by just telling us a little bit about yourself. Sure.
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C
And thanks so much for having me on today. I am based in Philadelphia. I'm a professor emerita of history from Rutgers University. I taught at the campus in Camden, and before that I taught at Villanova University. I'm a historian and I write mostly on matters related to place, identity, and memory. So that definitely figures into these books as well as the others I've published, one of which was sort of a cultural biography of Independ, which is going to be reissued next year for the 2026 anniversary. Independence Hall, An American Memory, and another book that's called Capitals of the the Race to Host the United nations, which is about how cities and towns across the United States sought to become the capital of the world as they saw it at the end of World War II. So all of that has sort of laid the groundwork for my work on these volumes. Also, prior to Being a historian, I was a worked as an editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer and for other papers in the Midwest which are sadly no longer newspapers as we knew them. One of them was the Fort Wayne News Sentinel, which actually won a Pulitzer Prize in 1982 and unfortunately is no longer a current enterprise. So that's the trajectory of publishing in our time. And I think these books on Philadelphia also speak to the trajectory of publishing and how we're dealing with digital and print publications in today's world.
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B
Absolutely. I can definitely see the connections there. So what brought you specifically to this project?
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C
Yes, so these books, which are a set of three that are collectively titled Greater Philadelphia A New history for the 21st century, are an outcome of a long term project in the Philadelphia area to create an encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. For the last 15 years or so, we have been building digitally, one topic at a time, new knowledge about Philadelphia and the surrounding region. And these books are curated from and expanded from that work. So we come to this with the help of great civic energy. We have engaged with many organizations around the region to get that encyclopedia project off the ground. And we have hundreds of scholars, editors, writers who have contributed to these volumes. So we took a look at this juncture as we're heading into the 2026 anniversary of our country to see, well, what does this add up to? And we have created these three thematic volumes which we think reflect a lot of what we've learned and where we think we are in terms of understanding of our region. There's certainly much more that can and will be done, but this is a legacy project. We're summing up a lot of great scholarship and hopefully opening the door to more that will go forward. So we have three books in this set. The first one was the first conceived and that's the Greater Philadelphia region. So in the three books we look at region, nation and world, the region book is, is so foundational and so important for describing how a region developed here around Philadelphia, even before Philadelphia. So for your readers who are not familiar with Philadelphia on the ground, we have a region that extends through parts of three states. So we're right on the Delaware River. We're surrounded by Southeastern Pennsylvania and South Jersey and also connected in important ways to Northern Delaware. So when we say Greater Philadelphia, that's what we mean. That's hundreds of communities. And so part of the challenge is wrestling with how are all of these communities functioning as a region and historically, how has that developed over time? So this is the book where readers are going to find the development geograph from the natural environment up through all these many municipalities, counties, and so forth, as well as the various sections of Philadelphia. And I think importantly, how all of this is connected, whether that's through transportation, through governance, through common characteristics. That's what readers will find in the Greater Philadelphia region Book. I had great fun for this book in claiming for myself as the leader of the project, a set of essays about early road travel in the Philadelphia region. So one summer I actually made it my business to trace the Great Wagon Road, which led out of Philadelphia in the colonial era west and down through the back country of Virginia. And it's a long road. I was imagining, what would it have taken in the colonial era to get down that road? Of course, what it took were Conestoga wagons, which were made in Conestoga, Pennsylvania. And it answered a question for me that I had always wondered about. And I am not a specialist in colonial history by any means, or revolution history, but I had always wondered why, during the American Revolution, when Quakers were exiled from Philadelphia, they sent them to Winchester, Virginia. Why. Why that spot? And it turns out it's right on the Great Wagon Road. So there was a Quaker community there, and there was a reason to go down there. So that was great fun for me to do. And all of the essays in this book are just really rich in describing the communities as they formed. We had a challenge in this project not only of bridging that whole region, but also tracing histories that begin with Native American settlement to the present day. So that is a long stretch of time, and most scholars are more specialized in their focus than that. And so we really challenged ourselves and our colleagues to reach across that history. And looking at the books as they've turned out, I think in the Greater Philadelphia Region Volume, Volume 1, one of the most, I think, impressive things to me is a chapter that most people might look at and think, oh, I'm not interested in this, but it's so important and so amazing. It's called Regional Governance and Stewardship. The amazing thing is that it runs from treaty negotiations between Native Americans and Europeans up through things like septa, which is our public transit agency, and the Philadelphia Regional Port Authority. So to get that span of material, I think, is just really amazing. So in each of our volumes, starting with this first one that I'm talking about, what we've done is shape thematic chapters. And what is added into these books is for each of those chapters, new essays that introduce and sum up the contents, as well as a section at the end of each Chapter called Explore More, which is so much fun because it tells you, well, now what can you read? And more importantly, where can you go? You know, we're a region very rich in historic sites and archives and museums to learn more about these topics. Also, each volume starts with one or two or three very expansive interpretive new essays. So while we started with an encyclopedia project, which I think of as a digital first project, what we end up with here with these books is a move from a research tool where you might look up a specific fact, right? You're online, you're watching tv, someone is challenging you whether something's right or wrong, and you type in your search terms and poof, Right, you get a specific fact, but it doesn't give you the narrative, right? It doesn't give you the interpretation. And so the vital importance of the volumes, I think, is to create that reading experience, to give you something you can hold in your hands where you have some guidance as to how all of this hangs together that might be different from the path you follow when you click, click, click through a digital encyclopedia. So that's just the first of three. So the first book was conceived by my colleagues Howard Gillette and Carolyn Adams, who are very highly regarded urban studies scholars. And so that kind of got me thinking about, well, what else have we accomplished in that digital first project? What other stories can we tell? So knowing that we had the region really well covered, we looked to see what about the nation and what about the world. So the second volume is Greater Philadelphia and the Nation, and I'm proud to have co edited that with my colleague Jean Sutterlin, who's one of our leading experts in colonial and revolution history and originated many of the essays in that volume and cultivated the authors to write them. So I think a lot of people might have a conception of Greater Philadelphia and the Nation. They may know this is where the Declaration of Independence was passed or the Constitution was drafted. They may be planning a vacation to come see us in 2026 on the 250th anniversary of the Nation. So those sorts of topics form the beginning of that volume, but only the beginning, because we know those events are only the beginning of our nation. And so the second volume moves somewhat chronologically to trace how the nation grows and changes and struggles with a Philadelphia focus. But there are so many things that are of importance to the nation that happened in Philadelphia that I think this has very broad interest and appeal of whether people are coming to Philadelphia or are particularly interested in Philadelphia. They will find the topics here that they're interested in in American history from the American Revolution forward. And part of what I love about this book is its trajectory through the 19th and 20th centuries, where we see Americans really struggle right over what this nation is going to be, who's included, who's not included. How that's negotiated and fought about over our nation's history is, I think, really important story for us to see and to understand. I'm really impressed in this book with a chapter that's called the Capital of Black America, because Philadelphia was arguably the capital of black America in the 19th century, especially as the free black community formed and grew around Mother Bethel AME Church and other African churches that were founded here. We're actually doing a teacher's workshop right now on this theme and involving Philadelphia school teachers in creating new curriculum that will amplify on these essays. And I also think that chapter has one of my favorite essays in the volume, which is about Mother Bethel AME and how it's a church, but it is also the foundation of community. And that essay by Ricardo Howell really traces that out across time. So I think that's a wonderful addition to the book. So we have all of this contesting and expanding of the nation through that book. And then it leads into some final chapters about how Philadelphia is perceived and connected across the nation. So by connected, I mean through things like media, the postal service. I mean, it's Philadelphia. You have to have Benjamin Franklin, right? He comes up a lot in these books. But the Postal Service is certainly one of his contributions to Philadelphia and the nation. Things like book publishing, banking, how we're connected by telephones and telegraphs, radio, television, all of that. Winding up with a chapter of Philadelphia in American popular culture. So our listeners can maybe think about where have they seen a movie or a television show that had Philadelphia either as the real or the supposed setting of the drama? And in that section, part of what we learn is that Philadelphia has often stood in, as a character in popular culture, of a character that's like a gritty urban place or a place where there's a lot of class consciousness and class differentiation from the Philadelphia Story up through Rocky and Beyond. Because I have to remind myself, Rocky is 50 years old now, too, so that's been a while. But still, I think that reputation kind of lingers. And so that chapter gives us those things right up to It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which, of course, is still on the air. So we have that. And in that section, we also have some coverage of. Of sports, because it's Philadelphia and of Music, because it's Philadelphia. And I had fun for that section. I wrote a little essay on the expression I'd rather be in Philadelphia. And I sort of love tracing those kinds of expressions as they develop over time. That one originating with WC Fields. And it reflects kind of a current in humor related to Philadelphia that, you know, it's kind of. It's funny, but it's kind of undercutting. Like it's funny, but it's not as bad as you think it is, which is a vein in American humor that goes back into the 19th century. So that was great, great fun to do. So that's Greater Philadelphia in the Nation. As you can see, it cuts several different ways. And so it's a really provocative and wide ranging volume, but arranged in ways that give you tight chapters to kind of sink your teeth into these things. And even though we're curating from an encyclopedia, we're not attempting to be encyclopedic. So when you read a chapter in these books about Philadelphia and American popular culture, you're going to get representative topics and hopefully that inspires you to get to know more. So that's our second book, Greater Philadelphia and the Nation. And then having done the Nation, we look around all these topics we created and, well, the next natural step is Greater Philadelphia in the world. And we were very happy that our colleague Andrew Heath joined us to edit that book. Andrew actually teaches in the UK, but he did his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote a great book about the consolidation of philosop Philadelphia city and county, which took place here in 1854, and has gone on to do additional work on Atlantic World history. So he's perfect. And this book, very creatively, I think, opens up with three big juicy essays. The Atlantic World, the Americas and the Pacific World. So wherever your listeners are listening from, they will find their connection in this book to Philadelphia in many ways, in those broad sorts of introductions. But also this is the book where we get into immigration and the cultures that resulted from immigration into this region and world religions. So when I talk to people about this book, I say, you know how diverse our region is. This is the book that explains how we got this way. And so I think that's just a really, really important thing for us to have in times. And then this book has chapters too, that take sort of different cuts at global connection. So we have a section about the environment, we have a section about epidemics and public health. That chapter runs from the yellow fever epidemics. The big one here was in 1793, up through coronaviruses. And, you know, to read through that narrative and see what we've learned and how those events have unfolded, I think is really, really instructive and important in our times as well as for history. And then there's a chapter that's about networks of knowledge, service, and activism. So this started out as sort of the list of other topics we wanted to get into the book. But then we started to realize, well, this really is showing us all these ways that ideas travel and the importance of individual and organizational initiative that I think is just really wonderful. So this one spans scientific societies to Sullivan principles. I got to write a little essay about the United nations world capital. I mentioned I'd written a book on that. And then the Greater Philadelphia in the World book wraps up by taking us into commerce, industry, and labor. One of Philadelphia's nicknames, and I think we probably have more than any other city someone can challenge me on that maybe is Workshop of the World, which is a name that's claimed by other places as well. So we get our industry and labor history, as well as A World at War, a chapter that moves chronologically through global conflicts. So we have these three books. They're similar in format and. And I should add, too, that they are really beautiful books, not because of anything I did, but our publisher, the University of Pennsylvania Press, has arranged for these books to be beautifully designed and fully in color illustrated, which is unusual in academic publishing these days. We have, I think, we reflect the riches of the archives of our region, and we're really proud to have archival partners that have assisted us in finding really terrific illustrations, historical maps, and in the first volume especially, there are originally commissioned maps to illustrate the growth of our region. So overall, what we hope is that we have curated and enhanced from that digital project, the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, these books that can stand as a legacy of our project that sort of put a pin in history as we understand it for our region at this time, and that open up the door for people then to go on their own path to exploration and for the next generation of scholars to continue to pursue new questions about Greater Philadelphia.
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B
And I can attest that the books are absolutely gorgeous, as you mentioned there. And so you mentioned the anniversary coming up. What does this reassessment of sort of the history of the Greater Philadelphia region afford us when we are sort of thinking about this anniversary coming up?
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C
Right. So it is sort of a happy coincidence that we became ready to publish these books in time to help mark the anniversary in 2026. But we do call it a new history for the 21st century. And what's new about it, in terms of Philadelphia studies, if you will, is to take a big look at Philadelphia not just as a city, but as a metropolitan region, which is something that has not been done on this scale before. Also, we have the benefit of the last generation or two of scholarship, which has added such depth and diversity to our understanding of Philadelphia's history that we're proud to have, throughout these books, paid attention to the great wealth of people and cultures in this region. So I hope that what we're presenting for 2026 is a fully elaborated look at our region, not comprehensive in every detail, but comprehensive in the sense of scope of geography and scope of people and places and organizations that have made this region what it is.
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B
Absolutely. And you've spoken a little bit about sort of the diverse sort of contributors that you have to this work. What was that process like? Sort of reaching out to these contributors and sort of editing the pieces and selecting which ones would go where.
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C
Yeah, so this is sort of where my background as a journalist and as a historian came into play, because we had to invent how to manage a project with enormous numbers of potential topics and many contributors and so forth. So we reached out in several ways. First of all, this project does have a civic engagement foundation. So in the beginnings, largely through the initiatives of my colleague Howard Gillette, we had a civic planning workshop where we tried to invite diverse groups of people and organizations to come together to think about, what do we know? What do we need to know? What do we want to know? What do we want to do? And that informed the shape of the project and also helped us to identify potential editors and authors. And then we routinely, periodically, over 15 years, reached out to the network of universities and public history professionals to invite people to write the topics that had been identified. Right. And sometimes to suggest them. I mean, sometimes people would suggest a topic that, oh, well, yes, of course, we need that topic. I remember one scholar, her name is Monica Henry, wrote to us and said, well, I see you have French Revolution, Haitian Revolution, American Revolution. What about the Spanish Revolution? Of course, we need the Spanish Revolutions. So we would add things there. So in all cases, what we were looking for were people who had substantial, demonstrated deep knowledge in their topics or the research and writing skills to be able to acquire that quickly. And encyclopedia writing is hard. It is not what scholars usually do, and it's not what anyone really ever does in their everyday life. Encyclopedia essays, at least in our project are both synthesis, they're summaries, but they're also, to a certain degree, analytical because we always, all of our essays start out with an intro that expresses the definition and significance of a topic, right? So you can't just know the facts, you have to know why they're important. And you have to be able to do that in a very condensed package. And so you asked about the editing process. The, the editing process was sometimes extensive to reach a stage at which the essays were not only excellent, but consistent with the other work. So I hope if you read these books, there's a great consistency among all these hundreds of people. And it's amazing that we did that also. Also, everything in these books was peer reviewed. So each essay went through multiple levels of not only editing and revision, but also peer review and revision. So experts have gone through all of this, and before publication, both online and in the books, everything has been fact checked. So these books, among other things, represent a whole lot of experiential education for college students, particularly who were working with me at Rutgers, but others as well, who got to learn a lot of history by fact checking and who got to do the research for a lot of the illustrations and the caption writing and so forth. So we're really proud of their efforts. And without their skill, especially in administration, I don't know how we would have put these books together from the digital project project either, because we had great student editorial assistants who made sure we had all the manuscripts put together correctly, who made sure all the contracts were in line, who made sure that all the correspondence is going back and forth with these hundreds of authors. So hats off to them for making it possible for the rest of us to produce these books. And they're acknowledged in the. The preface to the books as well. So long process is my short answer to your question.
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B
Wonderful. Well, what sort of audience did you imagine for this work?
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C
So we have had several audiences in mind all along. One of the audiences I think about is the engaged information seeker, you know, the sorts of persons who at one time they would have been the people to. To head off to their branch library, you know, whenever they wanted to know something. And now they're probably the people watching television with their iPads in their laps, right? Always looking things up. So engaged information seekers. We wanted to reach students and teachers and their teachers at any level. And I'm really, really glad that our publisher for these books obtained funding from the Sesquicentennial Funder Collaborative in Philadelphia so that these books are being placed in schools as well as branch libraries around the city. So those books are going out at no cost to the schools or the libraries. And as I mentioned, we're in the process of doing teacher workshops. We have four topics of those running with the Teachers Institute at Penn as so teachers and students, policymakers. We hope that people who are making policy in Greater Philadelphia or other metropolitan regions will find it useful to look at these books and see what has gone before. And finally, the tourism industry. We want to have good information available as we greet visitors to our city. And I should say, my current vocation is to be a freelance tour guide in Philadelphia. And our local association of Philadelphia tour guides has been a great partner in this project all along. And I think of them, too, when we think of these books, it's similar to teachers. If you reach one teacher, you reach hundreds of kids. You reach one tour guide or one docent in a museum, and you have reached hundreds of visitors. So those are particular audiences. But we also think at large about this project as a civic project that for the citizens of Philadelphia, for the people who live here in this region, who may not often think beyond their own horizons, just the necessities of everyday life, that's enough to take up your headspace right there. But these are books that allow you, with not too much effort, it makes it accessible for you to see how your life is connected. You know, you're in multiple streams of history, whether you think very much about it or not, that you connect in some way with the stream of cultural history, with the stream of geographic history, maybe with the stream of religious history or occupational histories, that you're part of a larger whole. And that has been really one of our objects, too, to make that possible for the people who live here and for people in other places. I think it's instructive to see how a city, any locality, creates an imprint that has all of these dimensions at the local, the national, the world. So I think while these are Philadelphia books, they're not just Philadelphia books, they're metropolitan books, and they are American history books.
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B
Absolutely. And, well, Dr. Myers, we've taken up so much of your time, and thank you for being so generous with your time. I'll just ask you one last question. What are you working on now?
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C
What am I working on now? Well, I'm working on being retired, for one thing. So, yes, I've retired from this project and from teaching, and I'm currently a historical consultant and a freelance tour guide in Philadelphia. And I have a couple of active projects that are surfacing and preserving 19th century history in Camden, New Jersey, and in Old city Philadelphia.
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B
That's absolutely wonderful. And congratulations to you on retirement. Thank you. And again, thank you so much for being on the show today. We really enjoyed having you. I hope people go out and sort of look at the this volume. These are wonderful and again, gorgeous books. Thank you again. Really enjoy it and take care.