We are very excited about our new website. This is the creation of Michelle Rajunov, a recent graduate of Penn's Digital Media Design (DMD) program, and Tamara Levy, a current DMD student. We still have a few features to add, but you get the idea.

Summer Update.

Now that classes are over, we can dedicate more of our energy to the Mapping Du Bois project. This summer, West Philadelphia Catholic High School students Haftom and Malik will be editing our documentary. Two Haverford College interns will help them wi... Read More

March 5th was an exciting day for the Mapping Du Bois project. We organized a lunchtime lecture and discussion with Haverford College historian Roger Lane. Professor Lane is author of many books, most notably The Roots of Violence and William Dorsey's Philadelphia and Ours. He spoke about the "First Golden Age of Philadelphia Black History," the late 19th century. He described it as a golden age because most blacks were employed, demonstrating strong academic capacity, and supporting a wide range of self-help organizations, despite the rampant economic discrimination. He described the 1950s... Read More

Thanks to some great folks at Stanford University, I participated in a video teleconference on Tuesday. Their Anthropology class read parts of The Philadephia Negro and did some GIS work with our Seventh Ward map layers. Then on Tuesday, I talked with them about the project and they asked questions. This was the first time students have looked closely at the data, and I was very excited about the questions they asked. Why are there 54 children living in one house on Lombard Street? We looked at the manuscript census data to confirm that there were that many children (and the census data re... Read More

Thank you to whomever suggested a blog (I can't remember now, but thanks to Tim for the encouragement this week). We've been working on this research project for more than a year now, but last week marked the beginning of summer which means a lot more people are available to work on this. Our main goal this summer is to finish collecting data from the 1900 U.S. Census for all 4,000 households within the 7th Ward that DuBois studied (in downtown Philadelphia, bounded by the Schuylkill River on west, 7th Street on east, Spruce Street to the north and South Street to the south). Yes, that's r... Read More

I hadn't made plans to celebrate Dr. Du Bois's 140th birthday, but the students at Masterman High School didn't want the important event to pass unnoticed. We celebrated with presentations to two African-American history classes about The Philadelphia Negro and Mapping Du Bois project followed by a pizza party. You might think that eating lunch at 10:15 would slow people down, but 12 pizzas and a full sheet-cake were gone within 30 mnutes. We talked about going school-wide with the celebration next year. The students started reading parts of The Philadelphia Negro the week after the party.<... Read More

Continuing with the theme of Black neighborhoods in Philadelphia, many unique places of business and residential neighborhoods for Blacks were formed all over the city. African Americans started to become more and more part of the city as they started to receive the same amenities and have some of the same luxuries as the white people living in the city. In these neighborhoods, there were theaters, restaurants, churches, and sports teams whose main audience was the African American living in the city.

Some of the most famous theaters for African Americans during the twentieth cent... Read More

I attended the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning Conference (ACSP) in Milwaukee two weeks ago where I presented research about Mapping Du Bois. It was encouraging that scholars were excited, not just about the teaching and community engagement but about the scholarship potential of this project. I gave a presentation about what the Mapping Du Bois project can teach us about the potential of GIS in planning history. Planning and urban historians focus on so many spatial processes, like segregation, gentrification, redlining, deindustrialization, etc. But the methods they use are... Read More

We are delighted to be partnering with the Pennsylvania Historical Society on their PhilaPlace neighborhood history project. The project aims to weave together resident stories, photographs, and other primary materials to tell the history of South Philadelphia and Northern Liberties. Joan Saverino, the project director, believes strongly in the value of collaboration, so we at the Mapping Du Bois project are excited to be involved, together with Avencia, Inc., the Department of Records, and the Preservation Alliance. Our role will focus on using maps to help people narrate their stories an... Read More

What I found interesting in viewing the occupations of all the White women that were married to physicians and lawyers along 19th ... Read More

A few issues that intrigued me in compiling the data (I reviewed the area from about 17th-20th ... Read More

A large aspect of the MDPN project is gathering descriptions of the housing in the 7th Ward so that it can be easily displayed on the final website. Amy and Cathy have decided to gather this data from a small part of the 7th Ward first, in order to see how we should go about it. The test area is between 7th and 8th, South and Addison.

To start gathering the housing data, Cathy recommended going to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, located at 1300 Locust. Tim and I went there today and looked at old fire insurance records. The records provide a description (and sometimes a phot... Read More

Honestly, we really have been too busy to blog. August involved all kinds of exciting developments:

1. Haftom and Malik have now interviewed 5 people for our documentary: Anthony Monteiro (Temple University, Du Bois scholar), V. Chapman-Smith (National Archives), Dana King (School District of Philadelphia), Jimmy Calnan (resident of the 7th Ward), and Carolyn Cannuscio (social epidemiologist at University of Pennsylvania). We have an interview with Michael Nutter, the presumed next mayor of Philadelphia, in October.

2. We have a first draft version of our game board, thank... Read More

Congratulations to Charlene Palmore-Lewis, a recent PennDesign grad in Historic Preservation, for realizing her dream of starting an African-American history tour company in Philadelphia. Several of us have already riden the "tutle bus" for the 3-hour tour around Philadelphia. The tour lasts 3 hours and leaves from the Visitor's Center at 6th and Market Streets Tues-Sat. at 9:00 and 1:00.

The tour features plenty of things that are familiar to the Du Bois team: talk of Du Bois and his study, a walk through Mother Bethel AME Church, discussion of Octavius Catto and Marion Anderson.... Read More

I found a few interesting occupations - a woman who was forelady in a mill, several actresses, etc. I also found many strippers, but I think they're stripping paint and chemicals and not anything that comtemporary strippers strip. And I discovered where all the famous Black caterers are - The 1800 block of Addison is just crawling with them! I'm interested in pursuing further the occupations and the occupational mismatch with education. I found that Blacks with professional occupations were the most likely to be unemployed whereas White professionals were the least likely. What I found inte... Read More

I have been thinking about supplementary ideas that could be added to the website to make it more interesting. Perhaps it would be neat to have a section devoted to the occupations of black Philadelphians around 1900. This might include two detailed things:

1) Description and illustration of what type of work a black laywer, doctor, teacher, shopkeeper, laborer, or servant might each expect to do and with whom they would work.

2) Description of the lifestyles that people employed in each of these occupations might be able to afford given their wages.

Perhaps it would... Read More

Another long segment of the film is a piece on the Philadelphia Stars, an all-black Baseball team playing in Philadelphia. In this segment, there were several interviews by former players recounting several memories of the players, the team and their schedule. They said that their field, at Belmont and Parkside Avenues in Fairmount Park, would host sold-out games and that they even won the Negro National League Pennant in 1934.

The film does not speak of too many racial issues in the city but there are two main stories that are featured in the film. One is with the election of Wi... Read More

Today I read the section of the book on the heatlh of black Philadelphians and I am definitely seeing his findings in the census material. Yesterday I came across a black woman who was 30 years old, widowed and had zero of here seven children still living. She was living with her parents and not working. Du Bois (and Anna a couple of posts down) talks about the different mortality rates between whites and blacks, and in the couple blocks of census data that I've gone through, I can really see the difference. I am starting to come across more black families, and it is shocking to see how man... Read More

I was listening to "Hambone, Hambone" on the cd, "The Long Road to Freedom: An Antholog of Black Music" that Tim found at the Music Library. It features kids chanting/singing a rhyme and hitting there thighs to create a rhythm. It's part of a "city sounds" section on the cd, based on familiar sounds in the 19th century city. Kids rapping, beating on plastic buckets with sticks, and wrapping on the table with their hand and fists today seems like the modern equivalent of the "Hambone" song. We should find a way to link rap and hip hop to our research on the DuBois era. Maybe we can design te... Read More

Over the last week or so I've found a lot of great stuff at the HSP. Yesterday I was looking through a scrapbook in the "Family Service of Philadelphia Records", which was basically a scrapbook about the College Settlement of Philadelphia and the College Settlement movement from 1894-1900 and found lots of great newspaper articles, flyers about events, and essays. One particular article that stuck out was an article titled "Enjoyed the Music" with the subtitle "an audience of whites and blacks, children and adults - good work accomplished in the summer by the settlement". There was no date ... Read More

In looking through Susan Wharton’s scrapbook of activities related to the College Settlement between 1894 and 1901, I came across a section devoted to a series of six lectures given at the College of Physicians shortly after the publication of The Philadelphia Negro. Wharton saved a small information pamphlet about the lecture series, and it is interesting to see that while it is acknowledged that the genesis of the series is The Philadelphia Negro, the actual title of the series is “The American Negro” and in the newspaper articles Wharton has saved, the book is not mentioned (nor is... Read More

Over the past few weeks, as I have explored many a digital history website, I have come to some conclusions - best practices if you will - that I think should inform the eventual design of the Philadelphia Negro site. These "best practices" concern two important balancing points that almost all of the sites I viewed struggle to work out (some with more success than others). First, digital history sites must be INTERACTIVE and encourage SELF-DISCOVERY, but they must also PROVIDE GUIDANCE. Particularly, with map-based projects, the best sites allow the user to play - to manipulate the maps as... Read More

Significant numbers of fire insurance records have been collected by the team for buildings in the Rossetti study area. These records document building conditions at the time the policies were purchased. In order to prepare these records for use in a 3D virtual model, we've created an Access database to capture a variety of different building details. These include: dimensions, # of stories, policy owner, policy date, building materials, #buildings on each property, building use, and other descriptive elements.

Most of the records collected to date have been entered into the databas... Read More

Currently I am working on creating some poems out of court case testimonies I found at the Philadelphia City Archives. I got the idea for this because a poet named Charles Reznikoff made poetry out of testimonies he found in volume 1 of the Reporter series, in two volumes: Testimony 1885-1890 Recitative, and Testimony Volume 2: 1885-1915. Although he was writing in the 1960’s and 1970’s, the time period of the court cases used for the poems was 1885-1915.

So anyway, early in the project, I was frustrated by the lack of direct quotes and narratives from people who lived in the Se... Read More

I was looking through the Starr Centre pamphlet at HSP, and I was struck by a statement Susan Wharton made in her essay about penny lunches for children. The penny lunch program was originally part of the Starr Centre, but it grew to be very large (in 1895-1896 21,000 lunches were sold), and it soon became independent, as some in the executive committee of the Starr Centre believed it took up a lot of time and energy but did not quite fit into the mission of the Centre (I find that confusing). Anyway, at the end of her essay she writes:

“Think of the free dinner given on Christma... Read More

In looking through a pamphlet about the Starr Centre at HSP, I found an essay about a Carpentry Club held from 1890-1895. The Starr Centre was a community service organization that began with Philadelphia’s first Progressive Working Colored Men’s Club. The Starr Centre mostly served the African American population and was located in the Seventh Ward. The Carpentry Club was for boys, and there was a small fee for each lesson, with the view of making the boys “self-respecting.” The lessons were open to black and white boys, but there were certain nights reserved only for African Ameri... Read More

For my first blog entry, I would like to talk about my findings in the Health Scrapbook for 1897. This scrapbook, found at the City Archives, has actual newspaper clippings from numerous local and national papers that deal with health and medical issues. The articles tend to focus on Philadelphia health related subjects; however, some of them are on national health concerns.

While looking through the 1897 scrapbook, I noticed many interesting stories. One of these issues was on the subject of street cleaning. It seems that the city hired private companies to clean the streets to ma... Read More

The lack of blog entries over the last two months should not be taken as a sign that all is quiet on the Du Bois front. Several of us have been hard at work on a number of things:

1. Anne Garcia, our public outreach coordinator, submitted our application yesterday to the Mural Arts Program for a mural of Du Bois at 6th and Rodman Streets. We had a successful community meeting two days before that, at Mother Bethel AME Church, with representatives from all four of the neighborhood associations in that area. They have all been supportive, as have been Mother Bethel, ODUNDE, the fire s... Read More

A freelance reporter who does work for NPR interviewed me two weeks ago. He came to talk about a report on the need for supermarkets in Philadelphia that I worked on several years ago. He looked me up before the interview and saw the reference to the Mapping Du Bois project. Of course, I couldn't help myself but talk about that as much as the supermarket study.

His piece ran on NPR's show "Day to Day" today. He framed the piece with the Du Bois map of the Old Seventh Ward. All and all, the piece was quite generous. I was really excited that he was able to work the Du Bois material i... Read More

I quote from a letter I received from the Mural Arts Program:

"Congratulations! Your mural proposal for "Mapping the Du Bois Philadelphia Negro" project has been approved by the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. During this application cycle, we were fortunate to receive over 50 applications from community leaders and organizations to paint murals in neighborhoods throughout the city. Among them, we found your application among the most compelling. We are anticipating your project to start anytime within the next fiscal year of July 1, 2007-June 30, 2008."

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May part of the census is the last 120 households and I also would use Ancestry.com for getting the census data and also re-checking information. I As I greet these people from the seventh ward in my mind, I cannot help but imagine how they looked, talked, what they liked and disliked. I wonder if I would have been friends with some of the girls my age or what my occupation would have been in Philadelphia. I also wonder how married couples met and how women deal with the loss of their children.

Among the households, there are several women who gave birth to more children than the nu... Read More

I made my first trip to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. What a nice place to conduct research. I looked at the annual reports of the College Settlement Association from the mid-18900s and early 1900s. It was the leaders of the Settlement Association who wanted a study of blacks living in the Old Seventh Ward, and Du Bois lived at the Settlement House for the first year he was in Philadelphia.

The Settlement records make a few brief references to Du Bois and his study, but they seem to have given it relatively little attention. Some of the material that I found particularly i... Read More

These were the most popular names for the last 120 households in the census.

Women: Mary Annie Elizabeth Margaret Catherine

Men: John William James Thomas Charles

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A few weeks ago, I saw the film documentary Strange Fruit, which was about Billy Holiday’s life and the history behind the song Strange Fruit. The song was about lynching and how the dead bodies swaying from the tree branch were like strange fruit... Read More

The Daily Pennsylvanian ran a second front-page article about our quest to have a mural of Du Bois painted on a prominent building on campus. I have heard from the University Architects office. They want to help us move the proposal ahead, which involves meeting with the on-campus design and art committees, most likely. I don't expect anything to happen in the short-term, but I appreciate the interest of the DP editors and staff.

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We celebrated Du Bois' 139th birthday on Friday, February 23rd at Du Bois College House on Penn's campus. It was a very festive event, featuring the gospel group, New Spirit of Penn, a birthday cake with Du Bois' photograph on it, and a life-size cut-out of Dr. Du Bois, himself. We didn't want HIM to miss the party.

On Tuesday, Anne Garcia, Brandon Gollotti and I visited Masterman High School to tell students in two African-American history classes about our Mapping Du Bois project. They seemed excited about our idea for a "Theirspace.com" site that would allow students to develop t... Read More