In this, the definitive comprehensive history of Philadelphia, the reader will discover a rich and colorful portrait of one of America's most vital, interesting, and illustrious cities.

"An alternative, history-focused guidebook to a selection of Philadelphia's heroes and notable places"--

"Historic Houses of Philadelphia" brings the region's most impressive museum homes to life with maps, touring information, and historical notes on 50 distinctive homes. 160 photos, 150 in color.

A detailed study of early historical preservation efforts between the 1780s and the 1850s In Historic Real Estate, Whitney Martinko shows how Americans in the fledgling United States pointed to evidence of the past in the world around them and debated whether, and how, to preserve historic structures as permanent features of the new nation's landscape. From Indigenous mounds in the Ohio Valley to Independence Hall in Philadelphia; from Benjamin Franklin's childhood home in Boston to St. Philip's Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina; from Dutch colonial manors of the Hudson Valley to Henry Clay's Kentucky estate, early advocates of preservation strove not only to place boundaries on competitive real estate markets but also to determine what should not be for sale, how consumers should behave, and how certain types of labor should be valued. Before historic preservation existed as we know it today, many Americans articulated eclectic and sometimes contradictory definitions of architectural preservation to work out practical strategies for defining the relationship between public good and private profit. In arguing for the preservation of houses of worship and Indigenous earthworks, for example, some invoked the "public interest" of their stewards to strengthen corporate control of these collective spaces. Meanwhile, businessmen and political partisans adopted preservation of commercial sites to create opportunities for, and limits on, individual profit in a growing marketplace of goods. And owners of old houses and ancestral estates developed methods of preservation to reconcile competing demands for the seclusion of, and access to, American homes to shape the ways that capitalism affected family economies. In these ways, individuals harnessed preservation to garner political, economic, and social profit from the performance of public service. Ultimately, Martinko argues, by portraying the problems of the real estate market as social rather than economic, advocates of preservation affirmed a capitalist system of land development by promising to make it moral.

"Stained Glass in Catholic Philadelphia tells the remarkable story of the thousands of stained-glass windows - made in America, England, France, and Germany - in the more than 400 churches, chapels, and institutions of the five-county Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Since 1997 more than 450 sites have been visited to document the archdiocese's windows by photographing them. This process resulted in the creation of a photo archive of over 50,000 images. Using this archive as a foundation, a team of scholars - from a variety of institutions and with specialties in medieval studies, architectural and social history, Christian iconography, decorative and liturgical arts, the craft, creative reuse, and historic preservation of stained glass - was assembled to study these windows. The result is this profusely illustrated book of original research that makes accessible a significant and highly visible, but neglected, aspect of our ecclesial, national, and regional cultural heritage."--BOOK JACKET. Book jacket.

This updated, comprehensive guide to Philadelphia's architecture will appeal to visitors, residents, and architecture enthusiasts.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1876.