Based on the biographies of some three hundred people in each city, this book shows how such distinguished Boston families as the Adamses, Cabots, Lowells, and Peabodys have produced many generations of men and women who have made major contributions to the intellectual, educational, and political life of their state and nation. At the same time, comparable Philadelphia families such as the Biddles, Cadwaladers, Ingersolls, and Drexels have contributed far fewer leaders to their state and nation. From the days of Benjamin Franklin and Stephen Girard down to the present, what leadership there has been in Philadelphia has largely been provided by self-made men, often, like Franklin, born outside Pennsylvania.Baltzell traces the differences in class authority and leadership in these two cites to the contrasting values of the Puritan founders of the Bay Colony and the Quaker founders of the City of Brotherly Love. While Puritans placed great value on the calling or devotion to one's chosen vocation, Quakers have always placed more emphasis on being a good person than on being a good judge or statesman. Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia presents a provocative view of two contrasting upper classes and also reflects the author's larger concern with the conflicting values of hierarchy and egalitarianism in American history.

Includes articles and reviews covering all aspects of American history. Formerly the Mississippi Valley Historical Review,

Albion W. Tourgée (1838–1905) was a major force for social, legal, and literary transformation in the second half of the nineteenth century. Best known for his Reconstruction novels A Fool’s Errand (1879) and Bricks without Straw (1880), and for his key role in the civil rights case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), challenging Louisiana’s law segregating railroad cars, Tourgée published more than a dozen novels and a volume of short stories, as well as nonfiction works of history, law, and politics. This volume is the first collection focused on Tourgée’s literary work and intends to establish his reputation as one of the great writers of fiction about the Reconstruction era arguably the greatest for the wide historical and geographical sweep of his novels and his ability to work with multiple points of view. As a white novelist interested in the rights of African Americans, Tourgée was committed to developing not a single Black perspective but multiple Black perspectives, sometimes even in conflict. The challenge was to do justice to those perspectives in the larger context of the story he wanted to tell about a multiracial America. The seventeen essays in this volume are grouped around three large topics: race, citizenship, and nation. The volume also includes a Preface, Introduction, Afterword, Bibliography, and Chronology providing an overview of his career. This collection changes the way that we view Tourgée by highlighting his contributions as a writer and editor and as a supporter of African American writers. Exploring the full spectrum of his literary works and cultural engagements, Reimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion Tourgée reveals a new Tourgée for our moment of renewed interest in the literature and politics of Reconstruction.