First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (review)

Nash is the preeminent historian of early Philadelphia; his books on various aspects of its politics and society, most prominently on the origins of radical urban politics during the Revolutionary era, have defined much of what we understand about the City of Brotherly Love. In this imaginative volume, Nash takes on the formation of Philadelphia's historical identity, focusing primarily on the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries. His central theme, that the shaping of historical memory was highly contentious, will surprise few who have followed the recent fracas about public commemorations of the past; one of the volume's achievements is to illustrate the long tradition of politicizing history.

First City illuminates many disparate efforts to enshrine versions of Philadelphia's—and America's—past. At times, the cacophony of voices and the multiplicity of stories overwhelm coherence in an ironic reflection of the book's theme. Nash is at his best when he focuses on elite efforts to assert a vision of the city's past rooted in the "sacred values" of the Quaker founders, and the generations of leaders that produced the Revolutionary and Constitutional eras (313). Records of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the Library Company of Philadelphia aid him in reconstructing the role of such eminent institutions in celebrating a largely white, upper-class version of Philadelphia's history at the expense of a more racially, ethnically, and politically diverse depiction of the past. Families sanitized their collections of letters and papers, and pressured authors to cast them in a flattering light. Organizations collected as their patrons directed, for the most part privileging the privileged and ignoring the rest. A homogenizing narrative of Philadelphia's history, and early American history more generally, took hold. Some characters and groups who did not fit this narrative either were ignored entirely or their historical contributions largely elided. Despite these efforts, people on the margins of this narrative managed to assert their own historical visions, albeit with mixed success.

The legacy of the American Revolution, for example, was contested from the moment of the war's conclusion; Philadelphia's elites, Nash suggests, were interested in containing the more radical elements of the revolutionary impulse. For example, despite the fact that the artist Charles Wilson Peale had shared the radical political agenda of his friend Thomas Paine—author of Common Sense (Philadelphia, 1776)—the portrait gallery that he opened in 1782 reflected "a hierarchy of races, from primitive to civilized" and his pantheon of Revolutionary heroes surrounded Paine's portrait with a group that reflected a more conservative view of the war and its outcome (138). Paine's reputation, and by extension the character of the Revolution itself, would be continually disputed. In the mid-nineteenth century, George Lippard, the founder of the socialist Brotherhood of the Union, launched a movement to reclaim the Revolution from "the thing which generally passes for History" (217). Lippard reasserted the importance of common men, and of radicals like Paine. Although Paine had been quickly dismissed by what Nash terms the "polite history" of the Revolution, especially because ofhis attacks on Christianity in The Age of Reason (New York, 1794), hisbrand of expansive democracy appealed to Lippard's constituency. Frank Etting, the man directed to restore Independence Hall for the Grand Centennial of 876, banished Peale's portrait of Paine from the building, calling its subject "an obscure political agitator" (280). Not until the 1930s when Richard Gimbel, a grandson of one of Philadelphia's premier retailing families, took an active interest in Paine and incollecting his work, was any Paine material of substance housed at themajor collecting institutions or his image displayed in any place of prominence.

In the book's final chapter, "Restoring Memory," Nash states, "Much of memory-making depends on the materials collected and preserved by museums, libraries, historical societies, and...