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  • From the Editor
  • C. Dallett Hemphill

This issue begins with a delightfully tongue-in-cheek piece from Billy G. Smith and Michelle Maskiell. It was the keynote offering of the November 2013 McNeil Center Conference entitled “On the Anvil of Labor History in the Revolutionary Era: Billy G. Smith and Fellow Artisans.” This scholarly gathering celebrated the career, thus far, of Billy G. Smith, former Distinguished Professor of Letters and Science at Montana State University, one of the McNeil Center’s earliest fellows, “dazzling urbanite in a rustic setting,” and self-described “Writer of the Purple Sage.” Smith’s work has inspired new approaches to multiple fields: urban history and the “lower sort” and the politically engaged study of class relations, slavery, demography, print, materialism, quantitative history, and maritime history, among others; and many of those interests are reflected in the article presented here. While fun and a bit fantastical in places, the article offers the best of the old and the new in its combination of social and labor history questions with sophisticated GIS methodology. We are glad that although Smith may have fled yellow-feverish Philadelphia for Montana, his fascination with the area draws him back. This article also inaugurates what will probably be a more frequent occurrence in the future. The maps referred to in the piece are not presented in the printed essay, but are all available in color on the EAS website at http://eas.pennpress.org. (They are also accessible on Smith’s own website at www.mappinghistoricphiladelphia.org/billy-priest-s-world.html.) We welcome any suggestions about future uses of the EAS website. The six articles following Smith and Maskiell’s piece offer an array of fascinating new work by up-and-coming scholars. Several of these pieces, like Smith and Maskiell’s, focus on Philadelphia. [End Page 511]

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