Pha 2019 Conference Poster Session

The Pennsylvania Historical Association sponsors a poster session at its annual meeting for undergraduate and graduate students to present their research as emerging scholars in the field of Pennsylvania and mid-Atlantic history. At the Fall 2019 meeting held October 17–19 in Indiana, PA, prizes were given for undergraduate students for first, second, and third place. The winning posters are reproduced on the following pages, along with their abstracts. A list of all entries follows.

Special thanks to Jeanine Mazak-Kahne of Indiana University of PA for organizing the poster session.

First Place: Adriana Vagelli, Penn State Abington; Kevin Cannon, faculty advisor. Poster: Who Was Thomas Weir? A Socio-Anthropological Analysis of 18th-Century Remains Excavated at the Site of the First Baptist Church Cemetery of Philadelphia

abstract: The Arch St. Bones Project is a salvage archeology project that began in 2016 and is run by the College of New Jersey, the Mütter Museum, and Rutgers University (Camden). Hundreds of human remains were discovered at a construction site in the Old City section of Philadelphia, the original site belonging to First Baptist Church of Philadelphia Cemetery (1707–1860). Only a handful of the unearthed coffins displayed a preserved metal plate carrying the name of the deceased, as well as the date and age at death. This work focused on one of these individuals, Thomas Weir. It was established, with a 97.7% certainty, that this individual was a male, 1.73m tall, with an age estimation of 23–39 years old at death. Weir was buried in a coffin of hexagonal style that displayed decorative hardware such as a metal inscription plate and handles. Weir's skeletal remains showed notable osteo-pathology, including laminal spurs on all lower thoracic vertebrae, presence of Schmorl's nodes on the superior and inferior bodies of select lumbar and thoracic vertebrae, a focal periosteal reaction on the right tibia, and hypoplasia of the enamel in the incisors of the left and right mandible. Extensive analysis of available historical data of eighteenth-century Philadelphia showed that possibly eight individuals named Thomas Weir/Wier were found to have lived, at least for a period of time, in Philadelphia or in its surrounding areas, during a time consistent with the estimated burial date. The results of this work suggest that the studied skeletal remains belong to a Thomas Weir of white race, a middle social class, who died in his twenties after the 1750s but before the 1830s, and who could have fallen victim to the yellow fever epidemic of Philadelphia in 1793.

Figure 1.

First-place poster: Who was Thomas Weir? A Socio-Anthropological Analysis of 18^th Century Remains Excavated at the site of the First Baptist Church Cemetery of Philadelphia.

Second Place: Nikol Damato, Slippery Rock University; William Bergman, faculty advisor. Poster: Suburbs and Scholarship: Women in Higher Education in Bellevue, PA, 1904–1914 [End Page 404]

abstract: In 1904 the Pittsburgh suburb of Bellevue, Pennsylvania, did not have any women listed as students in its directory, the Red Book. By 1914, however, the directory listed 45 women out of the total 107 students. This study examines why the Red Book telephone directories of Bellevue exhibit this increased number of female postsecondary students between 1904 and 1914. I used primary source material including the Red Book directories to characterize the women who attended college, Bellevue maps to identify where the students lived, and census records and newspaper articles to observe trends in women's access to education. I argue the Red Book included more female students in 1914 compared to 1904 because the streetcar suburbanization movement led to more middle-class families living in suburbs who could afford to send their daughters to school; women gained increased educational opportunities through all-female educational establishments like seminaries and literary clubs; and the women's suffrage movement generated new public interest in women and education, encouraging publishers of directories like the Red Book to include female students.

During the early twentieth century, technological advancements and rising middle-class incomes led many families to move from cities like...