The small light-brown button excavated in broiling August heat rests in the palm of Megan C. Kassabaum, Ph.D., associate professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and Weingarten Associate Curator for North America at the Penn Museum. Dug up from one of three small sites in the parking lot behind the Community Education Center
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On a sunny afternoon in late spring, 27 sixth graders from Mount Airy’s Henry H. Houston Elementary School skipped and hooted their way to SEPTA’s Carpenter Train Station, as if already savoring the adventure of planting trees there. “We identified flowers and pollinators along the way,” says Christine Bush, a STEM (science, technology, engineering and
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The late autumn wind began to bite during the 1838 Black Metropolis walking tour last year, but historian Michiko Quinones warmed the 10 participants with stories of riches, a riot and secret dealings in Philly’s antebellum Black community. “Some 20,000 Black people lived in Philadelphia in the late 1830s,” Quinones said. “The 1838 census showed
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The big library — the size of several classrooms — in the Cook-Wissahickon School in Roxborough stands as a monument to activism. Closed for several years in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the library now serves pre-kindergarteners through middle schoolers with story hours and a robust lending program that enrich the lives of students.
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At Spiral Q’s West Philadelphia headquarters, puppet artists cut out cardboard, shape it into bulldozers and paint it to prepare for a protest march against the 76ers’ plans for a Chinatown arena. “There’s something childlike about them,” says Jacque (who did not provide a last name), while taking a break from painting cardboard miniatures of
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I was a student at King [High School] when I heard about the Men [Who Care of Germantown (MWCOG)],” says Jewel Gadson, 19. “I was a hothead. Sometimes I didn’t go to class,” says Gadson, the third oldest of 15 siblings. Gadson, like his brothers and sisters, was in and out of foster care from
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Nicole Chandler has tended Overbrook’s Morris Park for so long that, when she talks, one imagines the scent of clean earth. “The City had written the park out of its 2005 budget,” says Chandler, 53, who lives across the street from the 64-acre site. “They were … going to let it naturalize, which means let
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The Philly Children’s Movement (PCM), which promotes child-centered activism and social-justice campaigns, including marches, demonstrations and workshops, has further heightened social consciousness through its Radical Little Library, a free neighborhood book exchange box at 601 West Carpenter Lane, outside of the Charles W. Henry School, near the Mount Airy Weavers Way Co-op. “We stock the
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In 1835, future circus magnate P. T. Barnum and an enslaved Black woman he bought for $1,000 bamboozled the public, according to the impresario’s 1855 autobiography and Mark Bramble’s 1980 musical “Barnum.” Barnum, living in New York, heard that the woman, Joice Heth, on exhibit in Philadelphia, claimed to be the 161-year-old former nursemaid of
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PART ONE Virginia, June 1837 1 Alsie Stone’s breasts leaked milk from the moment of her escape. Over hard miles, her milk painted stripes of terror down the front of her heavy tow-cloth blouse. The stitch in her side grew teeth. She tripped in the darkness, fell on her face, and jounced the baby in
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