At noon on May 10, 1876—after years of controversy, construction, and fuss—President Ulysses S. Grant and Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil entered Machinery Hall to open the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia. Since early morning, the day’s 186,000 attendees had been streaming through the gates. The president and the emperor stood in front of

thirteen acres of motionless machinery, all connected by pulleys, shafts, wheels and belts to the giant Corliss engine in the central transept. Several hundred invited guests, already waiting there, made room for the ceremonial party to climb upon the concrete base of the...

“Christmas and New Year’s eves and evenings were strongly recalled by the scenes on Chestnut street last night,” a reporter forThe Philadelphia Inquirerwrote the day after the 1880 presidential election.

In fact, it was just the same thing, only more so. The crowds were larger, the excitement was greater and the festive horn was in stronger force. All along Chestnut street, where the flying bulletin banner was swung over the street, sidewalks and cobblestones alike were hidden by a solid mass of humanity packed between the walls like herrings in a box. At Tenth street, where the Republican...

Efforts by voluntary organizations in northwest Philadelphia over the past century to preserve and enhance Wissahickon Park provide excellent examples of social capital at work. Some of these groups have had relatively brief lives, whereas others have lasted for several generations. All have taken advantage of the wealth, leisure, self-confidence, professional expertise, and political connections of residents in this relatively prosperous outlying area of the city that includes the communities of Germantown, Mount Airy, Chestnut Hill, and Roxborough. (See the map on p. xiv for neighborhood locations.)

As used in this chapter,social capitalis best defined by Robert Putnam...

Universities can significantly enrich the communities in which they are located. Through their educational role, they contribute to the overall wellbeing of the community by helping shape an enlightened citizenry and productive labor force. Through the musical, theatrical, and artistic activities they produce and sponsor, universities enhance the cultural life of the surrounding community, attracting residents and businesses in the process. As employers and purchasers of goods and services, they play a major role in local economies. Yet despite the myriad contributions of institutions of higher learning, their potential for community development has been and often still is overlooked by...

Education policyand community development research, like other areas of social policy research, have embraced the language of social capital in the past ten to twenty years. However, the community school movement preceded the theories that inform social capital studies by many decades. The community school movement emerged in the 1930s in response to the economic and social dislocations of the Great Depression. Community schools have promoted increased engagement in schools by community members and have attempted to have students, teachers, and parents solve community problems as a way of improving educational outcomes, increasing economic welfare and opportunities, and maintaining community...

During the twentieth century, democratic nonprofit credit unions provided financial services to hundreds of thousands of Philadelphians in a manner that relied on and in turn fostered social capital. Each credit union was based on a “common bond” that limited membership to a select field of people who could leverage individual reputations and collective responsibilities to build financial institutions. Though credit unions themselves exemplified the kinds of horizontal and mutual organizations that Robert Putnam has found to build social capital, they most commonly occurred in conjunction with vertical and for-profit structures. Credit unions largely did not emerge from civic associations...

Racial violence in the United States may be as old as the nation itself, but in no single period of the twentieth century was there anything that approached the chain reaction of race riots that began on July 18, 1964, in Harlem. The Harlem riot began the prolonged urban black protest that raced through seven major cities before coming to an end in Philadelphia on the last day of August. During the riots, people of all ages dashed through commercial thoroughfares, broke windows, and looted merchandise from neighborhood businesses. They worked over small and large businesses alike, taking groceries, liquor,...

Policy makers and theorists have embraced the ideas that a paucity of social capital and civic engagement weakens communities, that social capital is in decline across a range of social and geographic contexts, and that expanding “funds of social capital” is key to development. However, following recent ethnographic work by anthropologists and others on social policy, we take none of these claims about social capital at face value. Instead, we critically examine social capital by looking at the numerous ways people in one neighborhood, within the current political economic moment position themselves vis-à-vis local bureaucracies and social networks. The current...

In his bookWhitetown USA, Philadelphia journalist Peter Binzen documented the complex experience and untold story of urban white ethnic residents of the Kensington neighborhood at the end of the 1960s. Already in the throes of industrial decline, this traditionally white working-class area of the city known for its toughness and resistance to change had been the home of hardworking homeowners living side by side with hard-living renters for generations. Binzen painted a poignant yet candid portrait of the pride and patriotism, as well as anger and alienation, among residents during an intense period of social, economic, and political turbulence;...

In his seminalworkThe Philadelphia Negro, W.E.B. DuBois observed that the black church was a “social institution first and a religious [one] afterward.” DuBois argued that black churches represented the “organized life of Negroes” in Philadelphia and that “all movements for social betterment [were] apt to centre in the churches.”¹ Today, one might say the black church simply had more “social capital,” a concept popularized by Robert Putnam and others over the past decade. Putnam argues that churches of all stripes are “very important repositories of social capital”² that “serve civic life both directly, by providing social support to their...