A Postcard From Philadelphia

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Philadelphia

This is actually from August 2016, the week after the Democratic National Convention, when I spent a week at the Presbyterian Historical Society. I was mainly there to learn how the Presbyterian press covered the 1906 merger of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. (the “Northern” Presbyterians) with the Cumberland Presbyterians, who were predominantly in the upper South and lower Midwest.

It was a family trip. The boys, both under two years old and accustomed to Central Standard Time, would wake up early each morning, so we would explore the neighborhood we were staying at (East Passyunk) for a couple of hours before the archive opened.

The music is from “Appalachian Grove I” (via Internet Archive, licensed under CC BY-ND 3.0) by Laurie Spiegel, a pioneer of electronic music who developed the Music Mouse software program.

Bill Black is a history teacher in Houston and an editor for Contingent. He holds a PhD in history from Rice University, where he studied religion, nationalism, and slavery in the 19th-century Ohio Valley.

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