When it comes to the dynamics of Steemit, I’m no expert. But I do have a good sense of the dynamics of a big-city cultural community. In particular, since the late 1970s I’ve focused on the care and feeding

Restored and reinstalled in the center of Philadelphia—the city of Brotherly Love—in 1976, Philadelphia’s LOVE sculpture is one of many around the world. (Source) Versions of Robert Indiana’s work are

An 18th-century leaf-printing project as it relates to counterfeit-resistant currency, discussed here by @voronoi, features the printer’s partner, the go-to Founding Father: Benjamin Franklin. Source:

Was the daguerreotype for real? Joseph Saxton had heard about the recently-announced invention from Paris. He wondered: could this process actually allow anyone to replicate scenes in infinite, accurate

In times like these, we must ask and answer such questions. From mid-September through early October, Fireflies flickered up and down Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway with hundreds of colorful,

What should stay and what should go in a living city? I’ve asked the question repeatedly over the years in my posts at PhillyHistory. After all, what good is a Heritage City with no heritage (other than

“My name is Lily Goodspeed and I live in South Philly,” read the email. “I found your name because you wrote about so-called "Camingerly" recently, and I was searching for more info on "Deep

“It’s not just a new kind of software, or a new kind of money, it is essentially a social movement,” says Nathaniel Popper, The New York Times tech reporter. Listen here.

Thirty years ago, when Bill Cosby was honored on the cover of TIME magazine, who’d have guessed that one day there’d be a rush on cleansing his image, his name and his memory from just about everything,

There’s a bridge deep in Philadelphia’s Wissahickon Valley that’s an inaccessible work of art. It’s been there for thirty years now, having been lowered onto the craggy hillside by helicopter. There’s

“This Side Up.” An old idea for a new freedom monument. The need to remember is as old as civilization itself. Without shared memory, there’d probably be no civilization. We sometimes find ourselves

Sometimes a little history allows us to see a lot better. Artist Karyn Olivier describes her temporary installation, “The Battle Is Joined,” as “a mirrored remix” of Philadelphia’s “Battle of Germantown

Whose telephone technology would win? Victory was hardly a sure thing before the turn of the 20th century when the United States went toe-to-toe with Europe. Competition with the Old Country had been stiff

You gotta love a parade, especially when it makes you feel good. Credit: PhillyHistory.org This horse-drawn bar chart illustrating the rapid rise of the telephone in Philadelphia showed impressive gains.

The Writing Closet at the Abel and Mary Nicholson House The 295-year-old Abel and Mary Nicholson House in rural Salem County, New Jersey couldn’t be more inconveniently located, but it’s uniquely special

Philadelphia is known today as a city of murals. Peace Wall, 29th & Wharton, 1997. Credit: Jack Ramsdale for Mural Arts Program. But scroll back to the 1960s. Philly was then mural free and still the

“There Must Come a Change…” Public spaces in cities and towns are peppered with statues and monuments. Public art is one of the ways we acknowledge who we are and what’s important to us. How many hundreds

When it comes to talking about the meaning of monuments, it's useful to consider Upton’s Second Rule of Monument Making: Monuments always say more about the people, times and places of their creation than

~ Deep Looking for the Fun of It ~ Here at the intersection of past and future, we like pictures. A lot. For the last six years I've blogged at PhillyHistory drawing images from the Philadelphia City Archives,

Looking at Photographs vs. Looking into Photographs Visual superpowers are attainable! With the help of old-fashioned photographic technology these powers significantly enrich the experience of seeing.