Metropolitan Philadelphia ─ Living With the Presence of the Past

The Philadelphia-born author seeks to explain the metropolitan region of his hometown in a series of thematic essays. He first looks at the utopian impulses of the Quakers who founded the city and traces their influence to the present. He then explores the use the city makes of it's own past, especially its relationship to the founding of the US. The next essay explores the formation of the middle class in the Greater Philadelphia region and how it helped in the construction of the national identity of the US as a middle class nation. This is followed by a discussion of how the Delaware and Schuykill Rivers have shaped the human activity of the region. Annotation c2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

A native Philadelphian, Steven Conn is coeditor (with Max Page) of Building the Nation: Americans Write About Their Architecture, Their Cities, and Their Landscape, winner of the Noble Book Award of the Pioneer America Society and available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Conn contributes regularly to the Philadelphia Inquirer and City Paper.