Browse Items (735 total)

The episode give a history of the Stetson Hat Company and its celebrated employee benefits programs through the memories of former workers. The program includes a tour of the remaining buildings of the Stetson complex before it burned down in 1980.

A look at Prohibition in Philadelphia and Marine Lieutenant General Smedley Darlington Butler’s unsuccessful efforts to clean up the city and enforce the laws in the mid-1920s.

In this program four Italian American women discuss life in Southwest Philadelphia in the early 1900s, including their families’ immigration experiences, mothers, growing up, the Influenza Epidemic of 1918, and the American Dream.

This episode give a look at the city's past industrial greatness, and an historical tour of the city's Kensington neighborhood with historian Dennis Clark

This second half of the Kensington tour with Dennis Clark includes first-hand recollections of the impact of the Great Depression, the streetcar lines and automobile, and thoughts on the culture of the Irish in Kensington.

The first of four programs on the immigration of southern and eastern Europeans to the city in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, including their reasons for immigrating, journeys to Philadelphia, expectations, and first…

Recollections of early living arrangements, boarding houses, and life in a South Philadelphia rowhouse in the early 1900s. This is followed by a brief look at the history of the Lavin family, who arrived in Philadelphia in 1896.

A program on romance and courtship in the ethnic neighborhoods of pre-World War II Philadelphia, and the battles that raged between strict, Old-World fathers and their Americanizing children

A program on the worst pandemic of the twentieth century and its impact on Philadelphia, the hardest hit of American cities and on people’s experience and attitudes towards death.

Part 2 looks at the structure of the City’s Republican machine, patronage and political assessments, the vice protection rackets that provided its funding, and the Grand Jury investigations of 1928, the rise of the Democrats and collapse of…