JOURNAL ARTICLE
Making and Remaking of The Philadelphia Negro
Stephanie Boddie and Amy Hillier published an article in Digital Humanities Quarterly in 2022 to shed light on the methods and meaning of W. E. B. Du Bois’ 1899 study of the everyday lives of Black residents of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward.
Du Bois sits at his desk at Atlanta University. Image courtesy of the UMass Amherst W.E.B. Du Bois Papers, 1803-1999.
It does so by juxtaposing the way Du Bois conducted his research with our contemporary efforts to recover, recreate, and preserve The Philadelphia Negro using digital and geospatial technologies to document historical and contemporary patterns relating to race and class. Beginning with an exploration of primary source documents that provide new details about how Du Bois went about his original research, we focus on the humanities and social science research methods that he employed.
Additional Learning
Download the full articleBOOK CHAPTER
Susan Wharton and WEB Du Bois
Amy Hillier and Stephanie Boddie contributed a chapter for the 2023 book, Social Work, White Supremacy, and Racial Justice: Reckoning with Our History, Interrogating our Present, Re-Imagining our Future comparing the lives and ideas of Susan Wharton and W. E. B. Du Bois, focusing on the final years of the 19th century when their work converged in a study of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward.
Their personal and professional journeys to that point reflected deep class and racial differences, but they shared a commitment to understanding and improving the lives of Black people and believed leaders with education and class privilege were best positioned to make that happen.
“We use Wharton’s role in this story to better understand the tensions, contradictions, and limitations that characterized early social work practice and have persisted in various forms over the past 120 years.
Relying on archival sources and Du Bois’s writing, we compare their thinking about the role of research, causes of poverty, and meaning of racial discrimination. Other scholars have heralded the relevance of The Philadelphia Negro to understanding contemporary urban theory and social issues, but they have not focused on the meaning for social welfare history.”
Additional Learning
Tim Golden’s history thesis for Haverford CollegeCathy Rosetti’s Historic Preservation thesis for Penn DesignSherry Taylors’ independent study graduate paper about the Black churchAmy Hillier, “Teaching race and history with historical GIS,” in GEOHUMANITIES (2011)Amy Hillier, “Transforming communities through mapping: Harnessing the Potential of New Technologies,” in The Paradox of Urban Space.Amy Hillier’s sermon at Middlebury UU church (2006)Amy Hillier, “WEB Du Bois and the Social Survey Movement”