Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Imagining Philadelphia: Travelers' Views of the City from 1800 to the Present

Imagining Philadelphia: Travelers' Views of the City from 1800 to the Present

Stevick, Philip

Hardcover

Travel WritingGeneral United StatesGeneral United States History

ISBN10: 0812233778
ISBN13: 9780812233773
Publisher: Univ Of Pennsylvania Pr
Published: Aug 29 1996
Pages: 216
Weight: 1.10
Height: 0.79 Width: 6.06 Depth: 9.06
Language: English

In travel narratives, in correspondence, in diaries, and even in fiction, travelers to Philadelphia have bequeathed to us a bounty of as many Philadelphias as there are observers. Philip Stevick's collection of outsiders' observations captures what the visitors thought they saw and how it felt to have engaged the life of the city. Some travelers visited the classic destinations of earlier times, such as the great waterworks complex; others reacted generally to the tone and temper of the city. Together, these accounts fall into patterns that often convey a mythic reading of the city, as a place of uncommon order and symmetry, for example, or a place of great torpor and dullness, or a city extraordinary for the way in which elements of wilderness interpenetrate the metropolitan core.

Stevick finds that the city has inscribed itself on the imaginations of two centuries of visitors in ways that are often compelling but unpredictable, a parallel city to the place on the map and the street under foot, a city of the mind, an imagined Philadelphia.

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