Cochran - Pennsylvania: a Bicentennial history

Textbooks dealing with the general history of the state do not add much to the descriptions of early industrial development presented here. One of the best and most recent of such volumes is A History of Pennsylvania by Philip S. Klein and Ari Hoogenboom (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973). The colonial cities and their business are covered in four well-written arid scholarly volumes by Carl Bradenbaugh, of which Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America 17431776 (New York: Capricorn, 1964) was the most useful for this book. For the great period of Philadelphia finance, Bray Hammonds Banks and Politics in America: from the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) is both the pleasantest to read and the most generally informing. Victor S. Clark, History of Manufactures in the United States, 3 vols. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1929) is necessarily much concerned with Pennsylvania. The same may be said of George R. Taylors scholarly and interesting The Transportation Revolution 18151860 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962).

An original and discerning view of the conditions of eastern settlement and early development is James T. Lemons The Best Poor Mans Country: A Geographical Study of Early Southern Pennsylvania (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972). For an interpretation of the physical details of early Philadelphia see Sam B. Warner, The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of its Growth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968) and for many excellent essays on buildings Luther P. Eisenhart, editor, Historic Philadelphia: From the Founding to the Early Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, Transactions, no. 43, part I, 1953). Warners discussion of the early merchants is given greater depth and detail in Clarence Ver Steeg, Robert Morris: Revolutionary Financier (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1954) and Edwin T. Wolf II and Maxwell Whitman, The History ofthe Jews of Philadelphia from Colonial Times to the Age of Jackson (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1957). A careful and penetrating study by Stephanie Grauman Wolf, An Urban Village: Population, Community and Family Structure in German-town, Pennsylvania (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976) suggests much of the social and economic history of the other satellite cities.

General background on the rivalry of Baltimore, New York, and Philadelphia can be acquired from the essays in David T. Gilchrist, ed., The Growth of the Seaport Cities, 17901825 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, for Eleutherian MillsHagley Foundation, 1967); from geographer Allan R. Pred, Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities, 17901840 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973); from Leighton P. Stradley, Early Financial and Economic History of Pennsylvania (New York: Commerce Clearing House, 1942); and from James Weston Livingood, The Philadelphia-Baltimore Trade Rivalry, 17801860 (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1947). There being no interpretive history of banking in Pennsylvania alone, the reader must extract from Hammond; Fritz Redlich, The Molding of American Banking: Man and Ideas, 2 vols. (New York: Hafner, 1951); Ralph and Muriel Hidy, The House of Baring in American Trade and Finance: English Merchant Bankers at Work 17631861 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949); Nicholas B. Wainwright, History of the Philadelphia National Bank: A Century and a Half of Philadelphia Banking (Philadelphia National Bank, 1953); and Vincent Carossa, Investment Banking in America: A History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970). All are scholarly and much concerned with Philadelphia. B. A. Konkle, Thomas Willing and the First Financial System (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1937) covers the period of early incorporated banking. There is a long and frustrating two-volume biography, The Life and Times of Stephen Girard, by John Bach McMaster (Philadelphia: Lip-pincott, 1918) and a popular history, Lonely Midas: the Story of Stephen Girard, by Harry Emerson Wildes (New York, 1943). For later years there are good biographies by Thomas Payne Govan, Nicholas Biddle, Nationalist and Public Banker, 17861844 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959) and by Henrietta M. Larson, Jay Cooke:Private Banker (Cambridge: Harvard Studies in Business History, 1936). One of the last national financial leaders from Philadelphia in the nineteenth century, Edwin T. Stotesbury of Drexel, Morgan is treated briefly in James T. Maher, The Twilight of Splendor: Chronicles of the Age of American Palaces (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975). Materials for a proper history of the First Bank of the United States are lacking, but that of its successor is well analyzed in Walter B. Smith, Economic Aspects of the Second Bank of the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), as well as in Govans biography of Biddle. Many aspects of the pioneer development of insurance can be found in highly readable form in Marquis James, Biography of a Business 17921942: Insurance Company of North America (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1942).

The Gilchrist, Pred, and Livingood books have much to say about early east coast transportation. Both transportation and general business development in the western region are included in Catherine Elizabeth Reiser, Pittsburghs Commercial Development 18001850. This and George Swetnams good, brief summary of all forms of transportation in the state were published by the Pennsylvania Historical Association in 1951 and 1964, respectively, and are now available, together with many other studies, from the State Historical and Museum Commission in Harrisburg. The best general survey of the numerous instances of state aid to transportation is Louis Hartz,