1st Edition
Cresheim Farm An American History of Conquest, Privilege and Struggles for Freedom and Equality
This book is a work of political archaeology. It focuses on the people and events at a particular colonial farm in Germantown, Pennsylvania; their stories provide a micro and macro view of economic, social, demographic, and agro-ecological change.
Cresheim Farm shows how one mostly unknown but strategically placed piece of land—home to an extraordinary array of people, including early anti-slavery and anti-Nazi activists, the first woman editor of the Saturday Evening Post and a robber baron—can tell, affect and reflect the history of a nation. The writing is historically grounded and academic, future-oriented, deeply researched, and immediate. Cresheim Farm serves as a lens through which to observe and understand social forces, such as the launching point of freedom and democracy movements, white privilege, slavery, and genocidal westward expansion. The past lives on in all of us.
Introduction
PART I: Origins
1 The Unami Lenape: Conquest, Genocide, Resistance, and Survival
2 Colonization of Germantown: The Krefelders Arrive
3 The Mennonite Tyson Family: The Dawn of Cresheim Farm
4 Cresheim Farm Buildings as of 1703: Imprinting the Land with Fences and Stones
PART II: Colonization and Whiteness
5 The Mennonite Conrads Family: Outsiders Become White and Middle Class
6 Discontent Before the Revolution: Class and Caste
7 Cresheim Farm Buildings as of the 1770s: A White American Institution
8 Germantown During the Revolution: A Battle and A White House
PART III: Manifest Destiny and Class Struggle
9 Colonel Roumfort: Military, Law, and Order
10 The Gowen Empire: Upper Class Life in the Gilded Age
11 Franklin Gowen: An Anti-Union Activist
12 The Gowen Housing Estate: The End of Farming
PART IV: Race, Gender, and Activism
13 Adelaide Neall: A Suffragette in Publishing
14 Elizabeth and Robert Yarnall: Quaker Peace Activists
15 Slavery and the Underground Railroad in Germantown
16 Workshop of the World: From Sparkle to Rust
17 Black and White: Activists in Germantown
18 The Mattheus-Kairys Family at Cresheim Farm
Biography
Antje Ulrike Mattheus grew up in post-World War II West Germany and came to the US at 18 to be an organizer for the United Farmworkers Union. She has worked with a range of community, academic, direct action, and anti-violence programs to address white supremacy, race, class and gender inequalities. She has innovated grassroots adult education and empowerment programs and co-founded White People Confronting Racism, which has been conducting anti-racism workshops for white people since 1995. She enjoys restoring old buildings.
“In the great tradition of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gunnar Myrdal, Antje Mattheus sheds a brilliant light, along with original and compelling insights, onto American life and culture—this time, from the intriguing vantage point of a single homestead, a historical farmhouse in the city of Philadelphia. This fascinating book is a must-read!”
Elijah Anderson, Sterling Professor of Sociology and African American Studies, Yale University
“This book is a work of political archeology, an exploration of the sedimented politics of a place, seen over a long period of time….‘Where do we come from?’ {and} ‘Where does our knowledge come from?’ Or, ‘How can we know what we know?’ These are the deep questions that this book proposes.”
From the Foreword by Howard Winant, coauthor of Racial Formation in the United States
“This is an engaging and welcome history of the Unami Lenape Indian Nation that owned and farmed the land around Philadelphia long before the coming of European colonists. The extreme violence and abuse practiced upon the Lenape are given close attention…a hard and unsparing look. Mattheus also documents the roles of women, helping to overcome the near invisibility of Native people and women in history.”
Robert T. Coulter is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and Executive Director of the Indian Law Resource Center.
