Cresheim Farm
400 Years of History at an American Farm
- Available for pre-order on May 19, 2023. Item will ship after June 9, 2023
Preview
Book Description
The book is a work of political archaeology: it focuses on the people and events at a particular colonial farm in Germantown, Pennsylvania. The peoples’ and farm’s 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 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 magnify 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.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I: Origins
Chapter 1: The Unami Lenape: Conquest, Genocide, Resistance and Survival
Chapter 2. Colonization of Germantown: The Krefelders Arrive
Chapter 3: The Mennonite Tyson Family: The Dawn of Cresheim Farm
Chapter 4: Cresheim Farm Buildings as of 1703: Imprinting the Land with Fences and Stones
Part II: Colonization and Whiteness
Chapter 5: Mennonite Conrads Family: Outsiders Become White and Middle-class
Chapter 6: Discontent Before the Revolution: Class and Caste
Chapter 7: Cresheim Farm Buildings as of 1770s: A White American Institution
Chapter 8: Germantown During the Revolution: A Battle and A White House
Part III: Manifest Destiny and Class Struggle
Chapter 9: Col. Roumfort: Military, Law, and Order
Chapter 10: The Gowen Empire: Upper Class Life in the Gilded Age
Chapter 11: Franklin Gowen: An Anti-Union Activist
Chapter 12: The Gowen Housing Estate: The End of Farming
Part IV: Race, Gender, and Activism
Chapter 13: Adelaide Neall: A Suffragette in Publishing
Chapter 14: Elizabeth and Robert Yarnall: Quaker Peace Activists
Chapter 15: Slavery and the Underground Railroad in Germantown
Chapter 16: Workshop of the World: From Sparkle to Rust
Chapter 17: Black and White: Activists in Germantown
Chapter 18: The Mattheus-Kairys Family at Cresheim Farm
Author(s)
Biography
Antje Ulrike Mattheus grew up in post-World War II West Germany and came to the U.S. 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 innovated grassroots adult education and empowerment programs, and co-founded White People Confronting Racism, which conducts anti-racism workshops for white people since 1995. She enjoys restoring old buildings.
Reviews
"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