Your purchase has been completed. Your documents are now available to view.
Changing the currency will empty your shopping cart.
The Sellers brothers, Samuel and George, came to North America in 1682 as part of the Quaker migration to William Penn’s new province on the shores of the Delaware River. Across more than two centuries, the Sellers family—especially Samuel’s descendants Nathan, Escol, Coleman, and William—rose to prominence as manufacturers, engineers, social reformers, and urban and suburban developers, transforming Philadelphia into a center of industry and culture. They led a host of civic institutions including the Franklin Institute, Abolition Society, and University of Pennsylvania. At the same time, their vast network of relatives and associates became a leading force in the rise of American industry in Ohio, Georgia, Tennessee, New York, and elsewhere.Engineering Philadelphia is a sweeping account of enterprise and ingenuity, economic development and urban planning, and the rise and fall of Philadelphia as an industrial metropolis. Domenic Vitiello tells the story of the influential Sellers family, placing their experiences in the broader context of industrialization and urbanization in the United States from the colonial era through World War II. The story of the Sellers family illustrates how family and business networks shaped the social, financial, and technological processes of industrial capitalism. As Vitiello documents, the Sellers family and their network profoundly influenced corporate and federal technology policy, manufacturing practice, infrastructure and building construction, and metropolitan development. Vitiello also links the family’s declining fortunes to the deindustrialization of Philadelphia—and the nation—over the course of the twentieth century.
Domenic Vitiello is Assistant Professor of City Planning and Urban Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Philadelphia Stock Exchange and the City It Made.
"Engineering Philadelphia is a fine narrative history, based on impressive work in primary sources, about a family that shaped American industrial and urban history for more than a century. In this account, Domenic Vitiello also provides an imaginative and insightful prehistory of urban planning. Vitiello shows that the Sellers family developed larger visions of their businesses and their social commitments, visions rooted in economic, political, and social development which they wielded to shape cities and regions."—John K. Brown, University of Virginia, author of The Baldwin Locomotive Works, 1831–1915: A Study in American Industrial Practice
"Domenic Vitiello deploys the history of one firm—that of the Sellers family—as a window into understanding the broad sweep of American capitalism over 250 years. Vitiello successfully demonstrates how the Sellers family was embedded in worlds operating at the neighborhood, city, regional, and national scales. The tracing of American industrial history through the business history of one family is a fascinating way to explore the issues Vitiello raises."—Robert D. Lewis, University of Toronto, author of Chicago Made: Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis
Please login or register with De Gruyter to order this product.
