Reviews for Embodied History The Lives of the Poor in Ealry Philadelphia

The average rating for Embodied History The Lives of the Poor in Ealry Philadelphia based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-01-06 00:00:00 Marie Davis This is a useful and engaging book, far more than three stars would suggest. For shedding light on life in Philadelphia during the early Republic, it's incredibly good. The author details how the poor lived and died, who the poor were, and who treated them with respect and who did not. But. The whole "body" school of social history drives me up a wall. Everything is written along the lines of "these bodies were respected and honored" or "well-dressed bodies appeared in art and poor bodies rarely did" and "sailors expressed their political philosophy by enduring painful tattoos on their bodies." And so on. I understand the point of talking about important people controlling and acting on people who were poor or otherwise lacked power, but use of the term "body" instead of "person" only further dehumanizes the poor sods who lived desperate, disease-ridden lives. It turns them into widgets. Also, it's incredibly tiresome to read after the first ten pages. The big trick in the book is some scribbled in "impoverished" bodies added to William Birch's contemporary (1799) prints of various places in Philadelphia, as if this is a huge revelation: OMG THERE WERE POOR PEOPLE AND THEY WEREN'T INCLUDED BY BIRCH. So...really, there are some people--sorry, "bodies," who actually look at Birch's art and think it wasn't highly idealized? Come on. Maybe these are bodies inhabiting ivory towers, but there are some bodies who look at period art and realize that artist bodies, then as now, need to sell their work in order to eat, and there's only so much Hogarth the world can take. For all that, I'd recommend the book to anyone interested in life in the early Republic. I'd also recommend NOT turning the use of the word "body" into a drinking game, lest your body suffer from alcohol poisoning.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-05-15 00:00:00 Stacey Boreta Wooden didn't captivate me