ABSTRACT
In recent years Philadelphia has become a veritable laboratory for sociological and historical research, largely due to two invaluable sources of data being compiled at the Urban Archives of Paley Library at Temple University and by Theodore Hershberg’s Philadelphia Social History Project at the University of Pennsylvania. The Divided Metropolis: Social and Spatial Dimensions of Philadelphia, 1800-1975, 1 edited by William W. Cutter III and Howard Gillette, Jr., is a collection of ten articles on Philadelphia, several of the authors using these two excellent sources. The book begins with a discussion of the consolidation of the city in 1854 and ends with a summary article on the centralizing and decentralizing forces in the city’s development; in between are eight articles which discuss how neighborhoods are related to transportation, architecture, social class, and so forth.
