Group fights for recognition of veterans resting at abandoned Jacksonville cemetery

Many of the sites, including Sunset Memorial, were owned by the storied Afro-American Life Insurance Co., which started in Jacksonville at the turn of the 20th century. The sites fell into disrepair as the company slid into bankruptcy through the 1980s, and when it shut down in the 1990s the burial grounds became overgrown and unorganized.

Historical Philadelphia Gone Interactive

Interactive Historial Map of Philadelphia

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania has announced creation of an interactive Web site that connects stories to places across time in Philadelphia neighborhoods.

The Web site will focus first on two areas  Old Southwark and the Greater Northern Liberties  that were always home to immigrants and working class. We have chosen these neighborhoods because both are essential to understanding Philadelphia’s history and its industrial legacy as the “workshop of the world.” Situated north and south of the Center City historic district and home to successive immigrant communities almost three centuries, these areas continue as vibrant multiethnic neighborhoods featuring many sites of interest—historic houses of worship, community art and culture centers, gardens and murals, marketplaces, and ethnic businesses. Characterized by block upon block of low-rise row homes where common laborers, artisans, and skilled industrial workers, usually immigrants or migrants, settled, the boundaries of these neighborhoods were defined by work, home, religion, and ethnicity. What constitutes “the neighborhood” – that basic unit of the Philadelphia experience – is subjective, fluid and dynamic, defined as much by contested turf as by common ground.

Pa. house where Washington stayed in 1790s reopens

A house where George Washington stayed to escape a yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793 and to get away from city heat in the summer of 1794 is reopening to the public this weekend. Since closing in February 2008, the Germantown White House (formerly known as the Deshler-Morris House) has undergone substantial renovation and the installation of new exhibits designed to teach visitors about Washington’s household, including four enslaved Africans. The newly updated and refurbished Germantown White House, part of Independence National Historical Park, officially reopens.