Illuminating Institutions: The Chester County Poorhouse and Social Relief in the Early Republic (Virtual)

The United States has been experimenting with institutional solutions to social problems since before the country was founded. Chester County -- the poorhouse in particular -- is a perfect case study for examining this process because the records are unusually extensive for a non-urban area. The poorhouse was part of a network of institutions in Philadelphia’s surrounding counties that were simultaneously defining what it meant to be American and determining society’s responsibility for those who were floundering.

With Chester County’s poorhouse records we will explore how a historian uses often-impersonal institution records to illuminate the stories of their staff and inmates. We’ll be considering how historians use sources, how sources shape the questions historians ask, and how cultural assumptions shape the sources themselves.

About the Speaker: Monique Bourque received her Ph.D, in American History and Museum Studies from the University of Delaware’s Hagley program in the history of technology and industrialization. Her dissertation and much of her subsequent research has centered on social welfare in Philadelphia’s satellite counties in the early Republic. She is also deeply interested in how social and political values shape structures of knowledge, from the anthropomorphizing of social insects, to children’s nature education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After many years in academic administration, she currently works in the Oregon Secretary of State’s Corporation Division.

Admission is Pay as You Wish! Your donation is greatly appreciated. All proceeds benefit the development of future programming and the preservation of the History Center and its collections. The History Center is home to over 750,000 manuscripts, 100,000 photographs, and 70,000 artifacts. Your donation helps us to preserve and share those resources.

Presentation is via Zoom, and will be recorded and available for 7 days for all registered participants. We will email out a Zoom link the day of the program, and email a link to the recording within 24 hours. Note: the Zoom link emailed out the day of the presentation only takes you to the live Zoom; the link emailed out the day after will contain the recorded version.

This program is made possible with the support of the Chester County Community Foundation and the Chester County History Center Special Fund in honor of 18th century botanist Humphry Marshall.