Engineering Philadelphia: The Sellers Family and the Industrial Metropolis
"Engineering Philadelphiais 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 ofThe 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 ofChicago Made: Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis"Although the most famous family member, Escol Sellers, was the model for Mark Twain's quintessential capitalist/speculator/scoundrel inThe Gilded Age, throughout the nineteenth century the Sellerses of Philadelphia contributed constructively to the city's economic growth, urban planning, and political reform. Domenic Vitiello has written business history at its best—wonderful stories about interesting people framed by a strong understanding of how family and social networks interacted with technological and political change to shape the nineteenth-century metropolis."—William Pencak, University of Southern Alabama, editor,Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies"Domenic Vitiello's engaging and accessible study repositions industrialization’s actors as proto-planners, fabricating products as well as relationships and institutions that propelled urban economic development and, in time, battled decline. A striking asset here is that his work anatomizes both successes and failures, even when the latter expose individual, family, and organizational shortcomings.Engineering Philadelphiais essential reading for all concerned with urban and industrial history."—Philip Scranton, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, coauthor of Reimagining Business History