Additional Materials:

• Background information on Bubonic, Pneumonic, and Septicemic Plague.
• Some Statistics on the plague.
• Motco's wonderfully detailed 1705 map and panorama of London. To see this map in even further detail, see the Motco site.
• Five Views of the Great Fire of London.
• MOTCO provides a superb site for historical maps of London, with 17th, 18th, and 19th century maps of London and its environs, searchable and in incredible detail. Please Explore this site in detail.
• The British Broadcasting Company has an excellent Historical site on London, which includes very good background information on the following:
  • 1665: Plague, Population, and Economy.
  • The Lord Mayor's Rules to Check the Plague.
  • An animation of London before and after the Great Fire of 1666.
  • The designs of Christoper Wren and others to rebuild St. Paul's.
• Portrait of Daniel Defoe.
• The Samuel Pepys Library.
• The London Guildhall Collage Site, searchable and containing over 20,000 images of London's history.
• The London Genealogy Site.
• Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and its recent exhibit Liberty on the Anvil 1701-2001.
• Historical Maps of Pennsylvania.

Regular Syllabus Readings and Assignments:

Unit One: Plague, Fire and the New World City

Week 1

Jan 7: Introduction.

Jan 9: Read the first third of Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year (approximately through page 80) and the handout of various charts and data.

Recitation Jan 11: Read the second third of Journal of the Plague Year (at least through page 160). Assignment: Please bring a list of 5 different kinds of contagion (aside from the plague itself) that occur in these pages and list page numbers where these occur.

Week 2

Jan 14: Finish Defoe, and read through the two small selections on the Plague and the Fire in Samuel Pepys's Diary. Read also the handout that contains pictures of London before and after the fire, and the handout containing Wren's, Evelyn's and Hook's plans to rebuild London.

Jan 16: Read William Penn, "Some Account of the Province of Pennsylvania in America" (photocopy); Preface to the first "Frame of Government" (photocopy and on-line -- click here for a facsimile of the first page of the document); --, Letter to the Free Society of Traders (photocopy); Thomas Holmes, Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia" (photocopy and on-line); Benjamin West, William Penn's Treaty with the Indians (on-line).

Recitation Jan 18: Bring in your maps of the City of London, Wren's plan to rebuild London, and Thomas Holmes, Portraiture of the City of Philadelphia" (photocopy and on-line). Writing Assignment Due: Please write a 1-2 page essay analyzing the Penn Philadelphia city plan in relation to the actual maps of the City of London as it was built after the fire. Given your reading of Defoe and Pepys and your own interpretation of Wren's and Penn's plans, what urban problems is Penn seeking to solve? To what degree (in your opinion) does he relate aesthetic beauty and symmetry with other desirable civic traits? Why was it possible to fulfill the Philadelphia plan in ways that it was not possible to fulfill the London one?