Henry Muhlenberg House, Trappe (Collegeville)

Saturday, March 17

10:00 a.m, to approximately 1:30 p.m.

$15 for Philadelphia Chapter SAH members/OESIA members and their guests, payable on site.

Registration required, please email your name and the names of your guests to info@philachaptersah.org

We will be guided through three historic properties: The Speaker’s House was the home of Frederick Muhlenberg (1750-1801), the First and Third Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1781-1791.  The house is currently being restored to its late 18th-C appearance. The Augustus Lutheran Church, a National Historic Landmark built in 1743, was where the Reverend Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (1711-1787), Frederick’s father, preached and became known as the patriarch of the Lutheran Church in the United States. And the Henry Muhlenberg House, a fully restored house museum furnished with many original family artifacts where Henry and his wife Anna Maria raised their large family, several of whom had a significant impact on colonial life in North America as pastors, military officers, and politicians. (www.speakershouse.org — www.augustustrappe.org — www.trappehistoricalsociety.org)

Then we will go to The Philip & Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College for a special tour of the exhibit Real Estate: Dwelling in Contemporary Art with Museum Director, Charlie Stainback.  Named by the Philadelphia Inquirer as one of “Fall’s 13 must-see art exhibits” it features the work of contemporary artists working with or responding to the varying aspects of real estate vernacular—buildings, rooms, structures, monuments, properties and houses.  From the monumental to ubiquitous building, the ordinary, or derelict piece of property to the historic site, architectural details or the room itself, the artists presented in Real Estate consider an array of norms that fall under the much broader term of “architecture”. (www.ursinus.edu/berman).

We will begin at the Speakers House, 151 W. Main Street, Collegeville (Trappe), PA at 10:00 a.m. and tour the three properties through noon, then we’ll gather at the Berman Museum, 601 E Main Street, Collegeville, PA, at 12:30 p.m.  All of these sites are within 1.5 miles along Main Street.

The lecture is concerned with the major surge of modernization and industrialization in the Western world around 1900 and contemporary debates among engineers—including chemical engineers—about the “consequences” of technology in society. The United States and Germany were the two leading countries of the Second Industrial Revolution, and it was here that engineers first formulated political theories, ethics, and metaphysics of technology and traded them across the Atlantic Ocean. Engineers were also at this time trying to constitute themselves as a new profession and social elite, facing often fierce opposition from traditional elites, such as the nobility, military, attorneys and physicians, practitioners of the “hard” sciences of chemistry and physics, and senior members of the civil service. Engineers, who had concerns about transferable skills, migration, philosophical reflection, and upward social mobility, were also a microcosm of larger segments of the population who were aspiring to become recognized citizens of the emerging secular bourgeois states. Taking the example of the relationship between engineers, chemical engineers, and chemists, I explore this understudied intersection of industrial experts and traditional social elites. I lay bare the diverse types of social and cultural capital that engineers used to carve out places for themselves in a society in which they were not unequivocally recognized as members of leading and distinguished classes.

The speaker, Heidi Voskuhl, teaches the history of technology in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

March 15, 2018

6:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m.

Science History Institute

315 Chestnut Street

Philadelphia, PA 19106

Event is free, registration requested. Here is the link:

https://www.sciencehistory.org/event/fellow-in-focus-technology-and-society-engineering-cultures-chemistry-and-social-order-in-the