Philadelphia Yearly Meeting

of the Religious Society of Friends

History

Saving our Stories – Training in Oral History

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This online training will focus on the basics of doing oral history interviews including planning, releases, concerns, Zoom and other audio-visual tips, and publication/posting.  This program is offered free, as a service from SouthJerseyQuakers.  We welcome multiple participants from Friends’ meetings and other groups.

We encourage Friends to focus on how a Meeting or individual Friends made South Jersey (and other communities) a better place to live.  Additional topics, such as how our faith and practices have guided – and enhanced – Friends’ lives are important to record as well.

Our resource person for this training is Melissa Ziobro, Specialist Professor of Public History, Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University, and President of Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region, will lead this training.  She is also the editor for New Jersey Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, a joint venture of the NJ Historical Commission, Rutgers University Libraries, and Monmouth University.

Please pre-register.  Zoom details will be emailed on the day prior to the program.

 

Let’s Talk About Faith-based Reparations

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A world that is accountable for past harms including slavery, colonialism, genocide, and other material and moral abuses will be a world better for everyone. The Grassroots Reparations Campaign sponsors a course to examine the history, spiritual, conceptual (ethical and moral) and practical dimensions of reparations as a global movement. Centered on the approach to reparation from the United Nations, the twelve-hour course explores the perspectives that justify and help many ground the case for faith-based reparations. The spiritual journey to uproot white supremacy externally and internally co-exists with working toward full reparations and abolition-democracy. Barb Kreider will offer some insights from this course. Click here or call 646-558-8656 and enter meeting ID 873 3565 8140 to be part of the conversation.

Quakers in Education: Nitobe Inazo, Elizabeth Gray Vining, and Joseph Wharton

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This is the second in a series of articles about Quakers who’ve impacted the fields of education and contributed to global scientific, medical, political, or economic leadership. The first article was published on September 23 and covered Elise Goulding, Ezra Cornell, and Johns Hopkins.

Nitobe Inazo (1862-1933) was a Japanese Quaker who became the first Under Secretary General for the League of Nations. Nitobe was born into a samurai family on Honshu, the main island of Japan. While in college, he became a Christian and later a Friend. In 1884, He moved to the US for post-graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University. There he began attending Quaker meetings, telling friends, “I very much like their simplicity and earnestness.”

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Quaker Farms – Then and Now

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Not long ago, a typed narrative from a transcribed letter written by a Quaker farmer in “Chester Township” Pennsylvania showed up in some files. It was dated 10th month, 1725, and began “Dear Sister Mary Valentine, this goes with a salutation of love to thee, brother Thomas, and the children…”

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