Stephanie Grauman Wolf, lynchpin of the McNeil Center from its earliest days, died on 21 December 2024. She was a remarkable and gifted historian and a fixture in Philadelphia for 70 years, every one of which was better for her presence.
“Stevie,” as she was known to all, graduated from Wellesley College in 1957 and earned her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College in 1973, where she studied with Mary Maples Dunn and Caroline Robbins. When she entered Bryn Mawr in the early 1960s, it was one of the few places where women were taken seriously as scholars and perhaps the only place that understood what we would today call “work-life balance,” providing the flexibility for a person to be both a serious scholar and a mother to five(!) children. Bryn Mawr also provided the flexibility for Stevie to demonstrate an astonishing range of interests. Among other projects, she co-authored with Nancy Wise Hess The Sounds of Time: Western Man and His Music, a lavishly illustrated multidisciplinary work published in 1969. Four years later, her completed doctoral dissertation showed an entirely different side of her work. A community study of early Germantown, Pennsylvania rooted in demographic statistics, it sat on the cutting edge of “the new social history.” It also earned Stevie a place among the remarkable cohort of women historians who transformed the profession during the 1970s.
And who faced great challenges in finding employment in a job market where sexism joined academic retrenchment to make traditional opportunities scarce. At a time when no one had yet coined the term “alternative careers for PhDs,” in 1975 she was hired to coordinate a two-year NEH-funded program called the “Bicentennial College,” part of the University of Pennsylvania’s commemoration of 1776. Among its aims were to redirect scholarship on the American Revolution from Boston and Williamsburg to Philadelphia and the mid-Atlantic region, to foster collaborations among regional archives and educational institutions, and to provide postdoctoral fellowships to scholars exploring the Revolution from non-traditional perspectives. The Bicentennial College functioned as a consortium including the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and mobilized a faculty of 34 professors from Penn, Temple, Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore to offer cross-listed courses. If all this sounds familiar to those associated with today’s McNeil Center, it is no accident. Stevie always insisted that the Bicentennial College was the precursor to the Center, and she was right. In 1978, when Richard Dunn convinced the University of Pennsylvania and the Mellon Foundation to fund what was then called the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies, he built upon the foundation Stevie had created.
By then, Stevie had moved on to the University of Delaware to direct the Winterthur Program in Material Culture. In the mid-1980s, when Richard Dunn took an extended leave to coedit with Mary Dunn The Papers of William Penn, she returned to Penn as Co-Director of the Philadelphia Center with Richard Beeman, while also teaching courses on the history of childhood and helping to establish a presence for Women’s Studies on campus. She remained a fixture of the Center’s community for the next thirty years, serving multiple terms on its Advisory and Executive Councils, becoming a founding member of the editorial board for Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and joining innumerable fellowship selection and prize committees. She also regularly hosted lively sessions of her good friend and colleague Michael Zuckerman’s evening salons at her Mount Airy home. In 2006, thanks to the generosity of her husband Albert (“Ted”) Wolf (and much to Stevie’s embarrassment), the main gathering space at the McNeil Center was named in her honor.
Throughout her career, Stevie’s interests and work remained wide-ranging and innovative. Her best-known book, based on her dissertation, is Urban Village: Population, Community, and Family Structure in Germantown, Pennsylvania, 1683–1800 (1976), followed by As Various as their Land: The Everyday Lives of Eighteenth-Century Americans (1994). Both explore the great diversity of experience, especially among immigrants and migrants whose lives were transformed by the necessities of adaptation to unfamiliar soil. In that process, the land and those who worked it changed, forging new identities. As Stevie saw it, the land created first colonists and then Americans. This reinvention, she argued, was produced by necessity more than choice.
Stevie’s life as an institution builder and supporter of her field and her community grew throughout the decades, as she and Ted supported Philadelphia and its many historical institutions and provided key support to museums, centers of learning, schools and primary education, and much more. Stevie cared deeply about her neighbors, and about the history and historic buildings that make Germantown such a worthy object of study. She was active in many different scholarly and philanthropic venues: she was president of the Germantown Historical Society, Chair of the board at historic Wyck House, and helped to create the “History Hunters” program for middle-schoolers, based at Stenton. In many ways, she was a pioneer in the professionalization of public history.
Almost to the end, Stevie stayed active and interested in scholarship, with her keen mind unimpaired. She was whip-smart, candid, and had a tremendous sense of humor. During the Covid lockdown, she welcomed small groups of visitors to the outdoor deck at her house, always ready to talk about the state of the world as well as scholarly interests. She remained a lively, often delightfully irreverent force, as a participant in seminars, as a reviewer for scholarly journals, as an advisor for early career scholars, and as a boon companion to colleagues and friends in many fields. As a scholar, mentor, institution-builder, and friend, her guidance and good judgment were matched by generosity and wry wit that left a profound impression on all who knew her. She will be greatly missed.
Sarah Barringer Gordon
Daniel K. Richter