Not content to take shelter among their history books, those behind Poor Richard's Walking Tours want to take their academic viewpoints of the past to the masses.
Now comprised of six graduate students in Penn's History Department, Poor Richard's began life in 1998 when two of these students -- Kyle Farley and Chris Klemek -- combined their love for history with a love for Philadelphia.
"We made it a habit of going for long walks on the weekend to explore the neighborhoods... and to learn the secrets and charms that the city has to offer," Klemek said.
With those humble roots, the group gained their first client when the History Department asked Poor Richard's to show the city to a prospective faculty member.
"You're not going to say no to the Chair [of the department], and we were off to the races after that," Klemek said.
Today, the group's clients include the Penn Humanities Forum, the Rosenbach Museum and Library and the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation. Maintaining that their first priority is still scholarship, Poor Richard's conducts, on average, one tour a week.
"When you want a tour with specific intellectual content or if you want to not just see the city, but to understand how it came to be, that's when you call Poor Richard's," Farley said.
Although their mainstay tour spans from river-to-river and covers over 300 years of history, their academic base has allowed such non-traditional tour offerings as "Literary Philadelphia" and a tour of the city's African-American history.
"I would have never thought that we could have taken topics as abstruse as political theory in the 18th century or feminism in the 19th century and present them in such a way that can captivate a lay person," Klemek said, adding that "you don't have to dumb it down to reach broader audiences."
The wide range of the students' studies in American history have aided in developing the tours. Farley's research is on colonial cities as hubs of intellectual activity, while Klemek is investigating post-World War II urban history.
And while other members of the group focus on topics as diverse as labor history and Native American history -- allowing tour responsibilities to be divided among interest areas -- all of the guides find common ground in sharing their knowledge outside of the typical graduate student realm.
"There are graduate students who are perfectly happy to focus on their little corner of academic real estate," Klemek said. "But we... felt compelled to reach a little bit broader an audience and do public history."
Despite worries that their professors would be concerned about time not spent working on their doctoral dissertations, Farley and Klemek's advisor says that the opposite is true.
"It's just the sort of sideline that you want graduate students to undertake while they're getting their professional training," History professor Bruce Kuklick said. "I wish there were 50 more options like this created by graduate students and 10 times as many people getting involved with it."
However, some degree of balance between academics and business has been required.
"Tourists aren't as interested in the debates that we have in academia, and at the same time if you took the history that tourists want and bring that into the classroom, [the professors] would also balk," Farley said. "We're trying to be a bridge between the public and academia -- that's tricky."
Since last summer's "high water mark" of giving tours to the Republican National Convention's delegates, the founders have assumed advisory roles, handing much of the actual tour-giving over to those members of the group who are still completing their coursework.
Though Farley and Klemek both hope that Poor Richard's will go on without them, as graduation looms in two years, the duo felt that they have already gained much from the experience.
"It keeps us going through the more solitary undertakings of scholarship," Klemek said. "Without the research, our tours aren't interesting, and without the tours you can get a little monastic, cloistered away in your Van Pelt [Library] carrel."
