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Hardy Williams Academy

charter school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 5, 2026
Entity authorityQ4767092 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Hardy Williams Academy, formerly the Anna Howard Shaw Junior High School, is a historic junior high school building located in the Southwest Schuylkill neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.

It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1988.

History and architectural features

The building was designed by Irwin T. Catharine and built between 1922 and 1924. It is a three-story, seventeen-bay, brick building which sits on a raised stone basement. It was designed in the Colonial Revival-style in the shape of a shallow "W," and features a center projecting pavilion, stone cornice, and a brick parapet. The school was named for Anna Howard Shaw.

Since 2015, the school has been used as a charter school run by Mastery Charter Schools. It was renamed in honor of Hardy Williams.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Hardy Williams Academy” as charter school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Hardy, Williams and Academy.

Editorial reviewMost valuable as an event-and-institution map that identifies actors, dates and record creators for deeper historical inquiry. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1988, 1922, 1924, 2015—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Hardy, Williams and Academy providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Hardy Williams Academy”, the useful work is to connect “charter school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4767092. Authority coordinates are 39.941, -75.227. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1988, 1922, 1924 and 2015.

Critical limits

Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Hardy Williams Academy”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Hardy Williams Academy primary sources, Hardy Williams Academy archive and Hardy research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Hardy Williams Academy”?
  2. What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
  3. Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Hardy Williams Academy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.