As many Americans know, the two most important documents in the history of the United States, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of 1787, were drafted and signed at the State House in Philadelphia, now Independence Hall. The city was also the site of the first American paper mill, hospital, medical college, subscription library, street lighting, scientific and intellectual society, bank, and government mint. The city served on and off as the official capital of the country until 1800. Today, we remember less about the significance of Philadelphia to the history of the nation than the record shows. But...

Pennsylvania was the product of Quaker beliefs and aspirations, and Philadelphia became its pulsebeat on the banks of the Delaware River. “I have obtained [Pennsylvania] that an example may be set up to the nations,” wrote William Penn, its founder, in 1681.¹ Penn hoped that his colony of diverse settlers would show a strife-ridden world a new formula for living. Adept promoter as well as revered defender of persecuted Quakers, he attracted settlers from England, Ireland, Wales, and continental Europe with policies of religious toleration, pacifism, and fair treatment for all.

But the fertile Delaware River valley where Penn was...

Between the time William Penn left his colony in 1701 after his second visit and the outbreak of disputes with Great Britain in 1764 that would lead to the American Revolution, Philadelphia became the largest commercial center in English-speaking America. Penn’s liberal immigration policy encouraged rapid development of the region, and along with natural increase this drove Pennsylvania’s population upward from a mere 18,000 in 1700 to about 220,000 in 1765. The urbanized Philadelphia region grew from about 2,200 in 1700 to 19,000 in 1760, and then to about 30,000 as the Revolution erupted in 1775. Around 1720, a little-known...

The American Revolution was the central event in the lives of most of those who lived through it. It engaged the passions and interests of nearly everyone and promised to usher in a new age. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” wrote Philadelphia’s famous pamphleteer, Thomas Paine. “A situation similar to the present has not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand.”¹

While the Revolution shaped the lives of most of its participants, it also became the touchstone of succeeding generations, especially those who...

Philadelphia expanded rapidly in the early national period, swelling from an overgrown provincial capital of 30,000 when the Revolution broke out, to a muscular commercial and industrializing city of nearly 110,000 in 1820. Just as it had played a critically important role in the American Revolution, Philadelphia became the center of constitution-making. And when Congress moved from New York City to Philadelphia in 1790, it became the seat of the newly strengthened national government for ten years—a short period but one filled with intense drama connected to the revolutions in France and Haiti, the Whiskey Rebellion and Jay’s Treaty,...

Between 1815 and 1860, Philadelphians experienced dizzying growth and a tangled set of changes that were both exhilarating and wrenching (Figure 61). Their commercial seaport and center of government became a major manufacturing center in the “Age of Iron.” Though stripped of its federal and state capital status, the relatively contained city of just under one hundred thousand grew into a sprawling metropolis of more than half a million. With growth and manufacturing in the nation’s second-largest city came unheard of opportunities for some, a higher standard of living for many, terrible deprivation for others, and many knotty problems. Historians...

In trying to cope with the problems arising from rapid growth, unprecedented immigration of non-Protestants, and industrialization in all its bewildering facets, Philadelphians—like other Americans—struck off reform societies in the antebellum era like so many new coins (Figure 76). Public education, the Sunday School movement, temperance, a charter of rights for working people, reclamation projects for fallen women, and the penitentiary movement were all part of the “moral industry” that formulated solutions to what seemed the grand paradox of the era: as America grew in size and strength, social cohesion declined and social problems increased. Three other movements—...

Five days after John Brown’s execution on December 2, 1859, a “Great Union Meeting” organized by anti-abolitionist Philadelphians convened in Jayne’s Hall, two blocks from Independence Hall, to rebuke those who had sympathized with Brown and to assure white Southerners that Philadelphia stood with them. Streamers flew from ships, factories, public buildings, and hotels; cannons boomed; banners proclaimed “Union Forever! Pennsylvania Greets her Sister State, Virginia”(Figure 97).¹ The song composed for the pro-Southern rally set the tone:

The South shall have her rights—O’er her

Our eagle spreads its wings—

The treason plotters, brown or white,

Shall on the gallows...

From a population of about 725,000 in 1875, Philadelphia grew to 1.3 million inhabitants by 1900 (Figure 115). The first large contingents of immigrants, including Italians, Greeks, Poles, Hungarians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Russians, added new layers to the religious and ethnic diversity of a city fast becoming a sprawling industrial giant. As established white Protestant families migrated en masse to new suburbs, facilitated by a commuter rail system, newcomers resettled the vacated neighborhoods, crowded themselves into split-up houses and subdivided lots, and converted churches to reflect their own religious practices. In a multitude of workplaces, the skills of the...

Half a century after the Historical Society played a leading role in orchestrating the 1887 Constitution Centennial celebration, its executive council listened raptly to a report from a special committee on the society’s past, present, and future. Chairing the committee was Edward Carey Gardiner, great-great-grandson of Mathew Carey, the publisher and avid collector who was to give the society a blockbuster collection of papers from the extended Carey family of printers, publishers, and politicians. In a “Declaration of Faith,” Gardiner’s committee expressed its “growing conviction that historical societies in America … had been blown off their course and their forces...