Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia

Situated midway between New England and the southern colonies, Philadelphia became the capital of the American Revolution as representatives gathered for the First and Second Continental Congresses. When the delegates to Congress declared independence from Great Britain on July 2, 1776, they also secured Philadelphia’s enduring place in American history. In military action as well ⇒ Read More

In the decades after American independence, the atmosphere of liberty in Philadelphia spawned an artistic spirit that earned this city its reputation as the Athens of America.  Here, enthusiasm for the arts grew with the same fervor and in the same houses, streets, and shops where the seeds of political freedom had been sown and ⇒ Read More

Humans began to establish permanent settlements in the vicinity of Philadelphia approximately 2,800 years ago, centuries before Europeans claimed the lands along the Delaware River for the colonies of New Sweden, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. By the time Europeans arrived in the seventeenth century, the Lenape people inhabited a region along the Mid-Atlantic coast between ⇒ Read More

Philadelphia, where the U.S. Constitution was drafted in 1787, served as the nation’s capital for one decade in the 1790s. It was a decade of nation-building in many ways, from the drama of politics to the creation of a national culture. The U.S. Congress, meeting in the County Court House (Congress Hall), passed the Naturalization ⇒ Read More

When naming a newborn, you feel the weight of the decision, the fond hope that the right name might provide a push along a hoped-for path. Even as names seek to nudge destiny, sometimes they merely set up irony: Faith, the fiery atheist; Victor, the embittered failure. We can’t know all the thoughts that coursed ⇒ Read More

The Convention and Visitors Bureau touts Philadelphia as “a city of firsts.” The Independence Hall Association lists five pages of “Philadelphia Firsts” on its website.  A walking tour of the city links “Philadelphia Firsts” to its home page. George Morgan may have been the first to title a book on Philadelphia The City of Firsts, ⇒ Read More

In the late nineteenth century, Philadelphia developed dual personalities.  While industry intensified, making the city a hard-driving, muscular “workshop of the world,” by the 1880s civic boosters also promoted Philadelphia’s more domestic qualities as a “city of homes.” Philadelphians’ pride in home ownership had deep roots in the founding and growth of the city. But ⇒ Read More

In 1843, a student at the “med school of the University of Pennsylvania,” as he called it in a letter to a friend in Boston, declared Philadelphia “decidedly the city of the Union for doctors, the facilities for study making it a perfect little Paris.” The comparison reflected the renown of the French capital at ⇒ Read More

William Penn, the founder of Philadelphia, grew up in the Tower Hill section of London, one of the many storied neighborhoods in the capital of England. Before Penn set foot on the Delaware River shoreline in October 1682, he lived in a number of European cities including Paris, Dublin, and Amsterdam. Each of those centuries-old ⇒ Read More

Jean R. Soderlund When Lenape Indians in July 1694 crossed the Delaware River from New Jersey to meet with Pennsylvania government officials, they represented a people whose homeland became the Greater Philadelphia region: southeastern Pennsylvania, central and southern New Jersey, and Delaware. Despite their decline in population from European diseases, the Lenapes remained strong. They ⇒ Read More

In July 1903, at the height of the period of reform we have come to call the Progressive Era, crusading journalist Lincoln Steffens published the fifth in a series of articles exposing municipal corruption in the United States. His subject was Philadelphia, and to his mind it was worse than any other place he had ⇒ Read More

Philadelphians snort at the idea that a building in Boston—Faneuil Hall, a marketplace and meeting place–should presume to be called “the cradle of liberty” just because James Otis gave a fiery anti-British speech there in 1761. How can that compare to a city where the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States were ⇒ Read More

Civic boosters in the late nineteenth century adopted “Greater Philadelphia” as a phrase denoting aspirations for progress as well as way of describing the region including Philadelphia and extending beyond its boundaries. For more than a century since, numerous businesses and other organizations, including The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, have signaled their regional scope by ⇒ Read More

How often have you heard people proudly call Philadelphia a “greene country towne,” quoting William Penn’s evocative description of the city he founded?  Along with “city of brotherly love” – another catchy Penn coinage – the phrase ranks as the granddaddy of all municipal brands, pre-dating “Big Apple” and “Big Easy” by almost three centuries. ⇒ Read More

What might you do if you found yourself with almost 50,000 square miles of seemingly virgin land in a place you have never seen, far from home? In 1681, when William Penn – entrepreneur, scholar, religious mystic, Enlightenment intellectual – acquired Pennsylvania, he had a ready answer. Primed with forward-looking ideas about equality and shared ⇒ Read More

The nation celebrated the one-hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1876 in Philadelphia with the Centennial Exhibition, the first full-scale world’s fair held in the United States. As the exhibits in Fairmount Park demonstrated, the cause for celebration was not primarily history but industrial progress. In the decades after the Civil War, large-scale ⇒ Read More

Industrialization, transportation, and migration transformed the Philadelphia region in the first half of the nineteenth century. While turnpikes, canals, and railroads extended the city’s reach, new communities also formed within Philadelphia County as boroughs such as Frankford and Spring Garden were incorporated and villages such as Manayunk developed around mills and factories. In South Jersey, ⇒ Read More

Philadelphia’s central role in the birth of a new nation is not to be underestimated. But the commemoration of the Declaration of Independence, the work of the Continental Congress, and the writing of the Constitution in the city have tended to overshadow the ways in which the Philadelphia region’s entire story is in many ways ⇒ Read More

From its origins as a series of settlements at the edge of the Atlantic World to the age of international air travel, Greater Philadelphia has been a crossroads of global interaction and exchange. With a diverse population from the start, inhabited by Native Americans and then colonized by Dutch, Swedes, Englishmen, Germans, and Africans, the ⇒ Read More

What does it mean if a place loves you back? That was the question posed by the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation (GPTMC) when it chose the slogan “The Place That Loves You Back” to promote the Philadelphia region as a tourist destination in its 1997 advertising campaign. This was of course not the city’s ⇒ Read More

William Penn (1644-1718), the founder and proprietor of Pennsylvania, had high hopes for Philadelphia. He wanted the city to become the economic and moral hub and showpiece of the nearly 50,000 square miles that he had been granted as Pennsylvania (Penn’s Woods). Penn outlined his radical notion when he advertised the city for settlement in ⇒ Read More

In the second half of the twentieth century, an era of social change, manufacturing in the Philadelphia region plummeted as northeastern states lost factories and jobs to the Sunbelt and international competitors. Philadelphia’s longtime major industry, textiles, also was hit by product changes, for example the change in consumer preferences for nylon hosiery rather than ⇒ Read More

Greater Philadelphia, the “Workshop of the World,” felt the impact of national and international events during two world wars and the Great Depression. Although the region’s rate of industrial growth slowed in the first half of the twentieth century, the demands created by war energized manufacturing, particularly in shipyards on both sides of the Delaware ⇒ Read More

While investing in new attractions and services for tourism and redeveloping sites such as the Philadelphia Navy Yard for new purposes, the Philadelphia region also re-emerged as an immigration gateway for newcomers from South and Central America, Asia, and Africa. In 2008, the city of Philadelphia gained population for the first time since the 1950s. ⇒ Read More

How will they know? How will future generations of Philadelphians have any inkling that their city once thrived as a premier manufacturing center, the fine products issuing from its shops, mills, and plants prized by customers around the nation and the world? There are few traces left of this history—abandoned factory buildings here and there—and ⇒ Read More