Jean R. Soderlund is a Professor of History at Lehigh University and author of Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn.
The American Revolution brought upheaval to the lives of Delaware Valley residents as armies fought in battles and stripped food and other supplies from homes throughout the region. The transition from the imperial British monarchy to a republican government under the Continental Congresses and Constitutional Convention transformed Philadelphia’s legacy from a growing provincial seaport to ...
The struggle for women’s equality and civil rights started early in the Philadelphia region as women organized for education, property ownership, political power, economic opportunity, and freedom. In the colonial era, Quakers took the vanguard in women’s rights among European settlers by promoting women as ministers and overseers of discipline within the Society of Friends. Nevertheless, ...
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 told the Pennsylvanians ...
As in many parts of colonial North America, employers in and around Philadelphia recruited workers through indentured servitude, a system of bound labor that obligated individuals to serve for a term of years. Servitude began in the Delaware Valley with the seventeenth-century Swedish, Dutch, and English settlements, expanding after 1720 when a new wave of ...
Native Americans lived in what became southeastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and northern Delaware for more than 10,000 years before the arrival of Europeans in the early seventeenth century. By emphasizing peace and trade, the Lenapes retained their sovereignty and power through 1680, unlike native peoples in New England and Virginia who suffered disastrous conflicts with the colonists. ...
Between 1674 and 1702, New Jersey was divided in half: The proprietary West New Jersey colony faced the Delaware River while East New Jersey looked toward the Hudson. Although this political division lasted less than three decades, it represented long-standing geographical orientations of the Lenape and Munsee native inhabitants and European ...
Connecting the Past with the Present, Building Community, Creating a Legacy