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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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. ...
Connecting the Past with the Present, Building Community, Creating a Legacy