Pennsylvania was founded in 1681 by William Penn as a holy experiment in religious tolerance and enlightened governance. Penn's Frame of Government guaranteed liberty of conscience, and his treaty with the Lenni Lenape established an unusually peaceful relationship with Native peoples. He laid out Philadelphia as a planned grid city, the first great planned city in America, which grew into the largest city in colonial North America, with thirty to forty thousand residents by the Revolution. Its population was strikingly diverse and fractious: a Quaker and Anglican merchant elite, a large German community (roughly a third of the population) in the interior, and a militantly anti-British Scots-Irish Presbyterian frontier that shaped the colony's radical politics. Philadelphia's central position made Pennsylvania the natural stage for the Revolution's opening acts. The First Continental Congress convened there in 1774, and Pennsylvania’s writers and printers, above all Thomas Paine with Common Sense, shaped how all thirteen colonies understood what they were fighting for.
Interviewees
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David Brigham
- President and CEO, Historical Society of Pennsylvania
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William Ewald
- John J. O’Brien Professor of Comparative and International Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School
