Philadelphia

Philadelphia was founded by English Quaker William Penn in 1682. Its founding was revolutionary for two reasons: first, for its planned, rectilinear grid of streets covering two square miles, and second, for the religious tolerance Penn promised and then codified in the Charter of Privileges he granted in 1701. One hundred years after its founding Philadelphia had grown to be the largest city on the eastern seaboard and the economic, cultural, and political center of the new nation. Across the nineteenth century, Philadelphia’s economy shifted from on relying primarily on trade out of its port to one based on industrial production, and by the turn of the twentieth century, it was home to the most diversified manufacturing base of any city in the country. When the US Census conducted its Census of Manufacturers at the turn of the twentieth century, it counted 300 separate products. Philadelphia firms produced more than 90 percent of them. The economy peaked in the middle decades of the twentieth century and, as was the case in other industrial cities, began a steep decline after WWII. Philadelphia’s population peaked in the Census of 1950 and has dropped by 25 percent since then. Its economy is now dominated by “meds” and “eds.” While the city’s fortunes rebounded at the end of the century it remains the poorest of the nation’s ten largest cities. Given that it is among the oldest American cities, it is not surprising that Philadelphia can be said to have developed a historical consciousness early. By the second half of the nineteenth century Philadelphians had taken to writing histories of the city. To mark the city’s bicentennial (1884), for example, Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott published a history of Philadelphia and it is still worth reading. When the United States marked its Sesquicentennial in 1926, George Morgan published A Complete History of the City of Philadelphia and titled it The City of Firsts (neither included here). Philadelphia topics have also been approached by all schools of professional historiography. These include narrative histories, biographies, political, and economic studies. Philadelphia has also been at the forefront of the New Social History, a development in historical research that began in the 1960s. Between 1969 and 1985, Theodore Hershberg led a team of researchers and together created the Philadelphia Social History Project. Hershberg’s team amassed an immense amount of data from Philadelphia’s nineteenth century. Even more importantly, they computerized the information, creating one of the very first digitized historical databases. Given the length of time historians have been writing about Philadelphia and given the various subjects they have tackled and the methods they have employed, the literature on the history of Philadelphia is vast and cannot all be included in this bibliography.