Pennsylvania

• 1. Introduction

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  Pennsylvania sits at a crossroads that no other state can claim. It touches the Mid-Atlantic, the Northeast, the Appalachians, and the Great Lakes all at once. To its south runs the Mason-Dixon Line; to its northwest, the waters of Lake Erie brush against the Canadian province of Ontario. With over 13 million residents as of the 2020 census, it is the fifth-most populous state in the country, and yet most people passing through it on Interstate 80 have no idea they are crossing a place where the Declaration of Independence was signed, where the bloodiest battle in American history was fought, and where the first medical school in the nation opened its doors in 1765.

  The questions worth asking about Pennsylvania are not small ones. How did a land grant meant to settle a debt of 16,000 pounds sterling become the laboratory for religious freedom across the original thirteen colonies? Why did a state that dominated American steel, coal, and oil for well over a century end up with the largest inventory of abandoned mines in the United States? And what does it mean that a place once described by a political consultant as Philadelphia in the east, Pittsburgh in the west, and Alabama in the middle now decides presidential elections by margins of a single percentage point?

• 2. Before Penn Arrived

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  Meadowcroft Rockshelter, located in Jefferson Township, holds the earliest known evidence of human presence in Pennsylvania and possibly in all of North America. The remains found there point to a civilization that existed over 10,000 years ago, predating what archaeologists call the Clovis culture. Between 10,000 and 16,000 years ago, Native Americans moved across the two continents, arriving in North America during the last major glacial period.

  By 1000 AD, the native peoples of what would become Pennsylvania had moved well beyond their nomadic origins. They had developed agricultural techniques and a mixed food economy. Two major tribal nations held the land when European colonizers arrived. The Lenape, who spoke an Algonquian language, inhabited the eastern region, a territory then called Lenapehoking that stretched from most of present-day New Jersey through the Lehigh Valley and Delaware Valley. The Susquehannock, who spoke an Iroquoian language, were based along the Susquehanna River in the eastern part of the state.

  European disease and persistent warfare proved catastrophic for both tribes. The Hurons and Iroquois blocked the Lenape and Susquehannock from expanding westward into Ohio during the conflict known as the Beaver Wars. Northwest of the Allegheny River, the Iroquoian Petun nation fragmented into three groups during that same period: one in New York, one in Ohio, and the Tiontatecaga along the Kanawha River in what is now southern West Virginia.

• 3. Penn's Experiment

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  On the 28th of February 1681, King Charles II handed Quaker leader William Penn a land charter to settle a debt of 16,000 pounds sterling owed to Penn's late father, Admiral Penn. The transaction ranks among the largest land grants to a single individual in recorded history. Penn had wanted to call the territory New Wales; when that name was rejected, he suggested Sylvania, from the Latin for forest. The King named it Pennsylvania, literally meaning Penn's Woods, in honor of the Admiral. The younger Penn was mortified, convinced people would think he had named the land after himself.

  Penn established two governing innovations that spread throughout the colonies: the county commission and freedom of religion. Voltaire, writing in 1733, summarized Penn's foundational law simply: to ill-treat no person on account of religion, and to consider as brethren all those who believe in one God. Penn signed a peace treaty with Tamanend, leader of the Lenape, and the Treaty of Shackamaxon that followed was, by the historical record, never violated.

  Before Penn's grant, a southeast portion of the land had belonged briefly to New Sweden, established in 1638 at Fort Christina on the site of present-day Wilmington, Delaware. The Dutch held competing claims, and the British conquest of New Netherland in August 1664 eventually cleared the way. The partitioning of the county called Upland on the 12th of November 1674 produced the general outline of the current border between Pennsylvania and Delaware, years before Penn ever set foot on the land.

• 4. Revolution's Cradle

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  Philadelphia was not merely a backdrop to American independence; it was where the arguments were made, where the votes were cast, and where the documents were signed. The First Continental Congress convened there in 1774, drawing representatives from 12 of the 13 colonies. The Second Continental Congress began in May 1775, formed the Continental Army under George Washington, and the following year unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence in that same city.

  When Philadelphia fell to the British during the Philadelphia campaign, the Continental Congress moved west. It met at the Lancaster courthouse on Saturday, the 27th of September 1777, then relocated to York, where it adopted the Articles of Confederation. Pennsylvania delegate John Dickinson was the primary author of that document. Dickinson had already made his name before the war; writing as a delegate to the Stamp Act Congress of 1765, he composed the Declaration of Rights and Grievances, and his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania ran in the Pennsylvania Chronicle between the 2nd of December 1767 and the 15th of February 1768.

  The Constitution was drafted and signed at the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia, the same building where the Declaration of Independence had been adopted, now known as Independence Hall. On the 12th of December 1787, Pennsylvania became the second state to ratify the Constitution, five days after Delaware. Because roughly a third of Pennsylvania's population at the time spoke German, the Constitution was also presented in German so those citizens could participate in the debate. Reverend Frederick Muhlenberg, a Lutheran minister who became the first Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, chaired Pennsylvania's ratifying convention.

• 5. Steel, Coal, and the Gilded Machine

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  Andrew Carnegie founded the Carnegie Steel Company in Pittsburgh; Charles M. Schwab founded Bethlehem Steel in Bethlehem. These were not minor ventures. In the latter half of the 19th century, Pennsylvania housed some of the largest steel companies on earth, and the U.S. oil industry was born in the western part of the state, which supplied the vast majority of the nation's kerosene for years. Boomtowns like Titusville rose quickly and fell just as fast once the oil rush moved on.

  The political machine that ran alongside this industrial growth was built by U.S. Senator Simon Cameron, who later served as Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of War. Control passed to Cameron's son J. Donald Cameron, then to Matthew Quay, and finally to Boies Penrose. Henry Demarest Lloyd, writing about oil baron John D. Rockefeller, said he had done everything with the Pennsylvania legislature except refine it.

  Pennsylvania was the site of the first documented organized strike in North America. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and the Coal Strike of 1902 became nationally defining labor confrontations. In 1922, 310,000 Pennsylvania miners joined a United Mine Workers general coal strike that lasted 163 days and shut down most of the state's coal operations. The eight-hour workday was eventually won, and the coal and iron police were eventually banned. Milton S. Hershey began construction on a chocolate factory in 1903 in a town that now bears his name, and The Hershey Company grew into the largest chocolate manufacturer in North America.

• 6. Gettysburg and Its Aftermath

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  Over three days, from the 1st to the 3rd of July 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg was fought near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. More than 51,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed or wounded. It stands as the bloodiest battle of the Civil War and the bloodiest of any battle in American history. The Union victory at Gettysburg proved to be the war's turning point, leading to the Union's final victory two years later.

  On the 19th of November 1863, President Abraham Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg to participate in a ceremonial consecration of what is now Gettysburg National Cemetery. The speech he delivered there, the Gettysburg Address, ran 271 words and has been ranked among the most famous speeches in American history. An estimated 350,000 Pennsylvanians served in the Union army during the Civil War, among them 8,600 African American military volunteers.

  Pennsylvania's earlier president, James Buchanan of Franklin County, had served as the 15th U.S. president from 1857 to 1861 and was the first president born in Pennsylvania. His tenure ended just as the war was beginning. The political, industrial, and human costs of the Civil War era shaped the state's public institutions for generations, including the Cameron machine that would dominate its politics well into the following century.

• 7. Defining Moments Since 1900

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  On the 31st of May 1918, the Pittsburgh Agreement was signed in Pittsburgh by Tomáš Masaryk, establishing Czechoslovakia as an independent nation. The Benjamin Franklin Bridge, whose chief engineer was Polish-born Ralph Modjeski, opened to traffic on the 1st of July 1926, three days ahead of its scheduled opening on the nation's 150th anniversary. At completion, its 1,750-foot span was the world's longest for a suspension bridge, a distinction it held until the Ambassador Bridge opened in 1929.

  On the 28th of March 1979, the Three Mile Island accident became the most significant nuclear accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant history. During World War II, Pennsylvania had manufactured 6.6 percent of total U.S. military armaments, the sixth-most of the 48 states, and produced military leaders including George C. Marshall, Hap Arnold, Jacob Devers, and Carl Spaatz. More Medals of Honor were awarded to Pennsylvanians during that war than to individuals from any other state.

  On the 11th of September 2001, United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a field in Stonycreek Township, 1.75 miles north of Shanksville, after passengers learned by air phone of the earlier attacks on the World Trade Center and revolted against the four hijackers on board. All 40 civilians were killed. In October 2018-11 people were killed in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting at the Tree of Life - Or L'Simcha Congregation. On the 13th of July 2024, an assassination attempt on Donald Trump occurred near Butler, Pennsylvania.

• 8. What Pennsylvania Makes

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  In 2025, Pennsylvania's gross state product reached 1.056 trillion dollars, the sixth-largest among all U.S. states. If it were an independent country, its economy as of 2023 would rank 20th in the world. Pennsylvania holds first place nationally in several specific economic sectors: it produces 3.9 million barrels of beer annually, hosts over 6,000 farmers' markets, accounts for 80 percent of the nation's pretzel manufacturing, and produces one-fourth of the nation's potato chips across 24 facilities.

  The first nationally chartered bank in the U.S., the Bank of North America, was founded in 1781 in Philadelphia and is now part of Wells Fargo. PNC, which traces its origins to the First National Bank of Pittsburgh chartered under the National Banking Act of 1863, remains the nation's sixth-largest bank and is still based in Pittsburgh. Pennsylvania is also home to the oldest investor-owned utility company in the U.S., The York Water Company.

  The state now carries the nickname Cellicon State for the role of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in developing immunotherapies to treat cancer. C. F. Martin and Company, based in Nazareth, manufactures Martin Guitars played by artists the source names including Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, and Eric Clapton. The University of Pennsylvania, founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1740, remains the state's only Ivy League university, and its Perelman School of Medicine, founded in 1765, was the first medical school established in the nation.