The culture of Philadelphia goes back to 1682 when Philadelphia was established by William Penn, founder of the colonial-era Province of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia emerged quickly as the largest and most influential city in the Thirteen Colonies.
By the 1750s, Philadelphia was the second-largest city in the British Empire after London, and a center of early American culture, political leadership, intellectual thought, industry and manufacturing. Philadelphia served as the capital of both colonial-era British America and then, until 1800, as the first capital of the United States.
History
Present-day Philadelphia was formerly inhabited by the Lenape, a Native American tribe. In the 17th and 18th centuries (1600-1799) Philadelphia was known globally for its freedom of religion where people could live without fear of persecution because of their religious beliefs, affiliations or practices. Thousands of Quakers, Mennonites, and other Protestant denominations at odds with the practices of the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church at the time fled Europe to seek refuge in Philadelphia.
Prior to the American Revolution and following it, Philadelphia grew quickly into a major political and economic center of the United States, serving as the nation's capital until 1800. During the Revolutionary War, the First and Second Continental Congress met at what today is Independence Hall at 4th and Chestnut streets.
In 1776, 56 delegates to the Second Continental Congress, determined to secure independence from British colonial rule, charged the Committee of Five, including John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman, with authoring a declaration to King George III declaring the Thirteen Colonies free and independent states.
John Adams, a leading proponent for colonial independence, persuaded the Committee of Five to charge Jefferson with writing the document's original draft. Jefferson largely wrote the document in isolation between June 11 and June 28, 1776, from the second floor of a three-story home he was renting at 700 Market Street in Philadelphia. This document became known as the Declaration of Independence. It was unanimously adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, which both formalized and escalated the Revolutionary War.
The document has become one of the most iconic statements on human rights and human liberties, particularly its second sentence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Historian Stephen Lucas called the Declaration of Independence "one of the best-known sentences in the English language." Historian Joseph Ellis has written that the document contains "the most potent and consequential words in American history".
Following the Battle of Gettysburg, the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln famously referenced the Declaration of Independence in the Gettysburg Address, one of the most famous speeches in American history, saying, "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
In the 19th and 20th century, immigration and migration led to large concentrations of Irish, Italians, Germans, Asians, Puerto Ricans and African Americans. Philadelphia continues to be a major destination for immigrants, with large Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, East African, Middle Eastern, Indian and Mexican immigrant populations, among others.
The city has made contributions in art, music, television, architecture and food. Philadelphia institutions range from the Philadelphia Museum of Art to Pat's Steaks.
People
Before the first European settlers arrived in present-day Philadelphia, the region was inhabited by the Lenape, a group of Native American people. The Lenape occasionally fought with the earliest Dutch settlers, but had much better relations with William Penn and the early inhabitants of the English subjects of the colony of Pennsylvania. Still, disease and development pushed the Lenape west.
A member of the Religious Society of Friends who faced religious persecution and was imprisoned in Great Britain for challenging established religious views of the Church of England, Penn envisioned his colony as a place where many groups of people could live together and worship freely. Mennonites, Amish, Moravians, and Pietists moved to the area during the 17th century.
By the mid-18th century, Quakers and the English had become a minority in the colony as other ethnic groups such as the Welsh, Scots, free blacks, Germans, Ulster Scots, Finns, Swedes, Dutch Americans, and Irish moved to the city.
Lutherans established places of worship in the city as early as the 1720s. In 1748, Henry Muhlenberg led the founding of the Lutheran-affiliated Pennsylvania Ministerium.
In 1734, followers of what would become the Schwenkfelder Church arrived in Philadelphia and settled in the region. The first American Presbytery was founded in 1706 in Philadelphia and a year later in September 1707 the Philadelphia Baptist Association was founded, the oldest Baptist association in the United States. The city's first Catholic chapel was built in 1733 and the city's first recorded practicing Jew, Nathan Levy, arrived as early as 1735.
During most of the 19th century, immigrants mainly from Germany, England, and Ireland settled in the city. Some of these immigrants were Catholic, which fueled anti-Catholic feelings and organizations. In the 1840s Philadelphia became a major base for anti-Catholic Protestant groups which soon led to deadly riots in 1844. However, by the end of the 19th century, Roman Catholics had become the largest single denomination in Philadelphia, though all Protestant denominations combined remained a majority of the Christians in Philadelphia into the present day.
During the last decades of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, the origin of immigrants shifted from England, Ireland, and Germany to Italy, Southern Europe, Russia, Poland, and Eastern Europe. Italians and Poles helped increase the city's Catholic population, but Jewish immigrants, mainly from Poland, Lithuania, and Russia, were the largest religion to settle in the city during this period. Supplementing the already settled German Jews, the city's Jewish population swelled from 5,000 in 1881 to 100,000 in 1905. Philadelphia's Italian population changed from 300 in 1870 to 77,000 in 1910. Hungarian and Polish immigrants also settled in the city, but in smaller numbers. In the 20th century political power began to shift from primarily white Protestants to Irish and Italian Catholics and Jews, with the city's first Catholic and Jewish mayors elected in 1963 and 1992 respectively.
In the second half of the 19th century, immigration began from Latin America, mainly from Puerto Rico and Cuba. Starting in the 1950s, large numbers of Puerto Ricans settling primarily in North Philadelphia. By the end of the 20th century, Puerto Ricans became the largest Latino group in Philadelphia.
Immigrants from China founded Chinatown in the 1870s and 1880s; over the next century, the neighborhood grew into a diverse community with immigrants from many Asian countries. By the 21st century, Philadelphia's two largest Asian ethnic groups were Chinese and Korean immigrants. Philadelphia became the earliest recorded East Coast city with a Korean community in the 1880s; early members were largely political exiles supporting Philip Jaisohn.
Immigration from the Middle East to Philadelphia began as early as the 1880s with immigrants primarily from Lebanon. Starting in the 1960s immigrants from other Middle Eastern countries, such as Syria, the Palestinian territories and Iraq moved to the city. Other immigrants from Asia during the last decades of the 20th century include Indians, Vietnamese and Cambodians. Another community who established an identity in Philadelphia during the 20th century was the gay community. The city's homosexual community is centered in a portion of Washington Square West, nicknamed the "gayborhood" by residents.Insight Guides: Philadelphia and Surroundings, pages 39, 58 - 59
African Americans
The first black people in Philadelphia were slaves; with at most 1,500 people living as slaves in the city during the period slavery was legal. Slaves in Philadelphia usually lived in the same house of their owners and worked as servants or in their owners' shops. An abolition law in 1780 did not free any existing slaves, but banned the slave trade in Pennsylvania and freed the children of slaves born after the law was passed once they reached a certain age. By the time the law was passed, about 400 slaves and 800 free black people lived in Philadelphia. Many newly freed slaves and escaped slaves from the South moved to the city, and by 1820 the city's African American population was nearly eleven percent. During this time one former slave, Richard Allen, founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. As the African American population grew, so did white hostility towards them. African Americans were attacked and killed in the street and in their houses during a race riot in 1834, and four years later a state law was passed that prevented African Americans from voting. Abolitionists were also targets; they were prevented from spreading their message, and one of their meeting houses was burned.A Concise History of Philadelphia, pages 81 - 87
In the latter half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century large numbers of African Americans migrated from the Southern United States to Philadelphia giving the city the largest African American population of a northern U.S. city. In 1896 W. E. B. Du Bois came to Philadelphia and wrote his sociological book The Philadelphia Negro. Du Bois' study of the city's African Americans found many lived in Center City with growing populations in West Philadelphia. Many African Americans lived in neighborhoods near the rich white families they worked for. There was also a small group of upper class African Americans, both educated, wealthy and Philadelphia born, who descended from freedmen earlier in the century. The aristocratic African Americans were generally isolated, not recognized or even known about by the white population and alienated from the rest of the city's African American population.
As Philadelphia grew more industrialized the new factories refused to hire African Americans, with only about one percent of Philadelphia's African American population finding employment with the factories. In 1899, W. E. B. Du Bois said that ninety percent of the African American population in the city was below the poverty line. White-collar office jobs also refused to hire African Americans and many worked as domestic workers. There were African Americans that did manage to own their own businesses, while other became professionals such as doctors and lawyers. In 1884 Christopher J. Perry founded The Philadelphia Tribune, a newspaper for African Americans.