Pennsylvania historical timeline

Origins

The Lenape and Susquehannock held this land. William Penn received the colony in 1681 as settlement of a debt owed to his father and founded it on religious tolerance, which drew Quakers, Mennonites, Amish and German Pietists in numbers.

Turning points

Philadelphia was the centre of the Revolution: the Declaration of Independence was adopted there in 1776 and the Constitution drafted in the same room in 1787. The city served as the national capital for a decade. In July 1863 the Confederate invasion was stopped at Gettysburg in the bloodiest battle of the war.

Influential people

Benjamin Franklin made Philadelphia his home and shaped its institutions. Andrew Carnegie built the steel industry that made Pittsburgh, and gave away the fortune it produced in libraries and museums.

Cultural evolution

The world's first commercial oil well was drilled at Titusville in 1859, starting the petroleum industry. Steel and anthracite carried the state for a century, then collapsed in the 1970s and 1980s, and the recovery has been uneven.

Present-day significance

Pittsburgh reinvented itself around medicine, universities and robotics; Philadelphia around healthcare and education. The rural middle remains agricultural, and the political distance between the two halves is a permanent feature of American election coverage.