Pennsylvania

Philadelphia in the summer of 1776 was the most important room in the world. It was there, in the Pennsylvania State House — now Independence Hall — that the Declaration of Independence was debated and signed, and there again in 1787 that the Constitutional Convention produced the framework of American government. Pennsylvania's central geographic position, its cultural diversity rooted in William Penn's founding vision of tolerance, and its status as the most populous colony made it the natural site for these deliberations. Benjamin Franklin, the most famous Pennsylvanian of the founding era, was present for both.

The state's other great claim on American history came in the summer of 1863. The Battle of Gettysburg, fought July 1–3 in the small Pennsylvania town of that name, was the bloodiest engagement of the Civil War and the moment the Confederate army's last serious offensive capacity was broken. More than 50,000 men were killed, wounded, or captured in three days. Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at the dedication of the battlefield cemetery that November, distilling the meaning of the war into 272 words that are now inseparable from the idea of American democracy.

Pennsylvania's industrial history is equally significant. Pittsburgh became the steel capital of the world in the Gilded Age, its mills powering the infrastructure of a continental nation. The labor movement found crucial battlegrounds in Pennsylvania — from the Homestead Strike of 1892 to the coal miners' struggles in the anthracite fields. Today Pennsylvania remains one of the perennial swing states of presidential politics, its electoral geography a compressed version of American polarization: dense Democratic cities, vast Republican rural stretches, and suburbs that decide everything.