“A group of Philadelphia-area historical organizations are pooling their archives into ‘The Revolutionary City: A Portal to the Nation’s Founding,’ a growing collection of original documents that has been digitized, catalogued and made searchable by the public.
“More than 6,000 documents with more than 57,000 pages have already been uploaded into the publicly accessible website. The project began a decade ago with three major archives: the American Philosophical Society, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the Library Company. Since then, the cohort has grown to eight members.
“The director of the Philosophical Society, Patrick Spero, expects ‘The Revolutionary City’ to ultimately contain more than 100,000 documents in time for the nation’s semiquincentennial celebrations next summer.
“ ‘The Revolutionary City’ aims to tell as complete a story of the Revolution of Philadelphia as possible,” Spero said. “We have diaries from people that you’ve never heard of. But if you read their diary, you’ll learn new things about what it was like to live through this momentous event.”
“The portal contains groundbreaking documents, like Thomas Jefferson’s copy of the Declaration of Independence, in which he included notations directing how it should be performed out loud. It also includes more commonplace things, like letters between Elizabeth Coleman and Nathan Sellers, a young Quaker couple who kept their relationship secret because Sellers had broken away from religious pacifism by supporting the Revolution.
“During the period of the Revolution, Philadelphia’s Black population flipped from being a mostly enslaved demographic to one that was mostly free, representing a sea change for that community. “The Revolutionary City” has legal documents from 1781 that show how a free Black man in Philadelphia named John Francis sold himself into indentured servitude in order to buy his wife out of slavery.”
Browse the collection here.
Submitted by Robin McCarthy
