American history

FROM a general scan of Philadelphia's skyline of skyscrapers, its massive fin de siècle piles, and equally drab office blocks and empty car-park lots, it's difficult to believe there was a time when Philadelphia was the epicentre of the American universe.

Founded by William Penn in 1682 at the junction of the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers as the capital of Pennsylvania Colony, the city was named after the ancient Greek words for "brotherly love", a sentiment that was to find its truest expression during the revolutionary turbulence of the 18th-century when it hosted the First Continental Congress and the Second Continental Congress that signed the United States Declaration of Independence and the Constitutional Convention.

After the historic victory that forever ousted the British, the city was, briefly, the capital of the United States while Washington, DC was being built.