About Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania is the state where America was invented. The Declaration of Independence was signed here. The Constitution was written here. The Continental Army was forged at Valley Forge. The bloodiest battle of the Civil War, the battle whose outcome determined that the Union would survive, was fought at Gettysburg, and it was over the Pennsylvania fields near Shanksville that the passengers of Flight 93 made the decision that kept the U.S. Capitol standing on September 11, 2001. No other state has been so repeatedly present at the moments that defined the country.

Pennsylvania is also a state of remarkable contrasts. Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, its two great cities, are culturally as different from each other as Boston is from Chicago, separated by 300 miles and by distinct histories, accents, and identities. Between them lies a landscape that moves from the Amish farms of Lancaster County, the most productive non-irrigated farmland in the United States, through the coal towns of the Alleghenies to the robotic research laboratories of Carnegie Mellon University, where the future of artificial intelligence is being shaped in the same city that built the industrial 20th century.

Pennsylvania has been a crucial battleground state in every presidential election in living memory, and its political geography, Democratic cities, Republican rural counties, and competitive suburbs in the middle , mirrors the national divide so precisely that Pennsylvania has become the state that political scientists use as a baseline for understanding American electoral geography. Its destiny and the nation's have been intertwined since 1681 and show no sign of separating.