‘The Revolutionary City’ gives everyone access to original documents of Philly residents living through the war

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The revolutionary moment that gave birth to the United States 250 years ago had many stories. A new online archive aims to bring tens of thousands of them to life.

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. They wrote to each other using fake names.

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.

Francis’ indenture contract, which would bind him to a master for a set length of time, is on view in the in-person exhibition associated with the project, now at the Philosophical Society’s museum next to Independence Hall.

Curator Caroline O’Connell assembled objects and documents that reflect the experiences of regular Philadelphia residents trying to navigate a tumultuous period.

“They were just typical Philadelphians. There are people living, working, enduring during this period and who are being impacted by this unfolding conflict around them,” she said. “I wanted to zoom in on daily life.”

“The Revolutionary City” has been a decade in the making, bringing major historical organizations together and starting the arduous process of scanning documents and inputting metadata for each into a searchable platform.

Many of the documents are written by hand in 18th century script that can seem illegible to the untrained eye. “The Revolutionary City” is equipped with an artificial intelligence function that can transcribe the script in real time.

The system also uses network mapping to automatically trace connections to other documents on similar subjects.

“Once the documents are transcribed and they go through the handwritten text recognition, every word in that document now is searchable,” said Bayard Miller, associate director of digital initiatives at the American Philosophical Society.

“So if you’re searching for anything that has to do with rum, for example — if you’re interested in that you can find that,” he said.

When the British army occupied Philadelphia in 1777, it ordered every resident in the city to report any amount of rum in their possession to the General Commissary or “be dealt with in the most rigorous manner.”

Unlike past anniversaries of the birth of the United States, Philadelphia is not embarking on large-scale building projects, such as the Centennial Exposition of 1876, FDR Park of 1926 and the African American Museum in 1976.

But Spero calls “The Revolutionary City” a major 2026 infrastructure project that’s made for the digital age.

“TheRevolutionaryCity.org is more than a website,” he said. “It is a massive online digital repository that has taken hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars to build. It’s going to take that same amount of effort to continue to maintain into the future.”

“The Revolutionary City” museum exhibition closes Dec. 28. The growing website will remain in perpetuity.