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  • From Peopling to Postethnic:Pennsylvania Pluralism Reconsidered
  • Kathryn E. Wilson (bio) and Rosalind Beiler (bio)

News about immigration and ethnicity is everywhere in 2016—in the current US presidential campaign, in the ongoing European refugee crisis, in the United Kingdom's "Brexit" referendum, and even in Broadway musicals. Daily we are faced with public discussions about immigration and its attendant issues of ethnicity, religion, and race. Invariably, the anxieties underlying these discussions reflect the enduring concerns of a diverse society: How and why do people migrate? How can receiving nations or localities best respond to the needs of displaced people? How are newcomers integrated into new or existing communities of settlement? In what ways do they transform these communities? How do people from different cultural backgrounds and identities coexist, interact, and flourish together, and on what terms?

In this special issue of the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, we bring together scholars of Pennsylvania history to revisit some of these questions using current approaches to immigration and ethnicity. In doing so, we have privileged immigration and ethnicity as a thematic frame, knowing that this frame is contested and strongly related to others—labor, economics, geography, globalization, and the Atlantic world. But the frames of immigration and ethnicity persist in the study of Pennsylvania history, where they are embodied in the founding narrative of William Penn's "Holy Experiment" and enduring ideas of "Pennsylvania pluralism."1 The articles in this issue chart contemporary approaches to Pennsylvania pluralism, from the dynamism of the colonial [End Page 257] Atlantic world to revisions of the industrial era, ending with "postethnic" approaches that embody the complexities of Pennsylvania diversity in the age of globalization.

Pluralism—its practice, politics, limits, and legacies—has long been part of the story of Pennsylvania. From its founding, contemporaries noted the unusual diversity of Pennsylvania's population. Recounting the colony's history in 1698, New Jersey colonist Thomas Gabriel pointed to the presence of Dutch, Swedes, and Finns prior to the arrival of the English.2 Germantown founder Daniel Francis Pastorius commented on Pennsylvania's religious diversity and noted that English and Dutch Calvinists, Quakers, and Swedish and German Lutherans all worshipped in the colony.3 Historians have argued that Pennsylvania's unique heterogeneity resulted from William Penn's early policies of religious toleration. The founder's work in England, Ireland, and Europe to secure freedom from persecution for Quakers shaped his thinking about freedom of conscience. One of his key goals in founding Pennsylvania was to provide a place where religious dissenters, especially Quakers, could practice their beliefs freely. At the same time, he aimed to create a colonial enterprise that would profit him economically. These combined goals brought a wide variety of people to the colony.4

Pennsylvania's diversity increased throughout the eighteenth century. In "Mapping Ethnicity in Early National Philadelphia," Billy Smith and Paul Sivitz demonstrate the multicultural nature of Philadelphia's population a century after the colony's founding. Using GIS tools and spatial analysis, they show that the city's ethnic and racial diversity, while "intense" at midcentury, increased even further by the 1780s and 1790s. The authors find, furthermore, that Philadelphians did not cluster in ethnic enclaves but resided in integrated neighborhoods where they lived and [End Page 258] worked alongside those who spoke different languages and practiced different cultural traditions.

Pennsylvania's western frontier was also a place of cultural pluralism in the eighteenth century, as Jonathan Burns, Andrew Dudash, and Ryan Mathur reveal in their "hidden gem" essay about Fort Shirley's Muslim charm. The authors believe the charm belonged to one of the commonwealth's earliest African migrants, who entered the region with George Croghan when he hid with a group of Native Americans refugees during the French and Indian War (1756–63). Such archaeological evidence adds new dimensions to our understanding of religious and ethnic diversity on Pennsylvania's frontier.5 Like early national Philadelphians, rural Pennsylvanians also engaged with people from many cultural and religious backgrounds on a regular basis.

How these differences were experienced and understood has changed over the course of Pennsylvania's and the nation's histories. Immigration seems a straightforward term, embodied...

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