The culture of Philadelphia goes back to 1682 when Philadelphia was established by William Penn, founder of the colonial-era Province of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia emerged quickly as the largest and most influential city in the Thirteen Colonies.

By the 1750s, Philadelphia was the second-largest city in the British Empire after London, and a center of early American culture, political leadership, intellectual thought, and industry and manufacturing. It served as the capital of both colonial-era British America and then, until 1800, as the first capital of the United States.

Present-day Philadelphia was formerly inhabited by Lenape, a Native American tribe. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Philadelphia was known globally for its freedom of religion and a city where people could live without fear of persecution because of their religious affiliations or practices. Thousands of Quakers, Mennonites, and other Protestant denominations at odds with the pracitices of the Church of England and Catholic Church at the time fled Europe to seek refuge in Philadelphia.

Prior to the American Revolution and following it, Philadelphia grew quickly into a major political and economic center of the United States, serving as the nation's capital until 1800. During the Revolutionary War, the First and Second Continental Congress met at what today is Independence Hall at 4th and Chestnut streets.

In 1776, 56 delegates to the Second Continental Congress, determined to secure independence from British colonial rule, charged the Committee of Five, including John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman, with authoring a declaration to King George III declaring the Thirteen Colonies free and independent states.

Adams, a leading proponent of independence, persuaded the Committee of Five to charge Jefferson with writing the document's original draft, which Jefferson largely wrote in isolation between June 11 and June 28, 1776, from the second floor of a three-story home he was renting at 700 Market Street in Philadelphia. The Declaration of Independence was unanimously adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, which both formalized and escalated the Revolutionary War.

The document has become one of the most inconic statements on human rights and human liberties, particularly its second sentence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Historian Stephen Lucas called the Declaration of Independence "one of the best-known sentences in the English language." Historian Joseph Ellis has written that the document contains "the most potent and consequential words in American history".

Following the Battle of Gettysburg, the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln famously referenced the Declaration of Independence in the Gettysburg Address, one of the most famous speeches in American history, saying, "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."