Pennsylvania

The Republicans maintained control of the state for some 50 years after 1865. Significantly, during that period Simon Cameron, Matthew S. Quay, Bois Penrose, and other Pennsylvania political leaders held important national positions from which they could wield support and provide protection for Pennsylvania’s rising industries.

Industrial enterprises needed armies of workers, and these were supplied through immigration. Before the 1880s, most of the new workforce came from Ireland, France, Germany, England, and Scandinavia. Wave upon wave of immigrants then came from Italy, Poland, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. Since the late 1920s, some of Pennsylvania’s labour needs have been filled by blacks migrating from the South. While it remains an industrialized state, Pennsylvania has not had a significant upsurge in population since the end of World War I. The important change has been a redistribution of manufacturing activities from the older cities to smaller plants scattered throughout the countryside, which came about with the introduction of the motor car. In its population distribution, Pennsylvania is only slightly more urban today than it was in 1920. As a result in the 1990s much of the state retains a forested and rural atmosphere exemplifying nature’s bounty as first viewed by the colonial settlers.

On September 11, 2001, a hijacked passenger plane—believed to have been headed for the White House, Camp David, or the US Capitol Building—crashed in rural Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing all those on board.