Pennsylvania, The Keystone

Pennsylvania's nickname is the Keystone State, and the metaphor holds up to examination. A keystone is the wedge-shaped central block of an arch, the one that locks the other pieces in place. Remove it and the structure falls.

Pennsylvania's founders understood what the geometry of the original thirteen colonies implied: their state sat between New England and the South, between the Atlantic coast and the frontier, between the Quaker tradition of conscience and the harder-edged economic ambitions of what the country would become. It was the hinge. The evidence runs across three centuries.

Pennsylvania hosted the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention. Its coal powered the furnaces that drove the Industrial Revolution in America. Its oil wells gave the world its first commercial petroleum industry.

Its steel mills built the bridges and skyscrapers of the modern city. Its farms fed the continent. Its turnpike became a model for the Interstate System.

It also held, in the same ground, the contradictions that American history has never fully resolved. The freedom promised in William Penn's Charter of Privileges coexisted with the institution of slavery, Pennsylvania's Gradual Abolition Act of seventeen eighty was the first such law in the Americas, but gradual meant exactly that, and Black Pennsylvanians lived in a state that was neither the South nor a full promise of equality. The labor that built the industries was consumed by them: miners buried in anthracite, steelworkers killed in mill accidents, families swept away behind a dam that was someone else's private lake.

The landscape registers all of it. The mountains run northeast to southwest in long parallel ridges, part of the ancient Appalachians. The rivers cut through them to the Ohio, the Delaware, the Chesapeake.

The farmland of the south-central valleys is among the most fertile on the continent. The post-industrial cities of the west and northeast are still, in the twenty-first century, working out what comes after the industries that built them. Pennsylvania does not resolve cleanly into a single story.

It was designed, from the beginning, to hold more than one.