The year 2026 promises to yield a plethora of projects centered on United States history for the Semiquincentennial, and Philadelphia is positioning itself to be the epicenter of the celebrations. The University of Pennsylvania Press has gotten an early start, in a big way, with a three-volume set of books on Philadelphia history.

Subtitled A New History for the Twenty-First Century, the books have been curated in collaboration with the online site, The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia (EGP), with additional content. EGP resides at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities located at Rutgers Camden. “When we went to curate the books, we looked at what we had in the digital site,” said Charlene Mires, professor emerita of history at Rutgers Camden and a co-founder of EPG. She was the leader of the book project and co-editor of Volume Two.

Rather than being arranged chronologically or alphabetically, each of the three volumes places Philadelphia in a geographic framework. With the first book, The Greater Philadelphia Region, Mires explained, “We were thinking about how Philadelphia relates to New Jersey, Delaware, and southeastern Pennsylvania, at how they’re connected.” The second volume is titled Greater Philadelphia and the Nation, and the third expands outward with Greater Philadelphia and the World.

Within those geographic contexts, each book examines the city’s history, culture, institutions, and politics, past and present. “We saw that we had groups of topics with not only historical events, but also showing how the nation continued to evolve,” said Mires.

The more than 100 contributors are historical scholars, archivists, public historians, journalists, and cultural commentators. Yet, despite the roster of authors being weighted somewhat towards Ph.D. historians, the content is remarkably accessible to a general readership, while still holding the interest of those with a deeper knowledge of the city.

Even the editors found themselves learning new things. “I co-authored an essay on Center City, working with Catharine Dann Roeber. I learned why we call it Center City,” Mires recalled. “At the city’s founding, it was just ‘Philadelphia.’ In the aftermath of consolidation, a new reference was needed for what it was called. It became Central City and, eventually, Center City. It was fun for me to figure out that transition.”

“We wanted to write them in ways that are not too technical,” she continued. “We set out to have accessible essays grounded in the latest, best scholarship, including content that might have been contained in academic publications, but not widely known.”

Howard Gillette, professor emeritus of history at Rutgers Camden and co-editor of The Greater Philadelphia Region, noted that all the essays, regardless of the authors’ credentials, underwent the same rigorous fact-checking and editing that more academically-oriented work will experience.

While it is common practice for non-fiction publications to include a reading list to encourage more learning, these books take it further. Each chapter ends with an “Explore More” section that highlights places and collections to visit, as well as suggested readings, following the lead of EPG. “That’s always been fundamental in our work,” said Mires. “We’ve always asked our authors to encourage readers to get out and actually see the places they’re reading about.”

The editors followed their own advice when sourcing visuals for the books, seeking out Philadelphia’s wide collection of archives and institutions to assemble photographs and images of maps, portraits, and documents to support the writing.

The University of Pennsylvania Press received funding to provide a set of the books to all Philadelphia public schools and each of the 55 branches of the Free Library of Philadelphia and for the editors to offer workshops in the schools.

At a time when portions of the nation’s history are under siege by the Trump administration, which aims to erase negative events, it is noteworthy that the authors in these volumes have instead acknowledged that history in a straightforward, objective manner. Volume 2, Greater Philadelphia and the Nation, opens with an essay by co-editor Jean R. Soderlund entitled “Challenging the Nation’s Paradox,” a clear-eyed discussion of the contradictions contained in the Declaration of Independence’s assertion of “all men are created equal” when it was written in 1776.

“I look at these books as being a legacy of scholarship. They were finished before that [executive order],” explained Mires. “They reflect on all aspects of Philadelphia and U.S. history. These books speak to that history. We hope that by doing so will inspire the next generation of scholars.”