Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

[51]

The first monthly magazine, the first daily newspaper, the first religious magazine, the first religious weekly, the first penny paper, mathematical journal, juvenile magazine, and illustrated comic paper ever published in the United States had started on their career in Philadelphia; and that city produced, still more memorably, in Benjamin Franklin the first American writer to gain a permanent foreign reputation; and America's first imaginative writer and first professional writer of any description, in Charles Brockden Brown, the novelist.

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The first national capital.

In 1774 the first and second Continental Congresses met in that city, which was then the largest in America. In 1776 Philadelphia sent forth the Declaration of Independence. In 1787, in the same hall which had given birth to the Declaration, the Federal Convention assembled and formulated the Federal Constitution. The new Constitution met particularly strong opposition in Pennsylvania, which was, however, the second state to ratify it. The first Congress under the Federal Constitution met in New York in March, 1789, and Washington was inaugurated there