Forget Boston. Philly was where the Revolutionary War really went down.

Boston may have lit the fuse, but Philly is where the Revolution really went down. Caught in the middle of all the fury and foment were roughly 40,000 everyday Philadelphians trying to make do during an insurrection.

It can be hard telling the local story of a revolution, especially in a city where the local story was the story. The American Philosophical Society’s first new exhibit related to America’s 250th birthday in 2026, also known as the Semiquincentennial, tells it in full.

“Philadelphia, the Revolutionary City," which runs from April 11 through Dec. 28, 2025, provides a street-level, city-columnist view of the colonial city. Its wide array of objects, artwork, and materials, including maps, prints, political cartoons, and newspapers, document the daily lives of Philadelphians living and dying through fevered days of rebellion. Telling stories of long-forgotten lives — and with no shortage of hometown pride — the exhibit offers an intimate glimpse into what was then the largest city in the new nation.

“It really is a metropolis,” said exhibitions curator Caroline O’Connell. “It’s teeming with activity, it’s economically vibrant, and it’s culturally diverse … but also the messiness of this period has a lot of parallels with the present.”

“The Revolutionary City” is a time and place where easy labels don’t exist, and life-changing decisions are often made out of simple survival — a stratified city of wealth and hunger, riots and executions, newfound freedoms and unchecked cruelties.

“It’s a reminder that people are also still living their lives, even amid these increasingly harsh conditions,” said O’Connell. “And as we move through the show, the conditions get even harsher.”

Like a free Black man named John Francis who indentured himself in 1781 so he could purchase his wife’s freedom from a Bucks County slave owner. Francis signed the contract, on display, with his mark.

Or Violet Springhouse, a 6-month-old girl indentured that same year by the overseers of Philadelphia’s poor house to a Northern Liberties couple for a “term of twenty-seven and a half years.” Violet, a little girl with a beautiful name but an ugly life, was likely born into slavery, O’Connell said. The lengthy term of her contract, also on display, was a common one for children indentured into servitude during the era.

Then there’s the story of doomed John Roberts, a wealthy Lower Merion Quaker sent to the gallows for aiding the British during their occupation of Philadelphia in 1777 and 1778. Despite pleas for clemency from no less than three signers of the Declaration of Independence, it was one of the very few Philadelphia loyalty trials to end in death during the war.

And the diary of budding Philadelphian portrait artist Charles Peale, who on July 2, 1776, penned a grocery list for eggs and beer, before casually noting: “This day the Continental Congress declared the United States Colonies Free and Independent States.”

Peale then quickly got back to his groceries.

O’Connell, and Mary Grace Wahl, the associate director of the museum, said they assembled objects they hoped would draw in history buffs but also offer unexpected connection points.

A small tin cup used by a doctor for the practice of bloodletting. Continental army enlistment certificates found inside the walls of a house on Pine Street. Elegantly designed trade cards. A tiny 1780 almanac carefully modified by its Jewish owner to reflect the Jewish year 5541 and annotated in Hebrew. Well-worn family cookbooks. A mouse-chewed newspaper posting rewards for runaway enslaved people. A bride’s elegant silk and leather wedding shoes worn just after the war’s end.

The exhibition is partly inspired by the digital archive The Revolutionary City: A Portal to the Nation’s Founding, a collaborative project by Philadelphia historic institutions and the University of Pennsylvania to digitize their Revolution-era collections. The portal now hosts over 6,000 objects and 48,500 documents — and it’s still growing.

The aim of the combined efforts is to show a complete and complicated view of Revolution-era Philly — and also to poke a little shade at Boston, which likes to position itself as the birthplace of the American Revolution, said Patrick Spero, chief executive officer of the American Philosophical Society.

The title of the exhibit is no mistake, he said.

“We want to make the point that every aspect of what was revolutionary in America happened in Philadelphia.”