For North America, the founding groups were English and Scottish, but the next immigration was from Germany where persecution was sometimes even more violent. Economics, for all nomadic tribes was grazing, gradually turning into stationary agriculture; fixed boundaries emerging as private property. The Holy Roman Empire (essentially Germany in a hundred pieces of the Roman Conquest)), consolidated at the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), converting nomads into nations within boundaries. Their ruler was usually hereditary, but a new rule of the Treaty provided: the king would choose his religion, and individuals either conformed or fled from it. Consequently, rebellion was anti-aristocracy, instead of anti-authoritarian. The states were too big for pure Athenian democracy, so Roman Republican was about the only alternative. They voted for representatives, not laws. Central Pennsylvania attracted most of the German immigrants because William Penn's mother was Dutch, and he specifically welcomed them to settle in his new wilderness. (Some resented becoming a buffer between pacifists and nomadic Indians still persisting among the Pennsylvania "Dutch". This was mostly to the bewilderment of other descendants, and took the form of an agricultural hostility to the two major cities, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. At this distance, it is hard to say how much of this talk was political blarney.)

After the Civil War, immigrant groups from other backgrounds made the Atlantic voyage with easier transportation and different motives. It is only a slight exaggeration to say the latter dreamed of getting rich, with less reason to resent their old religions. Two centuries later, In the black migration from the South to the North after the two World Wars, these inside-outsiders encountered both anti-religious and anti-European attitudes.

• History: Philadelphia and the Quaker Colonies Philadelphia and the Quaker Colonies
• Colonial Times More than half of American history took place before 1776, but after 1492. For Philadelphia, Colonial history lasted about a century.
• Tribes, Religions, and Disregard of Boundaries
• Sociology: Philadelphia and the Quaker Colonies The early Philadelphia had many faces, its people were varied and interesting; its history turbulent and of lasting importance.