Pennsylvania's colonial assembly began planning a state house in Philadelphia in 1729 and acquired land on Chestnut Street the following year. Construction began in 1732 under master builder Edmund Woolley, working with lawyer and statesman Andrew Hamilton. The central block was usable by the mid-1730s, although the project, including its tower and flanking buildings, continued for two decades. Known at the time as the Pennsylvania State House, the building housed the colony's assembly, executive council, courts, and public offices.

Philadelphia's importance during the imperial crisis made the State House a meeting place for the Second Continental Congress. Delegates appointed George Washington commander of the Continental Army there in 1775, debated independence in 1776, and approved the Declaration of Independence on July 4. The engrossed declaration was signed there beginning on August 2. The Assembly Room became the best-known interior associated with the creation of the United States, even though debate, printing, public proclamation, and military struggle unfolded across many other places.

In 1787 delegates from twelve states assembled in the same room for the Constitutional Convention. Meeting in secrecy from May through September, they replaced the Articles of Confederation with a new federal framework that divided authority among national institutions while leaving unresolved profound conflicts over slavery, representation, and political power. From 1790 to 1800, when Philadelphia served as the temporary national capital, Congress met next door in Congress Hall. The President's House stood nearby and included quarters where members of George Washington's enslaved household lived and worked.

Other resources in the district acquired national meaning over time. The bell ordered for the State House in 1751 became known as the Liberty Bell during the nineteenth century, when antislavery advocates adopted its biblical inscription and image. Abolitionists, suffragists, civil-rights activists, immigrants, and visiting dignitaries repeatedly reinterpreted the bell and Independence Hall. Meanwhile, urban growth, demolition, commerce, and changing preservation ideas altered the surrounding blocks, leaving an uneven mixture of surviving eighteenth-century buildings and later reconstructions.

Congress authorized Independence National Historical Park in 1948, and the National Park Service assembled and restored a broad group of sites associated with the colonial, revolutionary, and early national periods. Independence Hall was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979 because of its exceptional association with the Declaration and Constitution. Modern interpretation also addresses the Lenape homeland, slavery, free Black communities, women's political activity, labor, and the limits of the founding era's promises. The park remains an active civic landscape as well as a preserved architectural district.