Current and Upcoming Events
November
17nov7:00 pm8:00 pmWomen, Law, and Disability in Early AmericaFree
Event Details
Fireside Chat: Women, Law, and Disability in Early
Event Details
Fireside Chat: Women, Law, and Disability in Early America
with Jennifer Reiss
Tuesday, November 17th, 2026 | 7:00 PM EST
Virtual Event | Free
What can the Library Company’s collections teach us about the intersections of women’s lives, disability, and the law? Dr. Jennifer Reiss, the 2025–2026 Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch Dissertation Fellow, will share materials she explored during her fellowship to uncover how women experienced and navigated legal and social systems in early America. This program will highlight the power of everyday documents as “keys” to understanding the past, in this case revealing histories of gender, disability, and lived experience.
Jennifer Reiss is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania working on the North Atlantic in the long eighteenth century. Jennifer is particularly interested in women and gender, early modern medicine and disability, and British and early American legal history. Her dissertation project, provisionally titled Undone Bodies: Gender and the Making of Disability in Early America, reconsiders how disability as a social category was constructed and experienced before burgeoning clinical understandings of bodily difference in the antebellum era.
December
01dec7:00 pm8:00 pmWhen The Declaration of Independence Was NewsFree
Event Details
Fireside Chat: When The Declaration of Independence Was
Event Details
Tuesday, December 1st, 2026 | 7:00 PM EST
Published for the 250th anniversary of the United States, When the Declaration of Independence Was News focuses on the nation’s founding document at the moment of its creation in 1776, before anyone knew what the legacy of the Declaration would be or if the United States would win the war against Great Britain. It explores how the Declaration was communicated to people in the new nation and around the Atlantic world and reveals the stories of the many people involved in the process of declaring independence, from printers to soldiers to diplomats to translators.
Dr. Emily Sneff is an early American historian and leading expert on the Declaration of Independence. She earned her Ph.D. in History from William & Mary. She is a consulting curator for exhibitions marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration at the Museum of the American Revolution and Historic Trappe.
Sponsored by the Program in Early American Economy and Society