Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, June 5th at 11:00 AM

In-Person Event

Join us for a guided tour of the Library Company’s first-floor exhibition galleries. Learn more about the history of the de facto first Library of Congress and oldest colonial cultural institution in the United States. Guests will also learn more about art and artifacts on display in the Logan Room, and as well as hear about the collection materials showcased in our rotating exhibition space.

Space is limited, so please sign up for only one tour time per person. Tickets are available for all First Fridays from May 1st through October 2nd, 2026.

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Tuesday, June 16th, 2026 at 5:30 PM ET

For centuries, Black lives have been counted, recorded, and categorized through systems of data. From plantation ledgers and slave ship records to digitized archives and genetic ancestry testing, these forms of documentation have shaped how slavery, race, and freedom are understood. Yet they have also left gaps, distortions, and silences that scholars continue to confront.

This conversation brings together Vincent Brown, Kendra Field, and Evelynn Hammonds to examine how different forms of data have been used to produce knowledge about Black life, and how those records can be reinterpreted to recover history. Brown’s work on slavery and resistance in the Atlantic world reveals how historians reconstruct the movements, networks, and political worlds of enslaved people from fragmentary colonial records. Field’s research and leadership of the 10 Million Names Project demonstrates how genealogical and archival data can reconnect families and restore histories disrupted by slavery. Hammonds’s scholarship on the history of science and the relationship between race and the genome offers a critical perspective on how scientific knowledge has classified, measured, and reshaped ideas about race.

Moving from the ledger to the genome, this panel explores how data has functioned as both a tool of power and a means of historical recovery, and what it means to reconstruct Black life across archives, databases, and scientific knowledge in the present.

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Tuesday, June 23rd, 2026, at 12:00 PM EST

Please join us on June 23^rd at 12:00 pm EST for a Fireside Chat discussion with the authors and co-editors of Claiming Land, Claiming Water: Borders and the People Who Crossed Them in the Early Modern Atlantic. (Penn Press, 2026)

Casey Schmitt will host a roundtable discussion with the editors and two authors in the new edited collection, Claiming Land, Claiming Water: Borders and the People Who Crossed Them in the Early Modern Atlantic. (UPenn, 2026).  Co-editors Rachel Herrmann and Jessica Choppin Roney will be joined by authors Christian Koot and Samuel Truett to discuss this collaborative endeavor.  The authors in Claiming Land, Claiming Water investigate how and why some people imagined and made claims to bounded space—and how and why other people confounded or challenged those claims—through a formative period of intense change in North America and the Atlantic world (c. 1630–1860).

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Tuesday, July 7th at 11 am| In-Person at the Library Company of Philadelphia

The Library Company of Philadelphia is pleased to offer complimentary tours during July in honor of the United States Semiquincentennial!

Join us for a guided tour of the Library Company’s first-floor exhibition galleries. Learn more about the history of the de facto first Library of Congress and the oldest colonial cultural institution in the United States. Guests will also learn more about art and artifacts on display in the Logan Room, and as well as hear about the collection materials showcased in our rotating exhibition space.

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Wednesday, July 8th, 2026, at 7 PM ET

American money and American democracy have always been in tension, pitting political equality against economic inequality. In Money and the Making of the American Revolution, Andrew David Edwards shows how this struggle emerged in America’s founding era. Everyone knows that the founders waged a revolt against taxation without representation. Edwards shows that the dispute over taxes was really a dispute over money: what it was, who could make it, and how to keep it from being used at the expense of the colonists in North America. The colonial rebels refocused their resistance on democratic, local control—defending the power they had used to make money for themselves.

Edwards’s narrative spans four continents, linking the problems of money and revolt in early America to the transatlantic slave trade, the disastrous mismanagement of the East India Company in India, and violence against Native Americans. His analysis emerges from the story itself, through the lives of individuals ranging from John Blackwell, Oliver Cromwell’s one-time war treasurer, to Thomas Paine, the impassioned pamphleteer of the American Revolution. Edwards argues that as the republican vision of an agrarian, independent monetary system faded, the leaders of the Revolution tied the nation to capitalism and imperialism at its founding. The colonists may have won the battle for representation, but the money that underpinned the European empire had established a stronghold in the new republic. Money and the Making of the American Revolution offers both an ambitious new interpretation of the Revolution and a fascinating story about the power of economic ideas.

Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, July 10th at 11:00 AM

In-Person Event

Join us for a guided tour of the Library Company’s first-floor exhibition galleries. Learn more about the history of the de facto first Library of Congress and oldest colonial cultural institution in the United States. Guests will also learn more about art and artifacts on display in the Logan Room, and as well as hear about the collection materials showcased in our rotating exhibition space.

Space is limited, so please sign up for only one tour time per person. Tickets are available for all First Fridays from May 1st through October 2nd, 2026.

REGISTER

REGISTER

Tuesday, July 14th at 11 am| In-Person at the Library Company of Philadelphia

The Library Company of Philadelphia is pleased to offer complimentary tours during July in honor of the United States Semiquincentennial!

Join us for a guided tour of the Library Company’s first-floor exhibition galleries. Learn more about the history of the de facto first Library of Congress and the oldest colonial cultural institution in the United States. Guests will also learn more about art and artifacts on display in the Logan Room, and as well as hear about the collection materials showcased in our rotating exhibition space.

REGISTER

Friday July 17, 5-7 pm | Free
In-Person at the Library Company of Philadelphia

The Library Company invites all who are attending the 47^th annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) to join us for a free open house and reception at the Library Company.

We’ll have drinks and light snacks, and Director Designate Jessica Choppin Roney will share brief updates at 5:30 pm and 6:30 pm about what’s ahead for the Library Company as we move to become a new division of Temple University Libraries.

Visitors can also browse our latest exhibition, Philadelphia’s Radical Revolution: From the Stamp Act to the Federal Constitution.

Pre-registration for this event is encouraged, and donations are appreciated!

The Library Company of Philadelphia is located at 1314 Locust St, Philadelphia PA 19107, around the corner from the DoubleTree Center City Hotel. The Library Company is wheelchair accessible.

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Tuesday, July 21st at 11 am| In-Person at the Library Company of Philadelphia

The Library Company of Philadelphia is pleased to offer complimentary tours during July in honor of the United States Semiquincentennial!

Join us for a guided tour of the Library Company’s first-floor exhibition galleries. Learn more about the history of the de facto first Library of Congress and the oldest colonial cultural institution in the United States. Guests will also learn more about art and artifacts on display in the Logan Room, and as well as hear about the collection materials showcased in our rotating exhibition space.

REGISTER

Tuesday, June 21st, 2026, at 5:30 PM EST

Please join us on the evening of July 21st for a book talk with Greg O’Malley, author of The Escapes of David George: An Odyssey of Slavery (St. Martin’s Press, 2026)

The Escapes of David George: An Odyssey of Slavery, Freedom, and the American Revolution (St. Martin’s Press, 2026) presents a life history of a man, born enslaved in colonial Virginia, whose repeated escape attempts triggered a remarkable saga. He survived enslavement on Virginia and Carolina plantations, stints in hiding in backcountry Carolina settlements, captivity in Native American communities, and evacuation from the emerging United States (and emancipation) with the British Army during the Revolution. Along the way, he founded arguably the first Black Baptist congregation in what became the United States. His surviving narrative, though brief, is the earliest known firsthand account of an attempt to escape slavery in North America. Because his struggle against enslavement spanned the revolutionary era, his story offers a counterweight to the litany of biographies of white “founding fathers.” Instead of a fight for political freedom from Britain and monarchy, George’s life reveals a parallel quest for freedom from American slavery. To achieve his independence, George fled the United States in the moment of its creation.

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Tuesday, July 28th at 11 am| In-Person at the Library Company of Philadelphia

The Library Company of Philadelphia is pleased to offer complimentary tours during July in honor of the United States Semiquincentennial!

Join us for a guided tour of the Library Company’s first-floor exhibition galleries. Learn more about the history of the de facto first Library of Congress and the oldest colonial cultural institution in the United States. Guests will also learn more about art and artifacts on display in the Logan Room, and as well as hear about the collection materials showcased in our rotating exhibition space.

Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, August 7th at 11:00 AM

In-Person Event

Join us for a guided tour of the Library Company’s first-floor exhibition galleries. Learn more about the history of the de facto first Library of Congress and oldest colonial cultural institution in the United States. Guests will also learn more about art and artifacts on display in the Logan Room, and as well as hear about the collection materials showcased in our rotating exhibition space.

Space is limited, so please sign up for only one tour time per person. Tickets are available for all First Fridays from May 1st through October 2nd, 2026.

REGISTER

Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, September 4th at 11:00 AM

In-Person Event

Join us for a guided tour of the Library Company’s first-floor exhibition galleries. Learn more about the history of the de facto first Library of Congress and oldest colonial cultural institution in the United States. Guests will also learn more about art and artifacts on display in the Logan Room, and as well as hear about the collection materials showcased in our rotating exhibition space.

Space is limited, so please sign up for only one tour time per person. Tickets are available for all First Fridays from May 1st through October 2nd, 2026.

REGISTER

REGISTER

September 29th, 2026, at 5:30 PM | In-Person at the Library Company of Philadelphia

From its earliest days, Philadelphia was one of the leading American cities, growing from a small “green country towne” to one of the greatest urban centers in the world.  It was also, from the late 18^th century into the 20^th century, a major center of American mapmaking.  Not surprisingly, Philadelphia’s cartographers all made maps of their home base.  The combination of a great city and important mapmakers produced a series of remarkable maps of Philadelphia.  This lecture will examine how these cartographic images illustrate the history both of the city and of this important industry.

Christopher W. Lane has been in the print and map business for over four decades, as founder and co-owner of The Philadelphia Print Shop in Chestnut Hill and then The Philadelphia Print Shop West in Denver.  He is now a private appraiser, consultant, author and lecturer.  Chris has come to be recognized as one of the country’s experts in this field, as evidenced by his 22-year stint as print and map expert on PBS’s Antiques Roadshow.  Chris has curated museum exhibitions and lectured around the country and overseas.  He has written several books, including the Ewell Newman Award-winning Panorama of Pittsburgh (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008). He has also written numerous articles in books and magazines, including “Philadelphia Mapmakers and the Beginnings of Commercial Mapmaking in America,” in Pennsylvania Legacies.

Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, October 2nd at 11:00 AM

In-Person Event

Join us for a guided tour of the Library Company’s first-floor exhibition galleries. Learn more about the history of the de facto first Library of Congress and oldest colonial cultural institution in the United States. Guests will also learn more about art and artifacts on display in the Logan Room, and as well as hear about the collection materials showcased in our rotating exhibition space.

Space is limited, so please sign up for only one tour time per person. Tickets are available for all First Fridays from May 1st through October 2nd, 2026.

REGISTER