Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, October 3rd 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 in May through October.

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Tuesday, October 7th at 7 PM ET

Virtual Event | Free

A century before the height of the Atlantic slave trade, early modern racialized slavery emerged through practices of captive-taking and human trafficking in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Caribbean. Casey Schmitt’s The Predatory Sea (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) offers the first full-length study of this deeply entangled history of captivity and colonialism. Between 1570 and 1670, a multinational assortment of privately funded ship captains, sailors, merchants, and adventurers engaged in widespread practices of captive-taking and human trafficking. Raids against coastal communities and regional shipping in the Caribbean ensnared multitudes, including free and previously enslaved people of African and Indigenous descent, who found themselves trafficked into slavery away from their communities of belonging. Beginning in the 1570s, their captors established maritime bases on small, strategically located islands. Colonization thus started with practices of captive-taking and human trafficking, which remained central to the development of the first English and French colonies in the Caribbean. Reading across imperial archives, Schmitt also traces the experiences of those ensnared in this trade. This captive economy, as explicated in The Predatory Sea, shaped English and French colonization, inter-imperial competition, and the lived experiences of captives and their captors.

Dr. Casey Schmitt is an assistant professor of history at Cornell University where she teaches classes on Early America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic World. She received here Ph.D. from William and Mary in 2018 and was the 2018-19 Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies before joining the faculty at Cornell. Her articles have appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, the Hispanic American Historical Review, and Early American Studies.

Hosted by the Program of Early American Economy and Society

The Forgotten Photographs of Reconstruction

In-Person Panel featuring Anne Cross, Matthew Fox-Amato, Aston Gonzalez, Elizabeth Keto and Kimberly-Wallace Sanders

October 21st, 2025 at 5:30 PM ET

This panel explores the role that photography played in the aftermath of American slavery. Anne Cross explores an 1866 photo used to document violence against a formerly enslaved person, while Elizabeth Keto investigates the history of anti-lynching photography. Kimberly Wallace-Sanders sheds new light on portrait photographs of black caretakers and white children, and Aston Gonzalez reinterprets the widely circulated “Radical Members of the So. Ca. Legislature.” Matthew Fox-Amato will speak to frame the essays. With particular attention to Black history, race, and racism, this panel breaks new ground in our understanding of photography’s place in the racial politics of the Reconstruction era.

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The Library Company of Philadelphia has been gathering for an annual dinner since our founding in 1731. To learn more about this year’s event and available sponsorship opportunities, please contact the Development Office at development@librarycompany.org or 215-546-3181 ext. 118.

294th Annual Dinner – Featuring Frank Cogliano
Thursday, November 13th, 2025

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Presented In-Person
The Down Town Club by Cescaphe
600 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA

We are pleased to host a lecture from Francis D. Cogliano, author of A Revolutionary Friendship: Washington, Jefferson, and the American Republic

Frank Cogliano is Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he is the author or editor of twelve books. He is the president of the Open History Society in Edinburgh and cohost of the American History Podcast: The Whiskey Rebellion. He makes regular media appearances, commenting on U.S. history, politics and international relations, for the BBC and other outlets.

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Thursday, November 20th at 7 PM ET

Virtual Event | Free

Join us for a book talk with Jamie L. Brummitt, author of Protestant Relics in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2025). In this talk, Brummitt explores the relationships among material culture, mourning, and gender in early America. Despite the common assumption that mourning is a feminine practice, this talk considers how producing, touching, and keeping relics became an intimate part of masculine mourning practices tied to religion, politics, and citizenship in early America. As Brummitt demonstrates, people of nearly all Protestant denominations and walks of life–including members of Congress, college presidents, ministers, mothers, free Black activists, schoolchildren, and enslaved people–sought embodied and supernatural sense experiences with relics. They collected relics from deathbeds, stole relics from tombs, made relics in schools, visited relics at pilgrimage sites like George Washington’s Mount Vernon, purchased relics in the marketplace, and carried relics into the American Revolution and the Civil War. Locks of hair, blood, bones, portraits, daguerreotypes, postmortem photographs, memoirs, deathbed letters, Bibles, clothes, embroidered and painted mourning pieces, and a plethora of other objects that had been touched, used, or owned by the dead became Protestant relics. These relic practices were so pervasive that they shaped systems of earthly and heavenly power, from children’s education to national elections to Protestant-Catholic relations to the structure of freedom and families in the afterlife. As this talk demonstrates, mourning practices became associated with women over time and for specific reasons, but this was not a foregone conclusion. Many early Americans considered mourning to be primarily a masculine practice centered around collecting relics of the dead for religious and political purposes.

Jamie L. Brummitt is an Associate Professor of American religions and material culture at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Brummitt earned her PhD from Duke University. Her book Protestant Relics in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2025) examines relic veneration, corpse inspection, and the art of mourning in the early United States. In 2017, Brummitt was the recipient of the Anthony N. B. and Beatrice W. B. Garvan Research Fellowship in American Material Culture at The Library Company of Philadelphia. She is also a past fellow of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon; Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library; the Filson Historical Society; and the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium.

Protestant Relics in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2025) is available for purchase with a 30% discount with code AAFLYG6 at Oxford University Press.

Hosted by the Visual Culture Program