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.

Finding Moses Williams

Free Virtual Program

November 19th , 2025 at 1 PM ET

This program of illustrated talks by five speakers focuses on the identification of the exceptional hollow-cut paper profiles created by Moses Williams (1776-1830) at Peale’s Philadelphia Museum and on presenting new historically accurate information about Williams’s life and family. Moses’s parents were manumitted by Peale in 1786 and Moses, who was born enslaved, was then indentured to Peale by his parents until age twenty-eight

Raised within the Peale family, Moses was literate and trained in skills for creating and installing the Museum’s displays of art and natural science. After the installation of a physiognotrace device for creating hollow-cut paper profiles in 1802, Moses was freed and given the concession to operate this new attraction. The popularity of this inexpensive form of portraiture and the highly accurate and elegant profiles Moses cut, made him financially independent.

Recent research into Moses’s life provides us with a clearer understanding of his artistry and other activities, as well as his death date and the identity of his descendants. And, the story of Williams’s birth family illuminates how the practice of indenture used by Free Black families, like the Williams family, was a strategy for seeking financial stability.

A small selection of Moses Williams’s profiles will be on display at the Library Company during November and December and in the Peale Gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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This program is sponsored by the Library Company of Philadelphia’s Program in African American History and the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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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

Beyond Glass Cases: The Library Company of Philadelphia’s “Collection Lab” Book launch with author Daniel Tucker

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2025 at 5:30 PM ET

In-Person Event | Free

Please join us as we celebrate the publication of Beyond Glass Cases: The Library Company of Philadelphia’s “Collection Lab,” a book by Daniel Tucker documenting the lessons learned during the three-year Pew Center for Arts & Heritage-funded project that sought to transcend traditional exhibition models in the interpretation of challenging, and at times harmful, collection items. The nearly 200-page-illustrated book published by Common Ground Research Networks includes an overview of each project component, interviews with creative partners, staff, and advisory committee members, and feedback from exhibition goers.

Author Daniel Tucker will discuss the creation of the book detailing The Library Company’s Beyond Glass Cases project and contextualize the initiative within the field of artist-led archival interventions and the larger debate about public memory.

A complimentary copy of the book will be available to each attendee.

Beyond Glass Cases is supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

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Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, December 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 in November 2025 through April 2026.

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Tuesday, December 9th at 7 PM ET

Virtual Event | Free

In this Fireside Chat, author Travis Glasson will discuss his new book Nobody Men: Neutrality, Loyalties, and Family in the American Revolution (Yale University Press, 2025). Neutrals – people who were neither ardent Patriots nor committed Loyalists – made up perhaps forty to sixty percent of the colonial population at the time of the American Revolution.  However, their experiences are usually glossed over in histories of the conflict.  Glasson’s work uses the experiences of the extended Cruger family, whose members included two mayors of New York City, a pro-American British MP, and the St. Croix merchant who gave Alexander Hamilton a start in life, to put neutrals’ stories at the center of a wider reconsideration of the Revolutionary conflict as a trans-Atlantic civil war.  In the process, it gives us new ways to think about how and why people made the Revolutionary-era political choices they did, what the conflict had in common with other civil wars across human history, and how the Revolution’s legacy has been defined by remembering some stories and forgetting others.

Travis Glasson is Associate Professor of History at Temple University and an Affiliated Faculty member with Temple’s Global Studies Program.  He completed his BA at the College of the Holy Cross and his MA and PhD at Columbia University.  Glasson’s other publications include the book Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (Oxford University Press, 2011) and articles published in venues including the William and Mary Quarterly and The Journal of British Studies.  

Hosted by the Program in Early American Economy and Society

Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, January 9th 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 November 2025 through April 2026.

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Episodes from A Flood of Pictures: The Formation of a Picture Culture in the United States

Book talk with author Dr. Michael Leja

Friday, January 30th, 2026 at 1:30 PM ET

Virtual Event | Free

When and how did pictures begin to permeate everyday lives in the United States? What happened to those daily lives when they did? And what happened to pictures in the process? The formative period for this cultural transformation was the three decades before the Civil War, when the ordinary experiences of a large segment of the population came to include pictures of many kinds, including illustrations in books, pamphlets, and newspapers; photographs on cards; full-sheet printed pictures collected in scrapbooks or albums or hung on walls; posters and broadsheets; spectacular paintings displayed in theatrical venues; and more.

In a surprisingly short span of time pictures assumed important functions. They supplemented verbal texts—and in some cases overshadowed them—for conveying news and information; portraying people, places, and events; selling things; educating and instructing; promoting and disguising political agendas; and shaping social identities. All sorts of individual and collective experiences were increasingly mediated by visual representations.

This talk will highlight two of the influential projects featured in A Flood of Pictures. They help to illuminate a time before successful pictorial formulas for mass appeal were established, before an audience habituated to consumption of pictures existed, and before pictures had become thoroughly commodified.

A Flood of Pictures is available for purchase at University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Hosted by the Visual Culture Program