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Wednesday, April 30, 2025 at 7 PM ET

Virtual Event | Free

Now more than ever the American Revolution and its legacies loom large for the American public. What did the Revolution mean for the people who lived through it? What should it mean for us today and what lessons should we draw from its memory? How might engagement with primary sources from the American Revolution help us participate in civil dialogue, appreciate the diversity of the American experience, and celebrate the common bonds that hold citizens together? We are hosting a roundtable discussion with the creators of two related public history endeavors seeking to make primary source texts and artifacts of our revolutionary past easily accessible to the public.

The Revolutionary City: A Portal to the Nation’s Founding is a website that provides a one-stop-shop for students, teachers, scholars, and lovers of history to learn about diverse stories of the American Revolution from the perspective of early residents of America’s revolutionary city. It makes available high-resolution images of historic documents from the American Philosophical Society (APS), the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP), and the Library Company of Philadelphia (LCP) so that readers can explore for themselves how Americans approached and lived through the upheaval, peril, and promise of revolution.

Join us as we meet with representatives from the archives who contributed to the portal and the creator of the public exhibit to discuss the portal, the exhibit, and the ongoing effort to inform the memory of the American Revolution and its legacies today.

Sponsored by the Program in Early American Economy and Society

Lecture by 2024-2025 William H. Helfand Fellow in American Visual Culture with Dr. Caroline Culp

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Friday, May 2nd, 2025 at 1:30 PM ET

Virtual Event | Free

The Sign in the Painting reconsiders the creative practice of Pennsylvania Quaker Edward Hicks (1780-1849), a successful sign and carriage painter working in Bucks County. In his spare time, Hicks created over sixty Peaceable Kingdom paintings, canvases depicting exotic animals coexisting in Biblical utopias. Scholars have too often divided attention between these two branches of Hicks’s artistic production—low and high, fine and folk—failing to see the crucial ties between them. By taking seriously the pedestrian rhetoric of the artist’s signboard painting with its intertwining of place, space, and local iconographies, Culp explores how the visual rhetoric found in signboard communication is foundational to Hicks’s easel paintings, which deployed the same site-specific communicative power.

Please join us for this recalibration of inherited histories offering new perspectives on the relationship between “high” and “low” art in American history, a discussion which aims to recover the conceptual complexity and alternative wisdom of artistic practices outside the academic tradition.

Caroline Culp is the Warren Family Assistant Curator at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City. She is a scholar of American art with specialties in colonial and early national painting and material culture, women artists, and the history of portraiture. Culp earned her Ph.D. in Art History from Stanford University and a B.A. in Art History and History (with honors) from Wake Forest University. Her scholarship appears in Panorama: The Journal of The Association of Historians of American Art, Journal18, and The Magazine ANTIQUES. She is the 2024-2025 William H. Helfand Fellow in American Visual Culture at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Sponsored by the Visual Culture Program

Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, May 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 in May through October.

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Annual Shareholder’s Meeting

Monday, May 12, at 5:15 pm

Hybrid Event

Open to Shareholders Only

Meet and mingle with other shareholders, trustees, and staff as we elect our Board of Trustees and share updates on the institution’s work over the last year. The program will include a share presentation to Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker and special recognition of Library Company shareholders of 40+ years. Reception to follow.

Shareholders will receive instructions via email by April 11, 2025 about how to register, with a mailed invitation to follow. Questions? Contact us at development@librarycompany.org.