the lIBRARY WILL BE CLOSED ON WEDNESDAY JUNE 3RD FOR ELECTRICAL WORK
Appointments are required to conduct research in our reading rooms.
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Upcoming Events
Current Month
June
05jun11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, June 5th at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
Event Details
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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Time
June 5, 2026 11:00 am - 12:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
16jun5:30 pm8:00 pmJuneteenth: From Ledger to Genome: Data and the History of Black LifeFree
Event Details
The Library Company of Philadelphia presents: Juneteenth: From Ledger
Event Details
The Library Company of Philadelphia presents:
Juneteenth: From Ledger to Genome: Data and the History of Black Life
with Vincent Brown, Kendra Field and Evelynn Hammonds
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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Time
June 16, 2026 5:30 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
23jun12:00 pm1:30 pmClaiming Land, Claiming WaterFree
Event Details
June Fireside Chat Claiming Land, Claiming Water: Borders and
Event Details
June Fireside Chat
Claiming Land, Claiming Water: Borders and the People who Crossed them in the Early Modern Atlantic
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2026, at 12:00 PM EST
Please join us on June 23rd 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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Time
June 23, 2026 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm(GMT-04:00)
July
07jul11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions Free Tuesday ToursFree
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Free Tuesday Tours
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Free Tuesday Tours
JULY ONLY
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.
more
Time
July 7, 2026 11:00 am - 12:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
08jul7:00 pm8:00 pmMoney and the Making of the American Revolution with Andrew EdwardsFree
Event Details
July Fireside Chat Money and the Making of the
Event Details
July Fireside Chat
Money and the Making of the American Revolution with Andrew Edwards
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.
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Time
July 8, 2026 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
10jul11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, July 10th at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
Event Details
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.
more
Time
July 10, 2026 11:00 am - 12:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
14jul11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions Free Tuesday ToursFree
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Free Tuesday Tours
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Free Tuesday Tours
JULY ONLY
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.
more
Time
July 14, 2026 11:00 am - 12:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
August
07aug11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, August 7th at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
Event Details
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.
more
Time
August 7, 2026 11:00 am - 12:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
More upcoming events here.
Library Company Announces Plans for Semiquincentennial
The Library Company of Philadelphia, founded in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin, opened its collections to the delegates to the First Continental Congress in September 1774. At the time, its collections held virtually every significant work of political theory, history, law, and statecraft to be found in the American colonies. That privilege was extended to delegates to subsequent Congresses, the Constitutional Convention, and the early Federal Congresses while Philadelphia was the national capital until 1800. This heritage as the first, though unofficial, Library of Congress places the Library Company in a unique position to shed light on the Revolutionary era. Plans for the Semiquincentennial center on two exhibitions.
Appointments are now required to access the Scheide reading room and the Graphic Arts Department reading room.
For text materials (Scheide reading room), appointments are required. Click here to learn more.
For visual materials (Graphic Arts Department reading room), appointments are required. Click here to learn how to make an appointment.
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Current Exhibitions
Current Month
June
Event Details
Philadelphia’s Radical Revolution: From the Stamp Act to the Federal Constitution On view at The Library Company of Philadelphia from May 18th – October 9th In Philadelphia, artisans
Event Details
Philadelphia’s Radical Revolution: From the Stamp Act to the Federal Constitution
On view at The Library Company of Philadelphia from May 18th – October 9th
In Philadelphia, artisans and tradesmen drove the Revolution more forcefully than in any other colony. Early in the Revolution, the city’s political and economic elites, many of whom rejected the spirit of rebellion, had been pushed aside by working men who seized political power, reshaped Pennsylvania’s wartime government, and wrote a new state constitution that proved to be the most radically democratic constitution of the entire Revolution.
These ardent patriots, backed by the militia, demanded absolute loyalty to the American cause. Before and after the occupation of Philadelphia by the British army in 1777-1778, they forced citizens to choose: swear an oath of allegiance to Pennsylvania or risk imprisonment, confiscation of property, or even death.
After the war was won, the radicals retained much of their power, but in the early 1780s, Philadelphia’s long tradition of political moderation slowly re-emerged. Many now feared that revolutionary excess could be as dangerous as elite rule had been before. When the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in 1787, the city’s delegates brought this spirit of moderation to its deliberations and were influential in designing a federal government that balanced popular power with checks and restraints.
This exhibition does not attempt to tell the whole story of the Revolution. It focuses on what happened in Philadelphia and the dramatic shifts its citizens endured—from disaffection, to radicalism, to moderation—through broadsides, pamphlets, newspapers, and prints collected in the city during the Revolution itself. It is shaped by the unique perspectives of two avid contemporaries: the Swiss emigrant, Pierre Eugène Du Simitière, who collected and preserved many items that others disregarded, and John Dickinson, the famously moderate “penman of the Revolution” at the center of Revolutionary politics. Together they preserve one of the richest records of Philadelphia’s radical experiment in democracy.
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Time
May 18, 2026 5:30 pm - October 9, 2026 7:00 pm(GMT-04:00)