Koha, our online catalogue, will be down for scheduled maintenance on August 12th. Readers will be able to browse our card catalogs and fill out hand-written call slips as needed.
Appointments are now required to conduct research in both of our reading rooms.
September
05sep11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, September 5th at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour
Friday, September 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 May through October.
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September 5, 2025 11:00 am - 12:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
11sep5:30 pm9:00 pm11th Annual Lecture in Honor of John C. Van Horne, with Richard Kagan
11th Annual Lecture in Honor of John C. Van Horne, with Richard Kagan Thursday, September 11th, 2025 Franklin Hall at the American Philosophical Society
11th Annual Lecture in Honor of John C. Van Horne, with Richard Kagan
Thursday, September 11th, 2025
Franklin Hall at the American Philosophical Society
Join us for the 11th Annual Lecture in Honor of John C. Van Horne, featuring Richard Kagan, author of The Inquisition’s Inquisitor: Henry Charles Lea of Philadelphia. In this lecture, Professor Kagan, will examine Lea’s multi-faceted career as a historian, shrewd businessman, dogged reformer, and major benefactor of the Library Company and University of Pennsylvania. He also offers new insights into Lea’s personal life, notably his controversial infatuation with his first cousin and future wife, Anna C. Jaudon; the periodic breakdowns that sidetracked his intellectual pursuits; and religious convictions that compromised the ostensibly “scientific” and objective character of his historical work.
Help us celebrate Dr. John C. Van Horne’s legacy of education and scholarship by joining us at the free public lecture and book signing, members-only reception, and private dinner immediately following the event.
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September 11, 2025 5:30 pm - 9:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
September Fireside Chat Telling the Truth about Authoritarianism: The
September Fireside Chat
Telling the Truth about Authoritarianism: The World-Altering Lives of John Swanson Jacobs
Thursday, September 18th at 7 PM ET
Virtual Event | Free
John Swanson Jacobs’s remarkable 1855 autobiographical emancipation narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery was lost on the other side of the world until Jonathan Schroeder rediscovered and republished it in 2024, accompanied by a full-length biography, No Longer Yours: The Lives of John Swanson Jacobs. Writing from the other side of the world, beyond the reach of American law and humanitarian authority, John Jacobs—globe-spanning brother of Harriet Jacobs and friend of Frederick Douglass—demonstrates the potential of unfiltered, unapologetic Black writing to speak truth to power. Bringing Despots back to the nation that Jacobs turned his back on gives American readers the best opportunity yet to understand how, when liberated from invisible constraints, African ex-Americans were able to reconfigure the relationship between liberty and truth to call for new, more just worlds. Most remarkably, the second half of the narrative ceases to narrate the autobiographical plot of Jacobs’s life altogether, and instead performs his autobiographical style, with Jacobs writing between the lines of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in order to underline the vast distance between these founding documents’ rhetoric of liberty and its reality. In reckoning with John S. Jacobs’s world-altering words for the first time, we are forced to ask how, in 1776, this new American nation commenced two experiments at once: one in democracy, the other in tyranny.
Jonathan D. S. Schroeder is a historian, literary critic, and lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design. His edition of John Swanson Jacobs’s long lost autobiographical slave narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery, was republished by Chicago in 2024, profiled in the New York Times, All Things Considered, and many other sites, and was the recipient of a 2025 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The recipient of long-term fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Carter Brown Library, and the American Antiquarian Society, Schroeder is a 2025-26 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where he is completing Prisoners of Loss: An Atlantic History of Nostalgia (under contract with Harvard) and beginning a full-fledged biography of the Jacobs family and their worlds.
Hosted by the Program in African American History
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September 18, 2025 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
October
03oct11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, October 3rd at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
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.
more
October 3, 2025 11:00 am - 12:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
October Fireside Chat The Predatory Sea: Human Trafficking and
October Fireside Chat
The Predatory Sea: Human Trafficking and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean
With Casey Schmitt
Tuesday, October 21st 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
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October 21, 2025 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
28oct7:00 pm9:00 pmFierce Desires: Identifying LGBTQ Histories in the American Past
Fierce Desires: Identifying LGBTQ Histories in the American Past Charlotte Cushman Society Lecture featuring Rebecca Davis October 28, 2025 at 7:00 PM ET Professor Rebecca
Fierce Desires: Identifying LGBTQ Histories in the American Past
Charlotte Cushman Society Lecture featuring Rebecca Davis
October 28, 2025 at 7:00 PM ET
Professor Rebecca Davis, author of Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America (Norton, 2024), a New Yorker “best book of 2024,” asks us to consider how and why queerness thrived in earlier eras, the impact of anti-obscenity laws, and the power of social movements to shift historical narratives. Rather than search for queer ancestors, she invites us to imagine entirely different ways that people thought about gender and sexuality in the past. She argues that this approach reveals just how visible, present, and influential queer desire was long before our contemporary labels or identity categories.
Rebecca Davis is a professor of history and of women and gender studies at the University of Delaware. She writes the Carnal Knowledge newsletter on Substack.
more
October 28, 2025 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
More upcoming events here.
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.
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.
Thank you for joining the The Library Company of Philadelphia mailing list. We look forward to keeping you informed.
August
No Events
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