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Tuesday, January 27th, 2026 at 7 PM ET

Eva Landsberg will interview Amy Watson about her new book, Patriots Before Revolution: The Rise of Party Politics in the British Atlantic, 1714-1763 (Yale University Press, 2025). 

In Patriots Before Revolution, historian Amy Watson shows that the political label “Patriot” was first adopted by a network of British politicians with radical ideas about the principles and purpose of the British Empire. The early Patriots’ ideological mission was not American independence but, rather, imperial reform: Patriots sought to create a British Empire that was militant, expansionist, confederal, and free. Over the course of the eighteenth century, these reformers used print media and grassroots mobilization efforts to expand their party to North America, where Patriotism would have revolutionary implications in the decades to come. The interview will be followed by Q&A.

Amy Watson is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She earned a PhD from Yale University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California/Huntington Library, Early Modern Studies Institute. Her research has been supported by the Massachusetts Historical Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, and the Library Company of Philadelphia, among others. Her other publications include articles in The William and Mary Quarterly and The Scottish Historical Review.

Hosted by the Program in Early American Economy and Society

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

Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, February 6th 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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Monday, February 9th, 2026 at 7 PM ET

Join us on the evening of February 9th for a virtual seminar with author and historian Natalie Léger about her new book: Haiti and the Revolution Unseen: The Persistence of the Radical Decolonial Imagination (Vanderbilt, 2025).

Since the 1938 publication of the Black Trinidadian writer C.L.R James’s seminal history of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 20th-century Caribbean anticolonialists imagined Caribbean freedom through Haiti. This imagining bore classics of Caribbean literature from the likes of the white Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier (The Kingdom of this World, 1947) and the Black Martinican writers, Aimé Césaire (The Tragedy of King Christophe, 1963) and Édouard Glissant (Monsieur Toussaint, 1961). These texts are rightfully classics, but they are foundational works that misremember and misrepresent the Revolution as a republican feat led by Caribbean-born revolutionists. They write Africans (or Ginens) out of the uprising, notwithstanding that two-thirds of the enslaved were African-born on the eve of the uprising. This talk addresses the political consequences of erasing Africans from the story of the Haitian Revolution in the moment of 20th century Caribbean anticolonialism. It argues that without them the story becomes a poor means of inspiring anticolonial contestation as intended and worse, Haiti and Haitians, become representative of the impossibility of securing liberation from colonial predation.

Natalie M. Léger is an Associate Professor of English at Temple University, who specializes in twentieth-century anti-colonial thought and decolonial philosophy in Caribbean literature and African diasporic fiction. Her research interests also focus on race and visual culture, Latin American literature, and magical realist cultural production. Her first book, Haiti and the Revolution Unseen: The Persistence of the Radical Decolonial Imagination, was recently published with Vanderbilt University Press.

Hosted by the Program of African American History

Black Declarations of Independence: Before and After 1776

February 19th-2oth, 2026

The American Philosophical Society, Benjamin Franklin Hall, 427 Chestnut St

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Wednesday, March 4th, 2026 at 5:30 PM ET

When we think of the American Revolution, we often picture a parochial drama: thirteen colonies squaring off against the British Crown in a spirited bid for independence. But this version of the story is only half the truth—and perhaps not even the most interesting half. In this riveting program, historian and author Richard Bell invites audiences to rediscover the Revolution as a world war that unleashed chaos, opportunity, and transformation across six continents. From the sugar fields of the Caribbean to the court of the King of Mysore, from refugee camps on the Canadian frontier to political uprisings in Sierra Leone and Peru, the war that gave birth to the United States was never simply America’s own. It was a seismic global event that redrew maps, toppled hierarchies, catalyzed migration, and accelerated new movements for liberty—and for empire.

In this program, Bell traces the far-flung reverberations of the war through the lives of the people it displaced, empowered, or destroyed. Participants will encounter a Native matriarch struggling to preserve a transatlantic military alliance, a Prussian officer reinventing himself in a foreign army, and a Boston schoolteacher shipwrecked thousands of miles from home. Along the way, Bell explores how the Revolution stirred a transoceanic refugee crisis, ignited antislavery activism, and inspired uprisings from Ireland to India. The program offers a bold new framework for understanding the Revolutionary War not as a tidy founding moment but as a sprawling, high-stakes struggle fought on land and sea, shaped by commerce, diplomacy, propaganda, and contingency. This is the American Revolution as you’ve never seen it before: complex, global, and astonishingly relevant to the modern world.

Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, March 6th 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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“Not a Poor, but a Very Importunate Widow” Sarah Kennedy and the American Revolution in Pennsylvania with Camille Kaszubowski, Ph.D.

2026 Women’s History Month Lecture

March 11th, 2026 at 5:30 PM

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