Upcoming Events
july
Event Details
Fireside Chat with Dr. Michael L. Dickinson Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, 1680-1807 Thursday, July 11, 2024 7:00 PM ET
Event Details
Fireside Chat with Dr. Michael L. Dickinson
Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, 1680-1807
Thursday, July 11, 2024
7:00 PM ET
Virtual Event | Free
From the late 17th century to the abolition of the slave trade in the Atlantic, Almost Dead (University of Georgia Press, 2022) is an account of the lives, sufferings, and resistances of thousands of enslaved people in the Black urban Atlantic, and how the survival of those captives led to the formation of unique and dynamic communities. Dr. Michael L. Dickinson explores a network of commercially linked cities to reveal commonalities, differences, and connections between urban communities of enslaved Black people across the Atlantic: both in the mainland United States and the Caribbean. As Dr. Dickinson reveals through the adoption of the perspectives of the enslaved, the similarities far outweighed the difference, and cities continued to be key sites for both Black subjugation and resilience. These similarities root themselves in the all-too-similar environments of oppression and a shared transnational need of enslaved Black people to resist social death and maintain their humanity.
Sponsored by the Program in African American History
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Time
(Thursday) 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
Event Details
The Black Historians’ Department: The Past Belongs to You Exhibition Opening Wednesday, July 17, 2024 at 6:00 PM ET In-Person Event | Free The Black
Event Details
The Black Historians’ Department: The Past Belongs to You Exhibition Opening
Wednesday, July 17, 2024 at 6:00 PM ET
In-Person Event | Free
The Black Historians’ Department: The Past Belongs to You, speculative historian Tafari Robertson has created a space dedicated to the Black historians who cultivate their practice and stories outside of traditional institutions. It is a speculation of what would be different about history as a form if it were built around the ways that Black people hold and exchange information with each other and what it means to amplify and support those processes. Tafari explored these ideas with other members of Philadelphia’s Black artistic and cultural community in a series of workshops/listening sessions. The exhibition that grew out of these sessions will include an office setting and a living room interior setting where visitors will be invited to engage with reference books, audio tapes, and video clips as ways to experience history. Two cases of items from the Library Company’s African American History Collection will also be displayed. The Past Belongs to You is an invitation to understand Black history as a community practice, not to be discovered or authorized, but participated in. We hope you’ll join us for this reclamation of the past.
Beyond Glass Cases is supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
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Time
(Wednesday) 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
25jul1:00 pm2:00 pmFor the Common Good: Reviewing the Library Company’s First 150 Years
Event Details
For the Common Good: Reviewing the Library Company’s First 150 Years A Virtual Talk by Dana Dorman, LCP Papers Project Archivist Thursday, July 25, 2024 1:00
Event Details
For the Common Good: Reviewing the Library Company’s First 150 Years
A Virtual Talk by Dana Dorman, LCP Papers Project Archivist
Thursday, July 25, 2024
1:00 PM ET
Virtual Event | Free
As the Library Company nears its 300th anniversary, our staff are taking a deep dive into our past thanks to the Library Company Papers Project, a three-year, NEH-funded project to review, process, and digitize institutional records from the Library Company’s founding in 1731 through 1881. Join Library Company Archivist Dana Dorman for a virtual collection review of our institutional archives. She’ll be sharing a selection of documents from the Library Company’s first 150 years of operations, including minutes, correspondence, shareholder records, financial documents, book orders, and much more.
This project has been made possible through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy Demands Wisdom. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this resource do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. For additional information on NEH, visit www.neh.gov.
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Time
(Thursday) 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
august
02aug11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, August 2, at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour
Friday, August 2, 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 April through September:
Friday, August 2, 11:00 AM—12:00 PM
Friday, September 6, 11:00 AM—12:00 PM
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Time
(Friday) 11:00 am - 12:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
07aug5:30 pm7:30 pm Dolls of our Lives : Exploring American Girlhood Then and NowFree
Event Details
Dolls of Our Lives: Exploring American Girlhood Then and Now A Book Talk and Collection Review with Mary Mahoney and Amy Sopcak Joseph Wednesday, August 7, 2024 Reception
Event Details
Dolls of Our Lives: Exploring American Girlhood Then and Now
A Book Talk and Collection Review with Mary Mahoney and Amy Sopcak Joseph
Wednesday, August 7, 2024
Reception at 5:30 PM | Lecture at 6:00 PM
In-Person Event | Free
Combining history, travelogue, and memoir, Dolls of Our Lives: Why We Can’t Quit American Girl (Macmillan Publishers, 2023), follows Allison Horrocks and Mary Mahoney on an unforgettable journey to the past as they delve into the origins of the iconic American Girl doll brand. Through interviews with a legion of devoted doll lovers, a field trip to Colonial Williamsburg, a place that inspired Pleasant to create American Girl, and an exploration of their own (complicated) fandom, their work takes a deep dive into one of the ’90s’ most coveted products. Join Mary Mahoney for a discussion about the nostalgia and allure of American Girl dolls and see Library Company collections related to American girlhood.
Sponsored by The Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch Program in Women’s History
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Time
(Wednesday) 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT-04:00)
15aug7:00 pm8:00 pmFIRESIDE CHAT: The Memory of ’76: The Revolution in American History Free
Event Details
Fireside Chat with Dr. Michael D. Hattem The Memory of ’76: The Revolution in American History Thursday, August 15, 2024 7:00 PM ET Virtual Event |
Event Details
Fireside Chat with Dr. Michael D. Hattem
The Memory of ’76: The Revolution in American History
Thursday, August 15, 2024
7:00 PM ET
Virtual Event | Free
While the American Revolution is the agreed-upon beginning of our nation’s origins, the meaning of that revolution has never achieved anywhere near the same degree of consensus. For almost as long as the United States has existed, a wide range of political and social actors have narrativized and reimagined the Revolution to match their current climates and personal agendas. Through revealing the Revolution’s singular presence as an American national myth, Dr. Hattem reveals the ever-changing nature of the Revolution’s meaning, how the nation’s founding is used far more often as a divisive tool than a unifying one, and how reinventing the past is a central and long-lived American sociopolitical pastime.
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Time
(Thursday) 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
september
06sep11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, September 6, at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour
Friday, September 6, 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 April through September. A new link will be made available to sign up for Fall-Winter tours.
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Time
(Friday) 11:00 am - 12:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
Event Details
The Black Historians’ Department: The Past Belongs to You Exhibition Opening Thursday, September 12, 2024 at 6:00 PM ET In-Person Event | Free Please join
Event Details
The Black Historians’ Department: The Past Belongs to You Exhibition Opening
Thursday, September 12, 2024 at 6:00 PM ET
In-Person Event | Free
Please join us for the closing reception for The Black Historians’ Department: The Past Belongs to You, the first exhibition in our Beyond Glass Cases series, curated by Tafari Robertson. This closing reception will provide an opportunity for interested guests to discuss the exhibition’s themes and impact, as well as connect around their own shared histories.
In The Black Historians’ Department: The Past Belongs to You, speculative historian Tafari Robertson has created a space dedicated to the Black historians who cultivate their practice and stories outside of traditional institutions. It is a speculation of what would be different about history as a form if it were built around the ways that Black people hold and exchange information with each other and what it means to amplify and support those processes. Tafari explored these ideas with other members of Philadelphia’s Black artistic and cultural community in a series of workshops/listening sessions. The exhibition that grew out of these sessions will include an office setting and a living room interior setting where visitors will be invited to engage with reference books, audio tapes, and video clips as ways to experience history. Two cases of items from the Library Company’s African American History Collection will also be displayed. The Past Belongs to You is an invitation to understand Black history as a community practice, not to be discovered or authorized, but participated in. We hope you’ll join us for this reclamation of the past.
Beyond Glass Cases is supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
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Time
(Thursday) 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
Event Details
Tangled Journeys: One Family’s Story and the Making of American History A Book Launch Conversation with Dr. Lori Ginzberg, Krystal Appiah, Beverly Brown, Elsa Lora,
Event Details
Tangled Journeys: One Family’s Story and the Making of American History
A Book Launch Conversation with Dr. Lori Ginzberg, Krystal Appiah, Beverly Brown, Elsa Lora, and Erika Piola
Thursday, September 19, 2024
5:30 pm
In-Person Event | Free
In 1830, Richard Walpole Cogdell, a Charleston bank clerk, purchased a fifteen-year-old enslaved girl, Sarah Martha Sanders. Until her death in 1850, she bore nine of his children, five of whom reached adulthood. In 1857, this all-too-ordinary story took an extraordinary turn when Cogdell and his enslaved children moved to Philadelphia, where he bought them a house. Virtually overnight, they became part of the African American middle class. In Tangled Journeys, Lori D. Ginzberg tells a sweeping transatlantic family history, a multi-generational, multi-racial story that is both traumatic and prosaic. Ginzberg combines exhaustive archival research of the Library Company’s Stevens-Cogdell/Sanders-Venning/Chew Collection with “whispers” —questions that the available evidence cannot answer but that force us to confront what was unseen, unheard, and undocumented. Readers are invited to grapple with an American history that puts the Sanders ancestors and descendants at its center.
Join Dr. Ginzberg, former Library Company curator Krystal Appiah, Sanders family descendants Beverly Brown and Elsa Lora, and Library Company curator Erika Piola in a celebratory reception and conversation about the stories behind the publication of Tangled Journeys.
Hosted by the Program in African American History and the Visual Culture Program.
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Time
(Thursday) 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT-04:00)
Event Details
Fireside Chat with Dr. Michael A. Blaakman Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic Wednesday, September 25, 2024 7:00 p.m. ET Virtual Event |
Event Details
Fireside Chat with Dr. Michael A. Blaakman
Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic
Wednesday, September 25, 2024
7:00 p.m. ET
Virtual Event | Free
In the first twenty-five years after its founding, the United States experienced an extreme wave of land speculation, so intense that people referred to it as a “mania” both then and now. Dr. Michael A. Blaakman’s Speculation Nation (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) traces the revolutionary origins of this real-estate fanaticism in a catalogue of ambition, corruption, capitalism, and politics that spanned millions of acres and was intrinsically tied to Native American land dispossession. Dr. Blaakman follows the schemes of these speculators from boom to bust, and in doing so creates a picture of the economic realities that underpinned (and underpin) U.S. settler colonialism: a frontier defined by profit first, and land second, where the conventions of the era firmly rooted land theft as an axiom of the American republic and made speculative capitalism intrinsic to the land of the free.
Sponsored by the Program in Early American Economy and Society
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Time
(Wednesday) 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
october
08oct1:00 pm2:30 pmThe Adventurous Life of Amelia B. Edwards: Egyptologist, Novelist, ActivistFree
Event Details
The Adventurous Life of Amelia B. Edwards: Egyptologist, Novelist, Activist Charlotte Cushman Society Lecture featuring Dr. Margaret C. Jones October 8, 2024 at 1:00 PM
Event Details
The Adventurous Life of Amelia B. Edwards: Egyptologist, Novelist, Activist
Charlotte Cushman Society Lecture featuring Dr. Margaret C. Jones
October 8, 2024 at 1:00 PM ET
Virtual Event | Free
We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Margaret C. Jones as our speaker for this year’s Charlotte Cushman Society lecture. Dr. Jones’s talk will be focused on her book, The Adventurous Life of Amelia B. Edwards: Egyptologist, Novelist, Activist (Bloomsbury, 2022). Edwards had a significant impact on the cultural landscape of Victorian England, both through her travel writing and her successful fiction. Later in life, she became a renowned historian specifically focused on ancient Egypt. Jones’s biography provides a deeper dive into Edwards’s life: her views on feminism, race, and animal rights, as well as her same-gender relationships with Ellen Rice Byrne, Lucy Renshaw, and Library Company shareholder Anne Hampton Brewster.
Created in 2018, the Charlotte Cushman Society is a group of donors dedicated to recovering and sharing LGBT history and will support on-going initiatives and exploration.
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Time
(Tuesday) 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm(GMT-04:00)
2024 Holiday Closings
The Library Company will observe the following holidays in 2024:
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day – Jan 15, 2024
President’s Day – Feb 19, 2024
Memorial Day – May 27, 2024
Juneteenth – June 19, 2024
Independence Day – July 4, 2024
Labor Day – September 2, 2024
Thanksgiving- November 28 & 29, 2024
Christmas Eve – December 24, 2024
Christmas Day – December 25, 2024
Winter Break – December 26, 2024 – January 1, 2025
For more information on these events please call 215-546-3181 or email events@librarycompany.org