Upcoming Events
September
24sep5:30 pm8:00 pmHugh Hughes' Debts and the Stories we Tell About the American RevolutionFree
Event Details
Hugh Hughes’ Debts and the Stories We Tell
Event Details
Hugh Hughes’ Debts and the Stories We Tell About the American Revolution
with David Waldstreicher
Thursday, September 24th, 2026 | 5:30 pm | Free
In-Person | 1314 Locust St, Philadelphia, 19107
Please join us on the evening of September 24th for a lecture by author and professor David Waldstreiche
The relationship between private debts, political economy, and patriot politics has vexed historians for more than a century. Hugh Hughes, an artisan and schoolteacher and one of the first Sons of Liberty in New York, found that his avid participation in the long Revolutionary process and its settlement got him into and out of debt repeatedly. This talk will explore Hughes’ experience of debt in relation to his radical politics and will suggest that following both the money and the rhetoric yields insights into the relationship between injustice and politicization and may even put into dialogue interpretations of the Revolution that seem incompatible.
David Waldstreicher is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His most recent book is The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys through Revolution and Independence (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), which won the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians and the George Washington Book Prize. He is also the author of Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification; Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution; and In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (1997) (Hill and Wang, 2009).
29sep5:30 pm8:00 pmPhiladelphia Maps and Mapmakers with Christopher LaneFree
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Philadelphia Maps and Mapmakers with Christopher Lane
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Philadelphia Maps and Mapmakers with Christopher Lane
September 29th, 2026, at 5:30 PM | In-Person at the Library Company of Philadelphia
Join us on September 29th for a talk with Christopher Lane, co-author of Historic Maps of Philadelphia: A History of the City of Brotherly Love in Rare Maps (Reedy Press, 2026)
From its earliest days, Philadelphia was one of the leading American cities, growing from a small “green country towne” to one of the greatest urban centers in the world. It was also, from the late 18th century into the 20th century, a major center of American mapmaking. Not surprisingly, Philadelphia’s cartographers all made maps of their home base. The combination of a great city and important mapmakers produced a series of remarkable maps of Philadelphia. This lecture will examine how these cartographic images illustrate the history both of the city and of this important industry.
Christopher W. Lane has been in the print and map business for over four decades, as founder and co-owner of The Philadelphia Print Shop in Chestnut Hill and then The Philadelphia Print Shop West in Denver. He is now a private appraiser, consultant, author and lecturer. Chris has come to be recognized as one of the country’s experts in this field, as evidenced by his 22-year stint as print and map expert on PBS’s Antiques Roadshow. Chris has curated museum exhibitions and lectured around the country and overseas. He has written several books, including the Ewell Newman Award-winning Panorama of Pittsburgh (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008). He has also written numerous articles in books and magazines, including “Philadelphia Mapmakers and the Beginnings of Commercial Mapmaking in America,” in Pennsylvania Legacies.
Copies of Chris’s book, Historic Maps of Philadelphia, will be available for purchase at this event
Click here purchase a copy of Historic Maps of Philadelphia from Reedy Press!
October
02oct11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
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Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, October 2nd at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour
Friday, October 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 from May 1st through October 2nd, 2026.
15oct1:30 pm3:00 pmFireside Chat: Roundtable: Disability, Literature, Art, and Civil Rights
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Fireside Chat: Roundtable: Disability, Literature, Art, and Civil
Event Details
Fireside Chat: Roundtable: Disability, Literature, Art, and Civil Rights
with Sari Altschuler and Vanessa Warne
Thursday, October 15th, 2026 | 1:30 PM EST
Virtual Event | Free
Join us as we talk to Sari Altschuler, author of Before Disability: A History of American Citizenship, and Vanessa Warne, author of By Touch Alone: Blindness and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Culture, as they discuss their cultural histories addressing disability, literature, art, and civil rights.
Before Disability: A History of American Citizenship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026)
In the wake of the American Revolution, many of the differences we now call disabilities could be accommodated into citizenship—and for some even exemplified its promises. By the antebellum period, however, disability was becoming a powerful, racialized tool of civic exclusion and, by the century’s end, a target for eugenic elimination. Before Disability: A History of American Citizenship tells the story of how this dramatic transformation occurred.
Sari Altschuler is associate professor of English and founding director of the Health, Humanities, and Society Program at Northeastern University. She is the author of Before Disability: A History of American Citizenship (Penn Press, 2026) and The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States (Penn Press, 2018), as well as coeditor with Jonathan Metzl and Priscilla Wald of Keywords for Health Humanities (NYU Press, 2023). With David Weimer she directs Touch This Page! Making Sense of the Ways We Read, a multi-local and online exhibition about the multisensory experiences of reading, which won the Library Company’s Innovation Award in 2019.
Available for purchase at Penn Press.
By Touch Alone: Blindness and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2025) puts the history of disability into conversation with the history of books. Guided by the experiences of the first generation of blind people to learn to read by touch, this book explores the ways in which raised-print books changed not only individual lives but also nineteenth-century culture.
Vanessa Warne is a Professor in the Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media at the University of Manitoba (Treaty One Territory). Her current research explores the intersection of the history of craft and the history of disability. She has published widely on nineteenth-century literature and disability, including serving as the co-editor of a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly on blindness studies. She has co-hosted two international conferences on critical blindness studies, is a co-creator of the Crafting Communities Project, and a co-host of the Victorian Samplings podcast.
Available for purchase at University of Michigan Press.
15oct5:30 pm9:00 pm12th Annual Lecture in Honor of John C. Van Horne, with Michael J. Lewis
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12th Annual Lecture in Honor of John C. Van Horne, with Michael J. Lewis Thursday, October 15, 2026 Franklin Hall at the American Philosophical Society
Event Details
12th Annual Lecture in Honor of John C. Van Horne, with Michael J. Lewis
Thursday, October 15, 2026
Franklin Hall at the American Philosophical Society
Join us in-person or virtually, for a conversation with author and historian Michael J. Lewis about the history of Philadelphia’s great libraries. Lewis’s books include Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind (W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), American Art and Architecture (W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), and the prize-winning August Reichensperger: The Politics of the German Gothic Revival (MIT Press, 1993). He was a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (2000-2001) and in 2008 received a Guggenheim Fellowship to support the completion of City of Refuge (2016), his study of millennial Utopias.
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.
20oct5:30 pm8:00 pmToni Morrison in the Archive, Toni Morrison as ArchiveLecture | Free
Event Details
Toni Morrison in the Archive, Toni Morrison as
Event Details
Toni Morrison in the Archive, Toni Morrison as Archive
with Autumn Womack and Dana Williams
Tuesday, October 20th, 2026 | 5:30 pm | Free
In-Person | 1314 Locust St, Philadelphia, 19107
Please join the Library Company on the evening of October 20th at 5:30 pm for a panel with historians Autumn Womack and Dana Williams.
This panel will consider Toni Morrison both as a subject of the archive, and as a figure who reshaped how we understand it. Bringing together work on her papers, her editorial career, and her fiction, this conversation asks what Morrison’s practice reveals about the making—and the limits—of the historical record for Black history. Drawing on recent scholarship on the Toni Morrison Papers, her work as an editor at Random House, and new critical studies of her novels, this panel will explore how Morrison used the archive, worked against it, and expanded what counts as historical knowledge.
Autumn Womack
Associate Professor of African American Studies and English, Princeton University. Womack works on African American literary history, visual culture, and archival practice. In 2023, she led the curatorial team for the exhibition Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory, which drew on previously unseen materials from the Toni Morrison Papers to illuminate Morrison’s creative process. Her forthcoming book, The Wanderer (Knopf, 2025), examines Morrison’s creative process through her archive, and she is co-editing, with Kinohi Nishikawa, a volume on Toni Morrison and Black archival practice.
Dana A. Williams
Professor of African American literature and Dean of the Graduate School, Howard University. Williams is a leading scholar of African American print culture and publishing history. She is the author of Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship (2025), which examines Morrison’s work at Random House and her role in shaping late twentieth-century Black literary and intellectual life.
Sponsored by the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia
Event Details
Queerness on the Move: Tracing Black Trans Histories 2026
Event Details
Queerness on the Move: Tracing Black Trans Histories
2026 Charlotte Cushman Lecture
with Candice Lyon
Thursday, October 29th, 2026 | 7:00 PM EST
Join us on the evening of October 29th for our 2026 Charlotte Cushman Society Lecture, featuring Candice Lyons.
Throughout the era of U.S. chattel slavery, bondspeople consistently subverted enslavers’ expectations, laying claim to their own labor, movement, bodies, and genders. Many of these figures formulated and executed elaborate plans to evade bondage, at times utilizing cross gender modes of escape in order to do so. In her talk, Dr. Candice
Lyons maps these histories of defiance, drawing on the archives of runaway slave advertisements published in Southern newspapers prior to Emancipation. These notices document the unsanctioned mobility of enslaved people and offer insight into the multiple ways Black gender was created and expressed in the years preceding the conclusion of the American Civil War. Lyons invites us to reframe self-emancipation as more than a rejection of captivity, but also a rejection of slavery’s imposed gender norms.
Candice Lyons is the Black Star Assistant Professor in Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her forthcoming manuscript, tentatively titled Archival Shouts: Queer Re-Examinations of U.S. Chattel Slavery, traces the queer gender and sexual practices of enslaved and free Black people living in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century United States. Her 2021 Feminist Studies article “Behind the Scenes: Elizabeth Keckley, Slave Narratives, and the Queer Complexities of Space” is the winner of the 2020 Feminist Studies Graduate Student Award, and her work has also been published in The Journal of Southern History, Souls, and the public history site Not Even Past.
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November
Event Details
Born in Flames, The Business of Arson and
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Born in Flames, The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City
with Bench Ansfield
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2026 | 5:30 pm | Free
In-Person | 1314 Locust St, Philadelphia, 19107
Join us on the evening of November 3rd for a book talk with Bench Ansfield, author of Born in Flames (W.W. Norton, 2025) , Finalist for the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in History
“Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!” That legendary and apocryphal phrase, allegedly uttered by announcers during the 1977 World Series as flames rose above Yankee Stadium, seemed to encapsulate an entire era in this nation’s urban history. Across that decade, a wave of arson coursed through American cities, destroying entire neighborhoods home to poor communities of color. Yet as historian Bench Ansfield demonstrates in their new book, Born in Flames, the most destructive fires were not set by residents, as is commonly assumed, but by landlords looking to collect insurance payouts. Driven by perverse incentives—new government-sponsored insurance combined with tanking property values—landlords hired “torches,” mostly Black and Brown youth, to set fires in the buildings, sometimes with people still living in them. Tens of thousands of families lost their homes to these blazes, yet for much of the 1970s, tenant vandalism and welfare fraud stood as the prevailing explanations for the arson wave, effectively indemnifying landlords.
Event Details
Exhibition Opening: Serious Fun: The Robert Staples Metamorphic
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Exhibition Opening: Serious Fun: The Robert Staples Metamorphic Collection of Movable and Moving Art before 1920
Reception followed by lecture by Dr. Juliet Sperling, University of Washington,
“Metamorphic Print and the Untouchable Arts in Nineteenth-Century America”
Free | In Person
Thursday, November 5th, 2026 | 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm
1314 Locust St, Philadelphia, 19107
Join us in celebrating the opening of Serious Fun an exhibition curated by Curator of Graphic Arts and Director, Visual Culture Program Erika Piola with “Metamorphic Print and the Untouchable Arts in Nineteenth-Century America,” a lecture by Dr. Juliet Sperling.
Metamorphic Print and the Untouchable Arts in Nineteenth-Century America
Nineteenth-century audiences largely kept a polite distance from high-status works of painting and sculpture. And yet these ostensibly untouchable arts were often made and understood with tactile sensibilities in mind. This talk focuses on the vital role of prints as a medium in shaping and disseminating these pervasive, culturally trained ideas about touch’s role in perception. It highlights a selection of metamorphic prints, or paper constructions with folded, layered, and expandable features that proliferated in U.S. print culture between roughly 1780 and 1910. Closely examining how these objects guided users from applied interaction toward more abstract concepts of tactility reveals the print medium’s power both to model sophisticated visualities and transport them across media, fundamentally shaping encounters with artworks beyond reach.
Juliet Sperling is Assistant Professor of Art History and Kollar Endowed Chair in American Art in the School of Art + Art History + Design at the University of Washington. Her research and teaching focus on the art and material culture of North America from the colonial period through the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on print history and theory. She is the author of Tactile Sensibilities: Seeing Through Print in American Art, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in Spring 2027.
06nov11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, November 6th at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour
Friday, November 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 from May 1st through October 2nd, 2026.
17nov7:00 pm8:00 pmWomen, Law, and Disability in Early AmericaFree
Event Details
Fireside Chat: Women, Law, and Disability in Early
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Fireside Chat: Women, Law, and Disability in Early America
with Jennifer Reiss
Tuesday, November 17th, 2026 | 7:00 PM EST
Virtual Event | Free
What can the Library Company’s collections teach us about the intersections of women’s lives, disability, and the law? Dr. Jennifer Reiss, the 2025–2026 Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch Dissertation Fellow, will share materials she explored during her fellowship to uncover how women experienced and navigated legal and social systems in early America. This program will highlight the power of everyday documents as “keys” to understanding the past, in this case revealing histories of gender, disability, and lived experience.
Jennifer Reiss is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania working on the North Atlantic in the long eighteenth century. Jennifer is particularly interested in women and gender, early modern medicine and disability, and British and early American legal history. Her dissertation project, provisionally titled Undone Bodies: Gender and the Making of Disability in Early America, reconsiders how disability as a social category was constructed and experienced before burgeoning clinical understandings of bodily difference in the antebellum era.
December
01dec7:00 pm8:00 pmWhen The Declaration of Independence Was NewsFree
Event Details
Fireside Chat: When The Declaration of Independence Was
Event Details
Tuesday, December 1st, 2026 | 7:00 PM EST
Published for the 250th anniversary of the United States, When the Declaration of Independence Was News focuses on the nation’s founding document at the moment of its creation in 1776, before anyone knew what the legacy of the Declaration would be or if the United States would win the war against Great Britain. It explores how the Declaration was communicated to people in the new nation and around the Atlantic world and reveals the stories of the many people involved in the process of declaring independence, from printers to soldiers to diplomats to translators.
Dr. Emily Sneff is an early American historian and leading expert on the Declaration of Independence. She earned her Ph.D. in History from William & Mary. She is a consulting curator for exhibitions marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration at the Museum of the American Revolution and Historic Trappe.
Sponsored by the Program in Early American Economy and Society
04dec11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, December 4th at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour
Friday, December 4th 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.
Event Details
Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession of the
Event Details
Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession of the United States
with Emilie Connolly
Tuesday, December 8th, 2026 | 5:30 pm | Free
In-Person | 1314 Locust St, Philadelphia, 19107
Please join us for a book talk with Emilie Connolly, author of Vested Interests (Princeton University Press, 2025), winner of the 2026 Bancroft Prize
Shortly after the United States’ founding, the federal government decided to pay for Native land rather than attempt to take it by military force alone. And therein hangs a tale. Hundreds of treaties transferred Indigenous homelands to the United States in exchange for annual payments, called annuities. With increasing frequency over the course of the nineteenth century, the government funded annuities with investment accounts held in trust for Native nations, purchasing a portfolio of bonds on their behalf. What followed was a system of fiduciary colonialism, in which the federal government gained administrative control over Native wealth to take Native land and, at once, finance the very debt-funded infrastructure – canals, banks, and railroads – that facilitated westward expansion. In short, if land was the “why” of U.S. settler colonialism, money was the “how.” Yet Indigenous peoples were not passive subjects of this system. Native leaders strategically navigated their financial ties to the federal government to safeguard their nations’ futures and insisted on their view of trusteeship as a sacred, reciprocal obligation. Through stories of treaty negotiations, bond market crashes, and the crisis of the Civil War, this talk recounts how the management of Native money became a central site of both imperial dispossession and Indigenous resilience.
January
08jan11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, January 8th at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour
Friday, January 8th 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.
February
05feb11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, February 5th at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour
Friday, February 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.
2026 Holiday Closings
The Library Company will observe the following holidays in 2026:
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day – Jan 19
Presidents’ Day – Feb 16
Memorial Day – May 25
Juneteenth – June 19
Independence Day – July 3
Labor Day – September 7
Thanksgiving – November 26 & 27
Winter Break – December 24 – January 1, 2027
For more information on these events please call 215-546-3181 or email [email protected]