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17nov7:00 pm8:00 pmWomen, Law, and Disability in Early AmericaFree

December

01dec7:00 pm8:00 pmWhen The Declaration of Independence Was NewsFree

04dec11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR

08dec5:30 pm8:00 pmVested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession of the United StatesBook Talk | Free

Event Details

Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession of the United States

with Emilie Connolly

REGISTER

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.

Emilie Connolly is Assistant Professor of History at Yale University. Her research focuses on the history of political economy, colonialism, and Indigenous peoples of North America. Her first book, Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States, published last year with Princeton University Press, was awarded the James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians and the Bancroft Prize in American History. Her writing has also appeared in the American Historical Review, William and Mary Quarterly, Journal of the Early Republic, and International Labor and Working-Class History. She has received fellowships from the Kluge Library at the Library of Congress, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Dartmouth Society of Fellows, and the American Council of Learned Societies. In 2024, she was appointed a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians.

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19dec11:00 am1:00 pm52 Weeks of Firsts Saturday Firstival CelebrationLecture | Free

January

08jan11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR

February

05feb11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR

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]