Curator-led Galley Tour of Stylish Books
Wednesday, January 16
2:30pm
Join us for a gallery tour led by the Curator of Art & Artifacts, Linda August.
Printed designs spread new ideas. Artisans, as well as their patrons, relied on books as a way to learn about the latest fashions in interior decoration. Philadelphia became a center for creating stylish furniture. The Library Company played a role by acquiring architecture and design books, which its members, who included cabinetmakers, frequently read and used. On display will be items spanning the 18th through 19th century. Highlights will include: Thomas Chippendale’s book, A Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director; the only known copy of the tradecard of Benjamin Randolph (a Library Company member); and colorful plates by Désiré Guilmard, who inspired Philadelphia cabinetmaker George Henkels.
From Tragedy to Triumph: Teaching about Black Girlhood in the Late 19th Century
A Case Study of the Sanders-Venning Family
Wednesday, January 16
4:45pm: Arrival and Registration
5:00pm – 6:30pm: Workshop and Collection Review
7:00pm – 8:00pm: Lecture
Presented by Dr. Nazera Sadiq Wright, Associate Professor, University of Kentucky
Close reading of primary sources provides ways to study broad historical movements through the eyes and lives of people who usually are not in textbooks. This workshop features scrapbooks and friendship albums made by free black young women in the north post-Civil War and offers insight into black middle-class life throughout the 1800s. Information and resources shared will bolster social studies, language arts, and art curriculum as the sources shinelight on 19th century political and social history, especially on topics of childhood, social and economic class, and art and literature. Teachers will leave with books, reproductions of sources, and prepared unit plans. Act 48 credit will be given, and free dinner and admission are provided.
This program is supported in part by the Library Company’s McLean Contributionship Educational Outreach Initiative, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation. The McLean Contributionship Educational Outreach Initiative was funded through the Endowment Campaign for the Program in African History.
The Program in African American History brings together scholars and interested members of the public to explore and discuss every aspect of the experience of people of African descent in the Americas from the beginnings of European colonization through 1900. For more than forty years, the African Americana collections of the Library Company have helped nurture and sustain rich scholarship that has added dramatically to our knowledge and understanding of that experience—and public exhibitions, lectures, and programs have sought to involve the broadest possible audience.
Lecture: From Tragedy to Triumph: Black Girlhood in the Late 19th Century
Wednesday, January 16
7:00pm – 8:00pm
This lecture is free and open to the public
Presented by Dr. Nazera Sadiq Wright, Associate Professor, University of Kentucky
Scholars such as Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Ellen Gruber Garvey, and Jasmine Nichole Cobb explore how nineteenth-century scrapbooks and friendship albums circulated among free black women in the North to showcase their middle-class status and close networks. However, little is known about how black girls participated in this sentimental practice. This lecture explores the significance of signatures and inscriptions written in two autograph albums from the second half of the nineteenth century in the Stevens-Cogdell-Sanders-Venning Collection at the Library Company of Philadelphia. The autograph albums belonged to two sisters, Miranda Cogdell Venning (1862–1900) and Sarah (Sallie) Sanders Venning (1872–1959). Dr. Wright will discuss the wide-ranging impact that early friendships, alliances, and associations had on the Venning sisters’ intellectual and political development.
This program is supported in part by the Library Company’s McLean Contributionship Educational Outreach Initiative, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation. The McLean Contributionship Educational Outreach Initiative was funded through the Endowment Campaign for the Program in African History.
The Program in African American History brings together scholars and interested members of the public to explore and discuss every aspect of the experience of people of African descent in the Americas from the beginnings of European colonization through 1900. For more than forty years, the African Americana collections of the Library Company have helped nurture and sustain rich scholarship that has added dramatically to our knowledge and understanding of that experience—and public exhibitions, lectures, and programs have sought to involve the broadest possible audience.
Preserving the Past: Early American Object Collecting
Collection Review
Tuesday, January 22
2:30pm
Philadelphia was the center for early American object collections, with Pierre du Simitiere’s American Museum, the Library Company, and Peale’s Museum. In the 19th century, people often collected and saved pieces of American history through relics. George Washington’s hair, snippets of the Star Spangled Banner, and other examples from the Library Company’s collection will be displayed.
Designing Afrofuturism: Imagining Black Futures through Art, History, and Literature
January 24 / January 31 / February 28 / March 21
6:00pm – 8:00pm
“Designing Afrofuturism” will examine the surviving art, architecture, and technology from indigenous civilizations across the African diaspora. Complemented by the upcoming Library Company exhibition “From Negro Pasts to Afro-Futures: Black Creative Re-Imaginings,” this seminar, led by Dr. Walter Greason (Associate Professor at Monmouth University), will explore how historical African American leaders envisioned the future. “Designing Afrofuturism” will draw upon the Library Company’s prodigious African American History collections, including rare Afrofuturist literature and drawings, poems and songs, and speeches and protests. Participants will learn how to reinterpret these historical records as the foundation of a twenty-first-century global society and to pursue that vision through recent public exhibitions, public art campaigns, and community literacy programs.
Seminars unfold over four two-hour sessions. Each session features an intimate and interactive presentation of historical materials in our reading room, followed by dinner in the historic Logan Room. Space is limited to 20 participants on a first-come, first, serve basis.
About the Seminar Leader:
Dr. Greason’s research focuses on the comparative, economic analysis of slavery, industrialization, and suburbanization. With a variety of co-editors, Dr. Greason has published Planning Future Cities(2017) – an innovative look at architecture, urbanism, and municipal design; The American Economy (2016) – a provocative examination of race, property, and wealth in the United States since 1750; and the Afrofuturist design textbook, Cities Imagined. His scholarly monograph, Suburban Erasure, won the Best Work of Non-Fiction award from the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance in 2014. He also won grants from the Mellon Foundation (2011) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (2016). He is also the creator of the #WakandaSyllabus. The subsequent series of essays can be found on the award-winning website, Black Perspectives.
To pay by check contact Colleen Gill, Development and Membership Coordinator, at cgill@librarycompany.org or 215-546-3181, ext. 136. For more information about the seminar series, contact Will Fenton, Director of Scholarly Innovation, at wfenton@librarycompany.org or 215-546-3181, ext. 119.
Benjamin Franklin & Immigration
March 6, 2019
6:00pm – 9:00pm
Few people of Benjamin Franklin’s generation understood better the importance of immigration to the British colonies of North America. Franklin’s ideas about immigrants and immigration evolved as his career moved from being a colonial leader in Philadelphia to a citizen of the world. His thinking about populations and about ethnic differences derive from his mutual concerns about laboring peoples and the environmental and economic circumstances of the North American colonies. By examining the Library Company’s historical records from Franklin’s time in Philadelphia, London, and Passy, we can trace how local circumstances shaped Franklin’s early thinking and how later experiences encouraged him to fashion a more global vision about immigration problems, goals, and strategies. Readings complementary to the Library Company’s holdings will enable participants to contextualize Franklin’s writings about peoples in North America and elsewhere, including indigenous peoples of North America, Ireland, and India; Scottish, Scots-Irish, and Irish peoples; Germans; Africans; French, and others.
Join Dr. Carla Mulford, a leading scholar on Franklin, as she curates original records that reveal Franklin’s shifting views on immigration, demographics, economics, and the environment. This seminar will feature an intimate and interactive presentation of historical materials in our reading room, followed by a casual dinner in the historic Logan Room. Space is limited to 20 participants on a first-come, first, serve basis.
About the Seminar Leader:
Carla J. Mulford has published widely in the field of early American studies, but Benjamin Franklin has been her preoccupation over the last twenty years. She has published twenty articles and book chapters on Franklin, in addition to The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Franklin (Cambridge UP, 2009) and Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire (Oxford UP, 2015). She is currently working on a new book, tentatively titled Benjamin Franklin’s Electrical Diplomacy. Professor of English at Penn State University, she is the Founding President of the Society of Early Americanists.
To pay by check contact Colleen Gill, Development and Membership Coordinator, at cgill@librarycompany.org or 215-546-3181, ext. 136. For more information about the seminar series, contact Will Fenton, Director of Scholarly Innovation, at wfenton@librarycompany.org or 215-546-3181, ext. 119.
Making a Republic Imperial
Thursday, March 28, 2019
The Library Company of Philadelphia
1314 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA
Friday, March 29, 2019
McNeil Center for Early American Studies
3355 Woodland Walk, Philadelphia, PA
How and why did the newly independent United States become an empire? The answer to this question is not obvious. Before the American Revolution, the colonies and the continent beyond them were spaces of contest, collaboration, and competition among European empires, Native American powers, and enslaved and free African Americans. The founding generation of the early republic added its own imperial ambitions to this mix, revealing competing visions for the new nation, intense debate in the new citizenry about whether and how quickly the republic should expand, what role it should play among international states, and what its character and purpose should be. Some began calling their nation an “empire” almost as soon as they started calling it a republic, while others wondered if the idea of an expansive republic was a contradiction in terms. Yet in just seven decades, the fledgling republic had become an imperial juggernaut with ambitions to rule a continent and beyond. By the 1840s, the United States had refined its tools for dispossessing Native peoples and asserted a political economy grounded in black enslavement. It had conquered an immense amount of territory and claimed the Pacific Ocean as its western boundary, while setting its imperial sights upon regions, peoples, and resources much further afield.
At this conference, six panels of scholars will use empire as an analytical framework for thinking and writing about the early republic. They will employ a wide variety of methods and approaches to investigate how and why the new nation became an empire, and to explore the meaning and utility of empire as a category of analysis for understanding the history of the early republic.
Conference Program
THURSDAY, MARCH 28
All sessions at the Library Company of Philadelphia, 1314 Locust Street, Philadelphia
9:00–9:45AM Registration & Coffee
9:45–10:00AM Welcome
Cathy Matson, PEAES and University of Delaware
Daniel K. Richter, McNeil Center and University of Pennsylvania
10:00–11:30AM Indigenous Sovereignty and the Ambitions of U.S. Empire
Chair: Michael Blaakman, Princeton University
Emilie Connolly, New York University
“Strategies of Succession and the 1797 Treaty of Big Tree”
Lauren Brand, Southern Nazarene University
“Facing West in Indian Country”
Garrett Wright, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
“Ambassadors to the Federal City: Central Plains Indians Discover the American Empire”
Comment: Elizabeth Ellis, New York University
11:30AM–12:00PM Break
12:00–1:30PM Industry, Trade, and the Imperial State
Chair: Cathy Matson
Susan Gaunt Stearns, University of Mississippi
“Selling the West: Frontier Merchants and Imperial Authority, 1780-1811”
Lindsay Schakenbach Regele, Miami University of Ohio
“How the National Firearms Industry Helped Make an Early Republic Empire”
Alicia Maggard, Williams College
“Pacific Mail, Industrial Empire: Building U.S. Power in the Pacific”
Comment: Honor Sachs, University of Colorado, Boulder
1:30–3:00PM Lunch on your own
3:00–4:45PM Knowledge Production and the Tools of U.S. Empire
Chair: Alexandra Montgomery, University of Pennsylvania
Tisa Wenger, Yale University
“Making Settler Secularism: Morse’s Geographies and American Religion”
Sveinn Jóhannesson, University of Cambridge
“Scientific Knowledge and Empire in Jacksonian America”
Michael Verney, University of New Hampshire
“Selling Empire: Publishing and Presenting Naval Imperialism in the Early American Republic, 1842-1860”
Comment: Ned Blackhawk, Yale University
4:45–5:00PM Keynote Introduction
Emily Conroy–Krutz, Michigan State University
Michael Blaakman, Princeton University
5:00–6:00PM Keynote Speaker
Kathleen DuVal, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
“Debating Empire, Race, and Nation in the Early Nineteenth Century”
6:00–7:00PM Reception
FRIDAY, MARCH 29
All sessions at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, 34th and Sansom Streets, Philadelphia
9:00–9:45AM Registration & Coffee
9:45–11:30AM Race, Slavery, and Geographies of Empire
Chair: Emily Conroy–Krutz, Michigan State University
Nancy Gallman, McNeil Center and Lewis & Clark College
“Unmaking an American Republic: Settlers, African Americans, and Constitutional Law in the Spanish Florida Borderlands”
Brandon Mills, University of Colorado, Denver
“From a Settler Empire to a Global Empire: Reconsidering the African Colonization Movement”
Scott Heerman, University of Miami
“Freedom in Chains: U.S. Empire, the Illegal Slave Trade, and the Case of East Texas, 1836-1845”
Comment: Rashauna Johnson, Dartmouth College
11:30–11:45AM Break
11:45AM–1:30PM Law and the Politics of Imperial Expansion
Chair: Bethel Saler, Haverford College
Jessica Choppin Roney, Temple University
“Inalienable: The Limits of an Empire Based Upon Natural Rights”
Julia Lewandoski, University of California, Berkeley
“An Empire of Indian Titles: Private Land Claims in Early American Louisiana, 1803-1840”
Camille Suarez, University of Pennsylvania
“This Land is Not Your Land: The Land Claims Act of 1851, Unratified Treaties, and the Dispossession of Californios and Native Americans”
Comment: Sarah Rodriguez, University of Arkansas
1:30–2:30PM Lunch on your own
2:30–4:00PM Imperialism and Its Discontents
Chair: Andy Shankman, Rutgers University-Camden
Margot Minardi, Reed College
“Pax Americana? The Imperial Ambivalence of American Peace Reformers”
Nick Guyatt, University of Cambridge
“Imperialism and the American Imagination”
Amy Greenberg, Pennsylvania State University
“When No Means No: The Question of Consent in the Ideology of Manifest Destiny”
Comment: Rosemarie Zagarri, George Mason University
4:15–5:00PM Closing Remarks
Michael Blaakman, Princeton University
Emily Conroy-Krutz, Michigan State University
5:00–6:00PM Reception
The Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Department of History at Princeton University, and Iona College’s Institute of Thomas Paine Studies are pleased to co-sponsor this two-day conference bringing together scholars of imperialism in its multiple early North American forms and spaces.
Stylish Books Symposium
Wednesday, April 3, 2019
The Stylish Books: Designing Philadelphia Furniture exhibition examines the Library Company’s collection related to furniture making in Philadelphia, illustrating the influence of books and showing style changes over time. Printed designs spread new ideas. Artisans, as well as their patrons, relied on books as a way to learn about the latest fashions in interior decoration. Books, periodicals, and advertisements generated consumer desire for these goods. The symposium will further explore and expand on how printed books impacted and inspired furniture design and style. Participants will enjoy talks from expert scholars and have an opportunity to view the exhibition. We hope to encourage and stimulate thought and conversation on this topic. Join us for an exciting day of research and discovery.
Schedule:
8:15-9:00AM:
Registration and light breakfast
9-9:15AM:
Welcome
Dr. Michael Barsanti, Edwin Wolf 2nd Director, Library Company of Philadelphia
Linda August, Curator of Art & Artifacts, Library Company of Philadelphia
9:15-10:15AM:
Keynote address
The Divergent Paths of Two Masters of British 18th-Century Design, Thomas Johnson and Thomas Sheraton
Brock Jobe, Professor Emeritus of American Decorative Arts, Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library
10:15-10:45AM:
Break
10:45-12PM:
Chippendale’s Director. The Rise of Print and Promotion in 18th-Century England
Femke Speelberg, Associate Curator of Historic Ornament, Design and Architecture in the Department of Drawings & Prints, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Thomas Chippendale’s Director in America: Popularity, Parody, and Perseverance
Alyce Englund, Assistant Curator of American Decorative Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art
12-12:45
From Design Book to Design–The Philadelphia Cabinetmakers’ Companions and Guides, 1750-1800
Alexandra Kirtley, Montgomery-Garvan Curator of American Decorative Arts, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Final Remarks
Lunch on your own