Upcoming Events
July
22jul7:00 pm8:00 pmFireside Chat- American Laughter, American Fury, With Eran ZelnikFree
Event Details
July Fireside Chat American Laughter, American Fury:
Event Details
July Fireside Chat
American Laughter, American Fury: Humor and the Making of a White Man’s Democracy, 1750–1850
Tuesday, July 22nd at 7 PM ET
Virtual Event | Free
In his new book American Laughter, American Fury, Eran A. Zelnik offers a cultural history of early America that shows how humor among white men served to define and construct not only whiteness and masculinity but also American political culture and democracy more generally. This humor — a category that includes “Indian play,” Blackface Minstrelsy, and frontier tall tales — transformed the United States into a white man’s democracy: a country in which only white men could be truly comfortable in their own skin.
Dr. Eran Zelnik received his PhD from UC Davis in 2016 and for the past seven years has been teaching history at Chico State University in California. A cultural historian, his work examines the intersecting categories of race, gender, and nationalism in the early United States. Alongside his recently published book, American Laughter, American Fury, Humor and the Making of a White Man’s Democracy, 1750-1850, he has published articles in the Journal of the Early Republic and in Early American Studies.
Hosted by the Program of Early American Economy and Society
more
Time
July 22, 2025 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
August
01aug11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, August 1st at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour
Friday, August 1st 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 May through October.
more
Time
August 1, 2025 11:00 am - 12:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
September
05sep11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, September 5th at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour
Friday, September 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 in May through October.
more
Time
September 5, 2025 11:00 am - 12:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
11sep5:30 pm9:00 pm11th Annual Lecture in Honor of John C. Van Horne, with Richard Kagan
Event Details
11th Annual Lecture in Honor of John C. Van Horne, with Richard Kagan Thursday, September 11th, 2025 Franklin Hall at the American Philosophical Society
Event Details
11th Annual Lecture in Honor of John C. Van Horne, with Richard Kagan
Thursday, September 11th, 2025
Franklin Hall at the American Philosophical Society
Join us for the 11th Annual Lecture in Honor of John C. Van Horne, featuring Richard Kagan, author of The Inquisition’s Inquisitor: Henry Charles Lea of Philadelphia. In this lecture, Professor Kagan, will examine Lea’s multi-faceted career as a historian, shrewd businessman, dogged reformer, and major benefactor of the Library Company and University of Pennsylvania. He also offers new insights into Lea’s personal life, notably his controversial infatuation with his first cousin and future wife, Anna C. Jaudon; the periodic breakdowns that sidetracked his intellectual pursuits; and religious convictions that compromised the ostensibly “scientific” and objective character of his historical work.
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.
more
Time
September 11, 2025 5:30 pm - 9:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
Event Details
September Fireside Chat Telling the Truth about Authoritarianism: The
Event Details
September Fireside Chat
Telling the Truth about Authoritarianism: The World-Altering Lives of John Swanson Jacobs
Thursday, September 18th at 7 PM ET
Virtual Event | Free
John Swanson Jacobs’s remarkable 1855 autobiographical emancipation narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery was lost on the other side of the world until Jonathan Schroeder rediscovered and republished it in 2024, accompanied by a full-length biography, No Longer Yours: The Lives of John Swanson Jacobs. Writing from the other side of the world, beyond the reach of American law and humanitarian authority, John Jacobs—globe-spanning brother of Harriet Jacobs and friend of Frederick Douglass—demonstrates the potential of unfiltered, unapologetic Black writing to speak truth to power. Bringing Despots back to the nation that Jacobs turned his back on gives American readers the best opportunity yet to understand how, when liberated from invisible constraints, African ex-Americans were able to reconfigure the relationship between liberty and truth to call for new, more just worlds. Most remarkably, the second half of the narrative ceases to narrate the autobiographical plot of Jacobs’s life altogether, and instead performs his autobiographical style, with Jacobs writing between the lines of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in order to underline the vast distance between these founding documents’ rhetoric of liberty and its reality. In reckoning with John S. Jacobs’s world-altering words for the first time, we are forced to ask how, in 1776, this new American nation commenced two experiments at once: one in democracy, the other in tyranny.
Jonathan D. S. Schroeder is a historian, literary critic, and lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design. His edition of John Swanson Jacobs’s long lost autobiographical slave narrative, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery, was republished by Chicago in 2024, profiled in the New York Times, All Things Considered, and many other sites, and was the recipient of a 2025 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The recipient of long-term fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Carter Brown Library, and the American Antiquarian Society, Schroeder is a 2025-26 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where he is completing Prisoners of Loss: An Atlantic History of Nostalgia (under contract with Harvard) and beginning a full-fledged biography of the Jacobs family and their worlds.
Hosted by the Program in African American History
more
Time
September 18, 2025 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
October
03oct11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, October 3rd at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour
Friday, October 3rd 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 May through October.
more
Time
October 3, 2025 11:00 am - 12:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
Event Details
October Fireside Chat The Predatory Sea: Human Trafficking and
Event Details
October Fireside Chat
The Predatory Sea: Human Trafficking and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean
With Casey Schmitt
Tuesday, October 21st at 7 PM ET
Virtual Event | Free
A century before the height of the Atlantic slave trade, early modern racialized slavery emerged through practices of captive-taking and human trafficking in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Caribbean. Casey Schmitt’s The Predatory Sea (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) offers the first full-length study of this deeply entangled history of captivity and colonialism. Between 1570 and 1670, a multinational assortment of privately funded ship captains, sailors, merchants, and adventurers engaged in widespread practices of captive-taking and human trafficking. Raids against coastal communities and regional shipping in the Caribbean ensnared multitudes, including free and previously enslaved people of African and Indigenous descent, who found themselves trafficked into slavery away from their communities of belonging. Beginning in the 1570s, their captors established maritime bases on small, strategically located islands. Colonization thus started with practices of captive-taking and human trafficking, which remained central to the development of the first English and French colonies in the Caribbean. Reading across imperial archives, Schmitt also traces the experiences of those ensnared in this trade. This captive economy, as explicated in The Predatory Sea, shaped English and French colonization, inter-imperial competition, and the lived experiences of captives and their captors.
Dr. Casey Schmitt is an assistant professor of history at Cornell University where she teaches classes on Early America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic World. She received here Ph.D. from William and Mary in 2018 and was the 2018-19 Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies before joining the faculty at Cornell. Her articles have appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, the Hispanic American Historical Review, and Early American Studies.
Hosted by the Program of Early American Economy and Society
more
Time
October 21, 2025 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
2025 Holiday Closings
The Library Company will observe the following holidays in 2025:
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day – Jan 20, 2025
President’s Day – Feb 17, 2025
Memorial Day – May 26, 2025
Juneteenth – June 19, 2025
Independence Day – July 4, 2025
Labor Day – September 1, 2025
Thanksgiving – November 27 & 28, 2025
Winter Break – December 24, 2025 – January 2, 2026
For more information on these events please call 215-546-3181 or email events@librarycompany.org