Three Sessions: Wednesdays
October 21, November 4 & November 18
5:30-7:00 p.m. est
This seminar will consider the innovative contributions of John Dickinson to the creation of the United States Constitution through his work on the Articles of Confederation (1776), the Annapolis Convention (1786) that met to consider the shortcomings of the Articles, the ensuing Federal Convention (1787), and the debate over ratification (1788). As the only leading figure to contribute substantially to every phase of the American Founding beginning with the Stamp Act resistance, Dickinson also played a key role during the constitutional era. In a timely seminar led by Dr. Jane E. Calvert, chief editor of the John Dickinson Writings Project and Associate Professor of History at the University of Kentucky, participants will explore drafts, notes, and essays, along with selected secondary source readings, to understand Dickinson’s contributions to the U.S. Constitution, reflecting on both what he offered and what his colleagues rejected.
About Dr. Jane E. Calvert
Dr. Jane E. Calvert is founding director and chief editor of the John Dickinson Writings Project and Associate Professor of History at the University of Kentucky. Her publications on Dickinson include Quaker Constitutionalism and the Political Thought of John Dickinson and Volume One of The Complete Writings and Selected Correspondence of John Dickinson. She is currently writing a biography of him. Her work is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the State of Delaware, the Harry and Lynde Bradley Foundation, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, among others.
Special Guests
- Liz Covart is the Digital Projects Editor for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at the College of William & Mary, where she hosts the podcast Ben Franklin’s World. She is currently working on a book project entitled, America’s Forgotten Constitution: The Articles of Confederation.
- John Kaminski is the founding director of the Center for the Study of the American Constitution at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He co-edited 32 volumes of The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution (State Historical Society of Wisconsin).
- Jack N. Rakove is emeritus W. R. Coe Professor of History and American studies at Stanford University. His work Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (Knopf, 1996) won the Pulitzer Prize in History.
Tuesday, October 27th
6:00 – 7:00 p.m. ET
via Zoom
Voter Suppression in U.S. Elections is a round table discussion between Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University, Dr. Kevin Kruse, Professor of History at Princeton University, Dr. Jim Downs, Gilder Lehrman NEH Chair of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College and hosted by Dr. William D. Fenton, Director of Scholarly Innovation at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Voter Suppression in U.S. Elections emerges from an extraordinary conversation held at Library Company last year in conjunction with the annual conference of the Organization of American Historians. This round table conversation will reflect upon that conversation and assess recent developments related to voter disenfranchisement and the voting barriers that ostracize the poor, Black, and Latino communities.
About the Panelists
Carol Anderson (Author)
Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University and a Guggenheim Fellow in Constitutional Studies. She is the author of several books, including Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955, which was published by Cambridge University Press and awarded both the Gustavus Myers and Myrna Bernath Book Awards; White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, which won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and was also a New York Times best seller and a New York Times Editor’s Pick. Her most recent book, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy, was long-listed for the National Book Award in Nonfiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Book Award in Nonfiction.
Kevin M. Kruse (Author)
Kevin M. Kruse specializes in twentieth-century American political history, with special attention to conflicts over race, religion, and rights. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his MA and PhD degrees from Cornell University. He is a professor of history at Princeton University, where he has served on the faculty since 2000. Kruse is the author of White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, and, with Julian Zelizer, Fault Lines: A History of the United States since 1974, as well as the coeditor of three essay collections. He is currently working on his next project, titled “The Division: John Doar, the Justice Department, and the Civil Rights Movement.”
Jim Downs (Editor)
Jim Downs is Gilder Lehrman NEH Chair of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College. He is the author of Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction and the coeditor of Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation (Georgia) and Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America.
To learn more and purchase the book, click here.
Jordan Alexander Stein, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Fordham University
This Fireside Chat is based on a collaboration between the Visual Culture Program and Dr. Pauwels Art & Spectacle in the 19th-Century United States class. The seminar explored spectacle and the historical construction of vision as founding conditions of art reception in the United States during the long nineteenth century. This Chat will showcase students’ research experience and work with an object from the Library Company’s collection.
Led by Erin Pauwels, Assistant Professor of American Art, Temple University and Erika Piola, Curator of Graphic Arts and Director of the Visual Culture Program, Library Company of Philadelphia
Session 1
During quarantine, Jennifer Rosner, Chief of Conservation, completed a research project on the Joseph T. Altemus bindery in Philadelphia. There were a few detours along the way, and she will tell us about a trip to Laurel Hill Cemetery, a search for some very pretty books, and how she persuaded her son to help test a theory on bookbinding practices.
To register for this event, please contact Special Events & Membership Coordinator Colleen Gill at cgill@librarycompany.org.
Not a member yet? Join here!
This Fireside Chat is based on a collaboration between the Visual Culture Program and Dr. Pauwels Art & Spectacle in the 19th-Century United States class. The seminar explored spectacle and the historical construction of vision as founding conditions of art reception in the United States during the long nineteenth century. This Chat will showcase students’ research experience and work with an object from the Library Company’s collection.
Led by Erin Pauwels, Assistant Professor of American Art, Temple University and Erika Piola, Curator of Graphic Arts and Director of the Visual Culture Program, Library Company of Philadelphia
Session 2
Philadelphia at the Table: Sleuthing the Paper Trails of Culinary History in Library Company Collections and Regional Archives with Dr. William Woys Weaver
Monday, November 23
1:30-2:30 p.m. EST
Dr. William Woys Weaver is an internationally known food ethnographer and author of 20 books dealing with culinary history and heritage seeds. He is the founder of The Roughwood Table, a non-profit organization devoted to heritage foods from heritage seeds. He served as Guest Curator for the Library Company’s culinary exhibit called The Larder Invaded (1986-1987). Dr. Weaver received his Ph.D. in food ethnography from University College, Dublin. He is presently working on a culinary history of Philadelphia.
Thursday, December 3rd
5:00-6:30 p.m. est
Drawing on period texts and illustrations (travelogues, almanacs, journals, advertisements) promoting coal, this talk will consider how contemporary audiences came to understand this fossil fuel in three ways: through the lens of landscape, as a geological specimen, and as a central component of the domestic sphere. Come learn about how coal’s multiple roles in the visual economy of the early-19th-century prompted a broadening of its use in the following decades.
About Rebecca Szantyr
Rebecca Szantyr was the 2019-2020 William H. Helfand Visual Culture Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University, where her research focuses on 18th- and 19th-century print culture. Her dissertation on the Neapolitan-American artist Nicolino Calyo examines the overlap of popular culture and the fine arts in the Atlantic World. From 2015-2018, Rebecca was the Florence B. Selden Fellow in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Yale University Art Gallery, where she curated exhibitions on Jacob Lawrence and the history of caricature. Her research has been supported by the American Antiquarian Society, the Joukowsky Research Travel Fund at Brown, the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, and the Library Company.
Co-Hosted with the Philadelphia Club
From 1985 to 2014, John Van Horne served as Director of the Library Company. From the time the first shipload of books arrived from London in 1732 through the present day, augmenting the Library Company’s collection through a constant stream of gifts and purchases has always been a principal part of the mission.
During his tenure the collections grew by many thousands of rare items in all categories, and his talk will highlight the major acquisitions that came in from several sources, such as German-Americana from collectors William Woys Weaver and Don Yoder, the late dean of Pennsylvania German studies; the glorious ornithological plate books comprising the collection of Francis R. Cope, Jr.; the great treasures of American history from the Revolutionary and Early National periods amassed over decades by Robert L. McNeil, Jr. and bequeathed in 2010; works of medical and pharmaceutical history from Trustee Emeritus Charles E. Rosenberg and our late President William H. Helfand; and thousands of important works in several fields from the omnivorous collector Michael Zinman, also a Trustee Emeritus and the subject of a New Yorker profile in 2000; and much else besides. These acquisitions ensure that a venerable institution can continue to respond to the ever-changing interests and needs of its readers and audience.
To register for this event, please contact Special Events & Membership Coordinator Colleen Gill at cgill@librarycompany.org.
Not a member yet? Join here!
Attendance at this event is reserved for donors to the Junto Campaign or those members who are part of our Phillis Wheatley membership and above. To donate to the campaign, please visit https://librarycompany.org/development/development-donate-form/ and select Junto in the “Earmark My Donation” dropdown menu.
Collector Robert Staples and his wife and design partner Barbara Fahs Charles of Staples & Charles will discuss how the collection began fifty years ago, the myriad forms and actions these seemingly simple works can take, and how these cards have inspired some of their exhibition designs.
To register for this event, please contact Special Events & Membership Coordinator Colleen Gill at cgill@librarycompany.org.
Not a member yet? Join here!
Co-Hosted by the Philadelphia Club
Join us for a talk about the history of the Library Company’s horological collections featuring historian, lawyer and collector Jay Robert Stiefel, with an introduction by Linda August, Curator of Art & Artifacts and Visual Materials Cataloger. The Library Company’s long history with clocks and horological books began with early shareholders such as David Rittenhouse, Benjamin Randolph, Edward Duffield, and John Child, and continued under the stewardship of librarian Edwin Wolf 2nd and now Director Emeritus John C. Van Horne. That horological legacy continues to the present day. Our speaker will share its highlights. Jay Stiefel has written on the Library Company’s horological collections for The Magazine Antiques and Antiquarian Horology. The library co-sponsored the launch of Jay’s current book, The Cabinetmaker’s Account: John Head’s Record of Craft & Commerce in Colonial Philadelphia, 1718–1753 (American Philosophical Society 2019), copies of which are available for purchase and inscription: rhammer@librarycompany.org.
To register for this event, please contact Special Events & Membership Coordinator Colleen Gill at cgill@librarycompany.org.
Not a member yet? Join here!
Supported, in part, by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Join Jasmine Smith, our African American History Specialist and Reference Librarian for a live collection review featuring items from our first ever Mellon Scholars on-line exhibition, Déjà Vu: We’ve Been Here Before: Race, Health, and Epidemics. Explore collections from the 18th and 19th century that document the long and chronicled history of medical racism from the 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic to the present.
To register for this event, please contact Special Events & Membership Coordinator Colleen Gill at cgill@librarycompany.org.
Not a member yet? Join here!
Wednesday, February 17
5:30-7 p.m. EST
A conversation with Sharon Block (UC Irvine), Sasha Turner (Johns Hopkins), and Jessica Marie Johnson, author of Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Penn Press, 2020). Hosted by Deirdre Cooper Owens, Director of the Program in African American History.
Offered via Fireside Chats
Sponsored by the Program in African American History