Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, January 9th 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 November 2025 through April 2026.

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Tuesday, January 27th, 2026 at 7 PM ET

Eva Landsberg will interview Amy Watson about her new book, Patriots Before Revolution: The Rise of Party Politics in the British Atlantic, 1714-1763 (Yale University Press, 2025). 

In Patriots Before Revolution, historian Amy Watson shows that the political label “Patriot” was first adopted by a network of British politicians with radical ideas about the principles and purpose of the British Empire. The early Patriots’ ideological mission was not American independence but, rather, imperial reform: Patriots sought to create a British Empire that was militant, expansionist, confederal, and free. Over the course of the eighteenth century, these reformers used print media and grassroots mobilization efforts to expand their party to North America, where Patriotism would have revolutionary implications in the decades to come. The interview will be followed by Q&A.

Amy Watson is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She earned a PhD from Yale University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California/Huntington Library, Early Modern Studies Institute. Her research has been supported by the Massachusetts Historical Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Gates Cambridge Scholarship, and the Library Company of Philadelphia, among others. Her other publications include articles in The William and Mary Quarterly and The Scottish Historical Review.

Hosted by the Program in Early American Economy and Society

Episodes from A Flood of Pictures: The Formation of a Picture Culture in the United States

Book talk with author Dr. Michael Leja

Friday, January 30th, 2026 at 1:30 PM ET

Virtual Event | Free

When and how did pictures begin to permeate everyday lives in the United States? What happened to those daily lives when they did? And what happened to pictures in the process? The formative period for this cultural transformation was the three decades before the Civil War, when the ordinary experiences of a large segment of the population came to include pictures of many kinds, including illustrations in books, pamphlets, and newspapers; photographs on cards; full-sheet printed pictures collected in scrapbooks or albums or hung on walls; posters and broadsheets; spectacular paintings displayed in theatrical venues; and more.

In a surprisingly short span of time pictures assumed important functions. They supplemented verbal texts—and in some cases overshadowed them—for conveying news and information; portraying people, places, and events; selling things; educating and instructing; promoting and disguising political agendas; and shaping social identities. All sorts of individual and collective experiences were increasingly mediated by visual representations.

This talk will highlight two of the influential projects featured in A Flood of Pictures. They help to illuminate a time before successful pictorial formulas for mass appeal were established, before an audience habituated to consumption of pictures existed, and before pictures had become thoroughly commodified.

A Flood of Pictures is available for purchase at University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Hosted by the Visual Culture Program

Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, February 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 in November 2025 through April 2026.

REGISTER

Black Declarations of Independence: Before and After 1776

February 19th-2oth, 2026

The American Philosophical Society, Benjamin Franklin Hall, 427 Chestnut St

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Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, March 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 in November 2025 through April 2026.

REGISTER

Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, April 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 November 2025 through April 2026.

REGISTER

REGISTER

Tuesday, April 21st, 2026 at 7 PM ET

Join us to discuss Alec Zuercher Reichardt’s new book, Roads to Power, Roads to Crisis: The War for the American Interior and the Infrastructural Routes of Revolution (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025).

The construction of imperial communications infrastructure led to British victory in the Seven Years’ War, yet it was also the empire’s undoing, laying the roads to Revolution.

Centering on the eighteenth-century struggle for the greater Ohio Valley, this book uncovers a much larger imperial competition, one for control over Atlantic and North American information and transportation networks. By the height of the Seven Years’ War, this contest had propelled Britain to construct imperial infrastructure that outpaced the efforts of France, its primary European rival, and that successfully co-opted Indigenous ally channels. However, the rise of the British North American infrastructure state was also the empire’s downfall. The same roads, printing presses, and postal networks constructed and funded by the War Office and imperial treasury quickly also became the primary routes for those revolutionaries who sought to oppose the British state.

Alec Reichardt is Associate Professor of History and Kinder Institute Associate Professor of Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri. He received his BA from Duke and his PhD from Yale University. A historian of early North America and the Atlantic World, he’s published essays and articles on the global eighteenth-century British Empire, French military infrastructure, Indigenous textual translation, as well as a co-edited collection, Inlands: Empires, Contested Interiors, and the Connection of the World (Columbia University Press, 2024).

Hosted by the Program in Early American Economy and Society