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Wednesday, April 15, 2026 at 5:00 PM ET

Please join the Library Company of Philadelphia on April 15th for a talk with Jessica Lepler about her new book Canal Dreamers (UNC Press, 2025)

Jessica M. Lepler tells the captivating story of this global journey in her new book, Canal Dreamers. Although the idea of literally changing the world by connecting the oceans proved too revolutionary for the Age of Revolutions, the quest itself changed history. Canal dreams prompted political transformations, financial crisis, recognition of new countries, concern about climate change, and more. Full of adventure, corruption, far-reaching consequences, and present-day parallels, Lepler’s absorbing narrative cuts through two centuries, revealing that dreams do not need to come true to make history.

Friday, April 17th, 2026 at 5:30 PM ET

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Free | In Person

Please join the Library Company of Philadelphia on April 17th for a conversation with Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens and Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson, moderated by Dr. Jim Downs

Join us for a public conversation featuring Deirdre Cooper Owens and Kellie Carter Jackson, moderated by Program Director Jim Downs, as we reflect on the field’s evolution, its present urgencies, and the future of Black women’s scholarship. Coinciding with the Organization of American Historians annual meeting in Philadelphia, this program invites all to celebrate the continued growth and transformation of Black women’s history at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

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Wednesday, April 22nd, 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