Upcoming Events
October
21oct5:30 pm8:30 pmThe Forgotten Photographs of Reconstruction
Event Details
The Forgotten Photographs of Reconstruction In-Person Panel featuring Anne Cross, Matthew Fox-Amato, Aston Gonzalez, Elizabeth Keto and Kimberly-Wallace Sanders October 21st, 2025 at 5:30 PM ET
Event Details
The Forgotten Photographs of Reconstruction
In-Person Panel featuring Anne Cross, Matthew Fox-Amato, Aston Gonzalez, Elizabeth Keto and Kimberly-Wallace Sanders
October 21st, 2025 at 5:30 PM ET
This panel explores the role that photography played in the aftermath of American slavery. Anne Cross explores an 1866 photo used to document violence against a formerly enslaved person, while Elizabeth Keto investigates the history of anti-lynching photography. Kimberly Wallace-Sanders sheds new light on portrait photographs of black caretakers and white children, and Aston Gonzalez reinterprets the widely circulated “Radical Members of the So. Ca. Legislature.” Matthew Fox-Amato will speak to frame the essays. With particular attention to Black history, race, and racism, this panel breaks new ground in our understanding of photography’s place in the racial politics of the Reconstruction era.
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Time
October 21, 2025 5:30 pm - 8:30 pm(GMT-04:00)
28oct7:00 pm9:00 pmFierce Desires: Identifying LGBTQ Histories in the American Past
Event Details
Fierce Desires: Identifying LGBTQ Histories in the American Past Charlotte Cushman Society Lecture featuring Rebecca Davis October 28, 2025 at 7:00 PM ET Professor Rebecca
Event Details
Fierce Desires: Identifying LGBTQ Histories in the American Past
Charlotte Cushman Society Lecture featuring Rebecca Davis
October 28, 2025 at 7:00 PM ET
Professor Rebecca Davis, author of Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America (Norton, 2024), a New Yorker “best book of 2024,” asks us to consider how and why queerness thrived in earlier eras, the impact of anti-obscenity laws, and the power of social movements to shift historical narratives. Rather than search for queer ancestors, she invites us to imagine entirely different ways that people thought about gender and sexuality in the past. She argues that this approach reveals just how visible, present, and influential queer desire was long before our contemporary labels or identity categories.
Rebecca Davis is a professor of history and of women and gender studies at the University of Delaware. She writes the Carnal Knowledge newsletter on Substack.
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Time
October 28, 2025 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
November
05nov5:30 pm8:30 pmRum and Coffee - Book Talk with Michelle McDonald and Jordan Smith
Event Details
Rum and Coffee Book talk with Michelle McDonald and Jordan Smith Wednesday, November 5th, 2025 Ticketed Reception at 5:30 | Free Lecture at 6:30
Event Details
Rum and Coffee
Book talk with Michelle McDonald and Jordan Smith
Wednesday, November 5th, 2025
Ticketed Reception at 5:30 | Free Lecture at 6:30
Strong. Cheap. Habit-forming. In the early modern era two very different beverages flooded American markets and palettes, each in their own way transforming tastes, leisure time, and even health. Rum and coffee connected North American markets and consumers to Caribbean plantation economies and Atlantic circuits of trade, fueling global economic integration.
Join us for an evening of rum, coffee, and convivial conversation with Jordan B. Smith, author of The Invention of Rum: Creating the Quintessential Atlantic Commodity and Michelle Craig McDonald, author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States to learn more about how these beverages went from rare and exotic to ubiquitous and everyday—and how each affected the economies and even politics of the United States in the era of revolutions.
The talk is free and open to the public. In addition, at a reception beforehand, Library Company shareholders and ticket-purchasers may join the authors for a rum tasting, espresso martinis, and rum- or coffee-flavored dessert treats.
Hosted by the Program in Early American Economy and Society
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Time
November 5, 2025 5:30 pm - 8:30 pm(GMT-04:00)
07nov11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, November 7th at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour
Friday, November 7th 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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Time
November 7, 2025 11:00 am - 12:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
13nov5:30 pm9:00 pm294th Annual Dinner Featuring Frank Cogliano
Event Details
The Library Company of Philadelphia has been gathering for an annual dinner since our founding in 1731. To learn more about this year’s event and available sponsorship opportunities,
Event Details
The Library Company of Philadelphia has been gathering for an annual dinner since our founding in 1731. To learn more about this year’s event and available sponsorship opportunities, please contact the Development Office at development@librarycompany.org or 215-546-3181 ext. 118.
294th Annual Dinner – Featuring Frank Cogliano
Thursday, November 13th, 2025
Presented In-Person
The Down Town Club by Cescaphe
600 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA
We are pleased to host a lecture from Francis D. Cogliano, author of A Revolutionary Friendship: Washington, Jefferson, and the American Republic
Frank Cogliano is Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he is the author or editor of twelve books. He is the president of the Open History Society in Edinburgh and cohost of the American History Podcast: The Whiskey Rebellion. He makes regular media appearances, commenting on U.S. history, politics and international relations, for the BBC and other outlets.
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Time
November 13, 2025 5:30 pm - 9:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
19nov1:00 pm3:30 pmFinding Moses Williams
Event Details
Finding Moses Williams Free Virtual Program November 19th , 2025 at 1 PM ET This program of illustrated talks by five speakers focuses on the
Event Details
Finding Moses Williams
Free Virtual Program
November 19th , 2025 at 1 PM ET
This program of illustrated talks by five speakers focuses on the identification of the exceptional hollow-cut paper profiles created by Moses Williams (1776-1830) at Peale’s Philadelphia Museum and on presenting new historically accurate information about Williams’s life and family. Moses’s parents were manumitted by Peale in 1786 and Moses, who was born enslaved, was then indentured to Peale by his parents until age twenty-eight
Raised within the Peale family, Moses was literate and trained in skills for creating and installing the Museum’s displays of art and natural science. After the installation of a physiognotrace device for creating hollow-cut paper profiles in 1802, Moses was freed and given the concession to operate this new attraction. The popularity of this inexpensive form of portraiture and the highly accurate and elegant profiles Moses cut, made him financially independent.
Recent research into Moses’s life provides us with a clearer understanding of his artistry and other activities, as well as his death date and the identity of his descendants. And, the story of Williams’s birth family illuminates how the practice of indenture used by Free Black families, like the Williams family, was a strategy for seeking financial stability.
A small selection of Moses Williams’s profiles will be on display at the Library Company during November and December and in the Peale Gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
This program is sponsored by the Library Company of Philadelphia’s Program in African American History and the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
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Time
November 19, 2025 1:00 pm - 3:30 pm(GMT-04:00)
20nov7:00 pm8:00 pmFireside Chat- Protestant Relics in Early AmericaFree
Event Details
November Fireside Chat Protestant Relics in Early America With Jamie
Event Details
November Fireside Chat
Protestant Relics in Early America
With Jamie Brummitt
Thursday, November 20th at 7 PM ET
Virtual Event | Free
Join us for a book talk with Jamie L. Brummitt, author of Protestant Relics in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2025). In this talk, Brummitt explores the relationships among material culture, mourning, and gender in early America. Despite the common assumption that mourning is a feminine practice, this talk considers how producing, touching, and keeping relics became an intimate part of masculine mourning practices tied to religion, politics, and citizenship in early America. As Brummitt demonstrates, people of nearly all Protestant denominations and walks of life–including members of Congress, college presidents, ministers, mothers, free Black activists, schoolchildren, and enslaved people–sought embodied and supernatural sense experiences with relics. They collected relics from deathbeds, stole relics from tombs, made relics in schools, visited relics at pilgrimage sites like George Washington’s Mount Vernon, purchased relics in the marketplace, and carried relics into the American Revolution and the Civil War. Locks of hair, blood, bones, portraits, daguerreotypes, postmortem photographs, memoirs, deathbed letters, Bibles, clothes, embroidered and painted mourning pieces, and a plethora of other objects that had been touched, used, or owned by the dead became Protestant relics. These relic practices were so pervasive that they shaped systems of earthly and heavenly power, from children’s education to national elections to Protestant-Catholic relations to the structure of freedom and families in the afterlife. As this talk demonstrates, mourning practices became associated with women over time and for specific reasons, but this was not a foregone conclusion. Many early Americans considered mourning to be primarily a masculine practice centered around collecting relics of the dead for religious and political purposes.
Jamie L. Brummitt is an Associate Professor of American religions and material culture at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Brummitt earned her PhD from Duke University. Her book Protestant Relics in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2025) examines relic veneration, corpse inspection, and the art of mourning in the early United States. In 2017, Brummitt was the recipient of the Anthony N. B. and Beatrice W. B. Garvan Research Fellowship in American Material Culture at The Library Company of Philadelphia. She is also a past fellow of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon; Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library; the Filson Historical Society; and the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium.
Protestant Relics in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2025) is available for purchase with a 30% discount with code AAFLYG6 at Oxford University Press.
Hosted by the Visual Culture Program
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Time
November 20, 2025 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
December
05dec11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, December 5th at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour
Friday, December 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 November 2025 through April 2026.
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Time
December 5, 2025 11:00 am - 12:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
January
09jan11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, January 9th at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
Event Details
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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Time
January 9, 2026 11:00 am - 12:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
Event Details
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,
Event Details
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.
Hosted by the Visual Culture Program
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Time
January 30, 2026 1:30 pm - 3:30 pm(GMT-04:00)
February
06feb11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, February 6th at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
Event Details
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.
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Time
February 6, 2026 11:00 am - 12:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
March
06mar(mar 6)11:00 am13(mar 13)12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, March 6th at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
Event Details
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.
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Time
March 6, 2026 11:00 am - March 13, 2026 12:00 pm(GMT-04:00)
April
03apr11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, April 3rd at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
Event Details
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.
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Time
April 3, 2026 11:00 am - 12:00 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