Upcoming Events
February
07feb11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, February 7th, at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour
Friday, February 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 January through April
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Time
February 7, 2025 11:00 am - 12:00 pm(GMT-05:00)
07feb(feb 7)2:00 pm08(feb 8)6:00 pmPEAES @ 2025: Retrospect and ProspectConference
Event Details
PEAES @ 2025: Retrospect and Prospect February 7-8th, 2025 The Historical Society of Philadelphia and the American Philosophical Society
Event Details
PEAES @ 2025: Retrospect and Prospect
February 7-8th, 2025
The Historical Society of Philadelphia and the American Philosophical Society
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEAES) was founded in 1999 to support advanced research in the history of American economy, including commerce, technological innovation, finance, business, and other fields. In its first twenty-five years PEAES has supported post-doctoral, dissertation, and short-term fellowships, sponsored conferences, and published scholarly monographs through a book series.
PEAES @ 25: Retrospect and Prospect takes the opportunity to reflect on the program’s accomplishments in the first twenty-five years under the leadership of Dr. Cathy Matson and to think forward to the challenges and opportunities of the next twenty-five years. What are the questions, methods, and approaches that will guide the next generation of scholarship? How can PEAES best support scholars of early American economy and political economy going forward?
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Time
February 7, 2025 2:00 pm - February 8, 2025 6:00 pm(GMT-05:00)
18feb7:00 pm8:00 pmFIRESIDE CHAT Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s BankFree
Event Details
Fireside Chat with Justene Hill Edwards Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank Tuesday, February 18th, 2025 7:00 PM ET Virtual Event
Event Details
Fireside Chat with Justene Hill Edwards
Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank
Tuesday, February 18th, 2025
7:00 PM ET
Virtual Event | Free
In the years immediately after the Civil War, tens of thousands of former slaves deposited millions of dollars into the Freedman’s Bank. African Americans envisioned this new bank as a launching pad for economic growth and self-determination. But only nine years after it opened, their trust was betrayed and the Freedman’s Bank collapsed. Fully informed by new archival findings, Justene Hill Edwards unearths a major turning point in American history in this comprehensive account of the Freedman’s Bank and its depositors. She illuminates the hope with which the bank was first envisioned and demonstrates the significant setback that the sabotage of the bank caused in the fight for economic autonomy.
Justene Hill Edwards is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. An Andrew Carnegie Fellow and a Mellon New Directions Fellow, she is a specialist in African American history, focusing on Black economic life in America. She is the author of Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank (2024, W.W. Norton) and Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina (2021, Columbia University Press). Always highlighting the lives of enslaved and formerly enslaved people, Hill Edwards studies the relationship between economic and political freedom for people of African descent in the United States.
Sponsored by the Program of Early American Economy and Society
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Time
February 18, 2025 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT-05:00)
20feb(feb 20)6:30 pm22(feb 22)12:00 pmBlack Philadelphia in the 18th and 19th Centuries
Event Details
PAAH: Black Philadelphia in the 18th and 19th Centuries February 20-22nd, 2025 The McNeil Center of Early American Studies and the
Event Details
PAAH: Black Philadelphia in the 18th and 19th Centuries
February 20-22nd, 2025
The McNeil Center of Early American Studies and the Library Company of Philadelphia
The Library Company of Philadelphia, in partnership with 1838 Black Metropolis and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania will be hosting “Black Philadelphia in the 18th and 19th Centuries” on February 20-22, 2025. The conference aims to restore Black people as central historical actors in Philadelphia, paying particular attention to their abolitionist, cultural, economic, social, and political networks. As the nation prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary in 2026, Philadelphia will be in the national spotlight for its historic connections to 1776. Too often placed at the margins of these commemorations, Black historical subjects take center stage at this conference, which aims to document their labor, politics and cultural contributions and rethink the periodization that determines national celebrations while compartmentalizing the history of racial minorities as separate timelines.
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Time
February 20, 2025 6:30 pm - February 22, 2025 12:00 pm(GMT-05:00)
March
07mar11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, March 7th, at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour
Friday, March 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 January through April
more
Time
March 7, 2025 11:00 am - 12:00 pm(GMT-05:00)
Event Details
The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America Dr. Kate Haulman Tuesday, March 11th, 5:30pm In-Person Event Join us on March 11 to hear
Event Details
The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America
Dr. Kate Haulman
Tuesday, March 11th, 5:30pm
In-Person Event
Join us on March 11 to hear Dr. Kate Haulman talk about her forthcoming book, The Mother of Washington in Nineteenth-Century America, which uses the public memory of Mary Ball Washington to explore the role of motherhood in commemorating the American Revolution Through the creation and evolution of the “Mother of Washington” figure in print, images, and the monument to her, memorializing Mary promoted a vision of founding motherhood based in traditional hierarchies of gender, race, and ancestry. As some women framed their political engagement in maternal terms, other men and women used the Mother of Washington to link the virtues she represented to the nation’s origins. The monument, begun by elite men in 1833, languished incomplete for decades, but white women memorialists who identified with Mary finished it in 1894, enshrining their version of motherhood on the landscape. Then as now, groups used the past to construct American motherhood and motherhood to engage with the founding past.
Dr. Haulman, Associate Professor of History at American University, researches and teaches the history of early North America and US women’s and gender history. She is the author of The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2011; paperback 2014), winner of the Berkshire Conference Prize for Best First Book in the History of Women, Gender, and/or Sexuality, and co-editor, with Pamela Nadell, of Making Women’s Histories: Beyond National Perspectives (New York University Press, 2013). She co-curated the exhibit “All Work, No Pay: A History of Women’s Invisible Labor in the Home” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History
Sponsored by the Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch Program in Women’s History
at the Library Company of Philadelphia
.
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Time
March 11, 2025 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT-05:00)
21mar2:00 pm3:00 pmFIRESIDE CHAT Reclaiming Women’s Power in the American RevolutionFree
Event Details
Fireside Chat with Dr. Jacqueline Beatty Reclaiming Women’s Power in the American Revolution Friday, March 21st, 2025 2 PM ET Virtual Event | Free
Event Details
Fireside Chat with Dr. Jacqueline Beatty
Reclaiming Women’s Power in the American Revolution
Friday, March 21st, 2025
2 PM ET
Virtual Event | Free
The American Revolution was a war for independence. Yet during this conflict, ordinary American women, in managing crises in their lives, claimed their dependence on husbands, on officials from local institutions, and on the state itself—all patriarchal forces that governed their lives. Join us this March for a “Fireside Chat” that explores the experiences of women who submitted thousands of petitions in the Revolutionary era, demanding remuneration, clemency, property rights, and even divorces, all using language that parroted presumptions of their legal, economic, and social subordination to men. Yet this rhetoric belied the astute and purposeful strategy women employed in their petitions to patriarchal officials. Ultimately, women in the revolutionary era were able to advocate for themselves and express a relative degree of power not in spite of their dependent status, but because of it.
Dr. Jacqueline Beatty is Associate Professor of History at York College of Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses in early American, women’s and gender, and public history. She received her Ph.D. from George Mason University in 2016. In 2015, she was awarded a Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch Program in Women’s History short-term fellowship at the Library Company for her research. Her first book, In Dependence: Women and the Patriarchal State in Revolutionary America, was published with New York University Press in 2023. She has bylines in The Washington Post, Time and Salon.
Sponsored by the Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch Program in Women’s History
at the Library Company of Philadelphia
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Time
March 21, 2025 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm(GMT-05:00)
April
04apr11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, April 4th, at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour
Friday, April 4th, 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 January through April
more
Time
April 4, 2025 11:00 am - 12:00 pm(GMT-05:00)
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