Crania Americana  And the Archive of Scientific Racism Exhibition Viewing

Tuesday, September 17, 2024 at 5:30 PM ET

In-Person Event | Free

Please join us for a Beyond Glass Cases exhibition viewing and reception for Crania Americana and the Archive of Scientific Racism, curated by former Library Company Fellow Paul Wolff Mitchell. This exhibition comprises part of Project Obtuse, a collaboration between the Library Company, Mitchell, and Jicarilla Apache artist Zachariah Julian, whose composition will premiere the following evening. Together, Mitchell and Julian examined the work of Samuel George Morton (1799-1851), whose papers reside, in part, at the Library Company. Morton is known today as among the most influential architects of scientific racism in the United States, both for his publications – most notably Crania Americana (1839) – and for his collection of nearly one thousand human skulls from across the world, amassed and measured during his lifetime to supply the “data” for these works. In this exhibition, Mitchell contextualizes the work of Morton and explores how Morton’s thinking developed and how his theories still affect us today. During this opening reception and viewing event, guests will have the opportunity to meet Mitchell and Julian and ask questions about their work.

Beyond Glass Cases is supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

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Project Obtuse Performance

Wednesday, September 18, 2024 at 5:30 PM ET

Free, In-Person Event | Hosted at the Asian Arts Initiative, 1219 Vine St, NOT at the Library Company

We hope you will join us at the Asian Arts Initiative for the premiere performance of Project Obtuse. In Project Obtuse, Jicarilla Apache artist Zachariah Julian uses color, sound, and movement to confront a dark chapter in the history of Indigenous peoples in America. To inform and inspire his composition, Julian, along with scholar Paul Wolff Mitchell, examined the work of Samuel George Morton (1799-1851), whose papers reside, in part, at the Library Company. Morton is known today as among the most influential architects of scientific racism in the United States, both for his publications – most notably Crania Americana (1839) – and for his collection of nearly one thousand human skulls from across the world, amassed and measured during his lifetime to supply the “data” for these works. For Project Obtuse, Julian worked with Mitchell to explore how Morton’s thinking developed and how his theories still affect us today. Through composition and performance, Julian will shift our gaze away from the chapter written by Morton and his colleagues and toward a thriving present and future that Indigenous Americans write for themselves. The performance will be followed immediately by a panel discussion with Julian and Mitchell, led by Library Company Curator of Printed Books Rachel D’Agostino.

Beyond Glass Cases is supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

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Book Launch: Edward Duffield, Clockmaker

Wednesday, September 18, 2024 at 6:00 PM ET

Free, In-Person Event | Hosted at the American Philosophical Society,
427 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106,
NOT at the Library Company

The American Philosophical Society Press will host a launch for the first book length study of Philadelphia clockmaker Edward Duffield on September 18, 2024.

Author Bob Frishman will discuss the life and work of Edward Duffield (1730–1803), a colonial Philadelphia clockmaker whose elegant brass, mahogany, and walnut timekeepers stand proudly in major American museums and collections. Duffield, unlike other leather-apron ‘mechanics,’ was born rich and owned a country estate, Benfield, and many more properties. He was deeply involved in civic and church affairs during crucial years in American history—his lifelong close friend, Benjamin Franklin, was staying at Duffield’s Benfield estate when Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams first discussed the Declaration of Independence. Sally, Franklin’s daughter, brought her family there for extended periods during the Revolution and Franklin’s wife, Deborah, was best friends for 50 years with Duffield’s mother-in-law. Duffield was even one of three executors of Franklin’s will.

In this lavishly illustrated book, Bob Frishman catalogs and describes 71 known Duffield clocks and instruments and reveals how, during the mid-18th century, they largely were not fabricated from scratch by isolated individuals. He contends that Duffield and his fellow clockmakers were not furniture-makers; they were mechanical artisans whose complex metal machines rang the hours and steadily ticked inside wooden cases made by others. Existing books on Philadelphia clocks have focused on these artifacts as furniture, including their woodwork, cabinetmakers, and decorative aspects. However, Frishman, a professional horologist for nearly four decades, brings his vast expertise to bear on this first comprehensive study of Duffield’s life and work.

Bob Frishman is a shareholder with the Library Company of Philadelphia. In the Logan Room you will find a Duffield clock, donated by Richard and Pamela Mones, that is included in the book.

This event is co-sponsored by the Library Company of Philadelphia with the American Philosophical Society

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Tangled Journeys: One Family’s Story and the Making of American History

A Book Launch Conversation with Dr. Lori Ginzberg, Krystal Appiah, Beverly Brown, Elsa Lora, and Erika Piola

Thursday, September 19, 2024
5:30 pm
In-Person Event | Free

In 1830, Richard Walpole Cogdell, a Charleston bank clerk, purchased a fifteen-year-old enslaved girl, Sarah Martha Sanders. Until her death in 1850, she bore nine of his children, five of whom reached adulthood. In 1857, this all-too-ordinary story took an extraordinary turn when Cogdell and his enslaved children moved to Philadelphia, where he bought them a house. Virtually overnight, they became part of the African American middle class. In Tangled Journeys, Lori D. Ginzberg tells a sweeping transatlantic family history, a multi-generational, multi-racial story that is both traumatic and prosaic. Ginzberg combines exhaustive archival research of the Library Company’s Stevens-Cogdell/Sanders-Venning/Chew Collection with “whispers” —questions that the available evidence cannot answer but that force us to confront what was unseen, unheard, and undocumented. Readers are invited to grapple with an American history that puts the Sanders ancestors and descendants at its center.

Join Dr. Ginzberg, former Library Company curator Krystal Appiah, Sanders family descendants Beverly Brown and Elsa Lora, and Library Company curator Erika Piola in a celebratory reception and conversation about the stories behind the publication of Tangled Journeys.

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Fireside Chat with Dr. Michael A. Blaakman

Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic

Wednesday, September 25, 2024
7:00 p.m. ET
Virtual Event | Free

Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, October 4, 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 October through December.

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The Adventurous Life of Amelia B. Edwards: Egyptologist, Novelist, Activist

Charlotte Cushman Society Lecture featuring Dr. Margaret C. Jones

October 8, 2024 at 1:00 PM ET

Virtual Event | Free

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Lineage Exhibition Opening

Tuesday, October 15, 2024 at 5:30 PM ET

In-Person Event | Free

We hope you will join us for the public exhibition opening of Lineage, a Beyond Glass Cases exhibition curated by Mark Thomas Gibson. Through four large scale paintings, Mark Thomas Gibson’s Lineage examines the proposition of “the future of humanity” proposed by Samuel Jennings’ 1792 painting Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences (or The Genius of America Encouraging the Emancipation of the Blacks).

The paintings are informed from Library Company holdings depicting the figure Liberty and listening sessions with Philadelphia high school history teachers; high school students from the social justice media program POPPYN; community leaders attending the political education program Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction; and volunteers from the Paul Robeson House and Museum. The works represent the session participants’ envisioned futures for humanity. Gibson’s paintings are composed within the western narrative painting tradition and seek to reorient viewers to understand our fictional relationship with our perception of history and potential outcomes.

Beyond Glass Cases is supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

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A Conversation with Sarah Lewis

Thursday October 17th, 5:30pm

In-Person Event

On Thursday, October 17, the Program in African American History is pleased to host a conversation with two of the nation’s leading Black art historians Sarah Lewis (Harvard University) and Huey Copeland (University of Pittsburgh).

PAAH Director Jim Downs and Professor Copeland will interview Dr. Lewis about her much-anticipated new book, UNSEEN TRUTH: WHEN RACE CHANGED SIGHT IN AMERICA. In this masterpiece of historical detective work, Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history. There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation’s racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen—until now. The surprising catalyst occurred in the nineteenth century when the Caucasian War—the fight for independence in the Caucasus that coincided with the end of the US Civil War—revealed the instability of the entire regime of racial domination. Images of the Caucasus region and peoples captivated the American public but also showed that the place from which we derive “Caucasian” for whiteness was not white at all. Cultural and political figures ranging from P. T. Barnum to Frederick Douglass, W. E .B. Du Bois to Woodrow Wilson recognized such fictions and more, exploiting, unmasking, critiquing, or burying them.

Sarah Lewis, is regarded as one of the most insightful and eloquent speakers on race, visuality, and culture in America. Her Vision & Justice initiative sparked a critical national conversation on the intersection of visual representation and racial justice.

This program is presented by The Program in African American History. 

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Fireside Chat with Jason Cherry

William Trent: Factor of Ambition

Tuesday, October 22, 2024
7:00 PM ET
Virtual Event | Free

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.

293rd Annual Dinner – Featuring Dr. Craig L. Symonds
Monday, October 28, 2024

Presented In-Person
The Down Town Club by Cescaphe
600 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA

This year, we are pleased to be featuring Dr. Craig L. Symonds discussing his most recent book, Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay.

Dr. Craig L. Symonds is Professor Emeritus of History at the United States Naval Academy, where he taught for thirty years. From 2017 to 2020 he was the Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History at the U.S. Naval War College. He is the author of seventeen books, the most recent of which is Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay (Oxford University Press, 2022). He has been awarded the Lincoln Prize, the Roosevelt Prize, the Morison Prize, and the Barondess Prize, as well as the Dudley Knox Medal for Lifetime Achievement and the Pritzker Military Museum & Library Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. He and his wife Marylou live in Annapolis, Maryland.

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Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, November 1, 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 October through December.

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Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, December 6, 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 October through December.

REGISTER