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.

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Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery

Wednesday, December 11th, 5:30pm

In-Person Event

Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery reveals the biggest stories of early American history through the most mundane artifacts: shoes manufactured in Massachusetts for the use of enslaved people in Mississippi, for example, or woolen dresses stitched in Rhode Island for enslaved women in South Carolina to wear. In following these everyday goods from the communities in which they were made to the communities in which they were used, we can rethink the geography of slavery and freedom in the decades between American independence and the Civil War. And in doing so, we can confront questions that continue to preoccupy us in the age of the iPhone and fair-trade coffee: what are the moral, ecological, and political relationships linking consumers and producers across long distances? What does it mean to be “complicit?”

Seth Rockman is an associate professor of history at Brown University. He is the author of Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore and coeditor of Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Rockman serves on the faculty advisory board of Brown University’s Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. Rockman is a Library Company shareholder, having been one of the first PEAES long-term fellows in 2001–2002.

Hosted by the Program in Early American Economy and Society.

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