Event begins at 5:30pm

Virtual

From the end of the 17th century to the early 19th century the Rev. Thomas Bray, an Anglican clergyman, and after his death in 1730 his Associates, provided books to Philadelphia and operated schools for the education of young black Philadelphians, both enslaved and free. Hundreds of books were sent to form the first library of Christ Church (many of which are on the shelves of the Library Company), and the schools operated by the Associates and by the Rev. Absalom Jones with their support educated countless pupils in reading, writing, and domestic arts in the era before segregated public education for the city’s African Americans began in 1818.

John C. Van Horne was the Director of the Library Company from 1985 to 2014. His doctoral dissertation was published as Religious Philanthropy and Colonial Slavery: The American Correspondence of the Associates of Dr. Bray, 1717-1777 (University of Illinois Press). He is also the author of “The Education of African Americans in Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia” accessible at librarycompany.org

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Sara T. Damiano, Assistant Professor of History, Texas State University

In To Her Credit, Sara T. Damiano uncovers free women’s centrality to the interrelated worlds of eighteenth-century finance and law. Focusing on everyday life in Boston, Massachusetts, and Newport, Rhode Island—two of the busiest port cities of this period—Damiano argues that colonial women’s skilled labor actively facilitated the growth of Atlantic ports and their legal systems. Mining vast troves of court records, Damiano reveals that married and unmarried women of all social classes forged new paths through the complexities of credit and debt, stabilizing credit networks amid demographic and economic turmoil. In turn, urban women mobilized sophisticated skills and strategies as borrowers, lenders, litigants, and witnesses.

Sara T. Damiano received her PhD in History from Johns Hopkins University and is currently an assistant professor at Texas State University. She is a social and cultural historian of early America and the Atlantic world. Damiano has previously published articles on female administrators of estates and on collaborations between male and female financial agents. In the Spring of 2016, she was a Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEAES) postdoctoral fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Her research has also received support from organizations and institutions including the American Historical Association, the American Society for Legal History, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Damiano teaches courses on early America, the Atlantic world, law and society, capitalism and economic culture, and American women’s and gender history. Prior to arriving at Texas State University, she taught courses at Johns Hopkins University and University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

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October 7, 2021

6:00 p.m. ET

Join host, Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens as she leads a discussion, with Alex Black, Hobart and William Smith Colleges; Derrick R. Spires, Cornell University; Manisha Sinha, Still Senior Panelist, Douglass Winner; and William Kashatus, William Still Biographer, on the life of African-American Abolitionist, William Still.

Sponsored by the Program in African American History

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Wednesday, October 13 | 5:30 pm

Siobhan Angus, Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art/Visiting Scholar, Yale Center for British Art and 2020-2021 William H. Helfand Visual Culture Fellow Sponsored by the Visual Culture Program

To explore photography’s chemical and material history, this talk examines the materiality and meaning of 19th-century iron and silver-based photographs that document and celebrate industrial growth in Pennsylvania, particularly railroads and steel mills. By placing these photographs, including platinum, cyanotype, and albumen prints, as well as stereographs in dialogue with each other, the ways that artists have documented transformations to the landscape in the past is reconsidered in terms of the rapid pace of current environmental degradation. Questions of how photography was used to respond to, and express social, emotional, or political perceptions of land, and how these meanings have changed in the 21st-century from an increasing awareness about the human impact affecting climate change will be explored.

Siobhan Angus specializes in the history of photography and the environmental humanities. Her current research explores the visual culture of resource extraction with a focus on materiality, perceptions of nature, and environmental justice. She is currently a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art and a visiting scholar at the Yale Center for British Art. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History and Visual Culture from York University. Her research has been published in Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, Radical History Review, and Capitalism and the Camera (Verso, 2021) and is forthcoming in Geohumanities and October. She is a co-editor of The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Literature, Culture, a member of the Executive Committee of the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada (ALECC), and a board member of the Workers Arts and Heritage Center. Her research has been supported by the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, the Science History Institute,  and the Paul Mellon Centre.

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Born in 1790, Fitz-Greene Halleck went on to become one of the most celebrated poets of the mid-19th century, a member of New York’s Knickerbocker set who rubbed shoulders with Charles Dickens and John Jacob Astor, and was eventually memorialized with a statue on Poet’s Walk in Central Park. This “American Byron” was also a life-long bachelor whose homoerotic poems live in plain sight and whose queer relationships were subject to contemporary documentation and satire. Prof Stein’s lecture will be an introduction to his life and legacy.

Sponsored by The Davida T. Deutsch Program in Women’s History and the Charlotte Cushman Society

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Thursday, October 21, 5:30-6:30 pm ET

Rebecca Kamen, Visiting Scholar and Artist in Residence, The Computational Neuroscience Initiative and the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania

Sculptor and lecturer on the intersections of art and science Rebecca Kamen seeks “the truth” through observation. Her artwork is informed by wide-ranging research into cosmology, history, and philosophy. She connects common threads that flow across various scientific fields to capture and re-imagine what the scientists see.

This presentation will explore how art, scientific special collections, and the process of discovery provide inspiration to re-imagine a variety of scientific phenomena from Black Holes to the Coronavirus. Kamen will also discuss a research project exploring the creative process of making the invisible visible through an investigation of the dynamics of curiosity.

Sponsored by the Visual Culture Program

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Featuring Erika Piola, Curator of Graphic Arts and the Director of Visual Culture Program

A Library Company Virtual Collection Review

Tuesday, October 26, 7:00 pm

Railroad disasters, steamship explosions, devastating fires, and violence in the streets were fodder for many a news story read during the 19th century. Before the dawn of modern media as we know it, typically lithographs provided the public with their “first” glimpses of sensational events and tragedies reported by the city’s press. Join Erika Piola, Director of the Visual Culture Program, as she discusses the conception, distribution, and reception of the“fake news” aspect of this often overlooked genre of “gory and graphic” popular imagery in 19th-century American visual culture.

Image: The Terrible Conflagration at Ninth and Washington Streets, Philadelphia. : On the Morning of Wednesday February 8th 1865 (Philadelphia: J. L. Magee, 1865). Hand-colored lithograph.

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Teresa A. Goddu, Associate Professor of English and American Studies, Vanderbilt University

Beginning with its establishment in the early 1830s, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) recognized the need to reach and consolidate a diverse and increasingly segmented audience. To do so, it produced a wide array of print, material, and visual media: almanacs and slave narratives, pincushions and gift books, broadsides and panoramas. Building on the distinctive practices of British antislavery and evangelical reform movements, the AASS utilized innovative business strategies to market its productions and developed a centralized distribution system to circulate them widely. In Selling Antislavery, Teresa A. Goddu shows how the AASS operated at the forefront of a new culture industry and, by framing its media as cultural commodities, made antislavery sentiments an integral part of an emerging middle-class identity. She contends that, although the AASS’s dominance waned after 1840 as the organization splintered, it nevertheless created one of the first national mass markets.

Goddu maps this extensive media culture, focusing in particular on the material produced by AASS in the decade of the 1830s. She considers how the dissemination of its texts, objects, and tactics was facilitated by the quasi-corporate and centralized character of the organization during this period and demonstrates how its institutional presence remained important to the progress of the larger movement. Exploring antislavery’s vast archive and explicating its messages, she emphasizes both the discursive and material aspects of antislavery’s appeal, providing a richly textured history of the movement through its artifacts and the modes of circulation it put into place.

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Daniel Mandell, Professor of History, Truman State University

The United States has some of the highest levels of both wealth and income inequality in the world. Although modern-day Americans are increasingly concerned about this growing inequality, many nonetheless believe that the country was founded on a person’s right to acquire and control property. But in The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600–1870, Daniel R. Mandell argues that, in fact, the United States was originally deeply influenced by the belief that maintaining a “rough” or relative equality of wealth is essential to the cultivation of a successful republican government.

Mandell explores the origins and evolution of this ideal. He shows how, during the Revolutionary War, concerns about economic equality helped drive wage and price controls, while after its end Americans sought ways to maintain their beloved “rough” equality against the danger of individuals amassing excessive wealth. He also examines how, after 1800, this tradition was increasingly marginalized by the growth of the liberal ideal of individual property ownership without limits.

This politically evenhanded book takes a sweeping, detailed view of economic, social, and cultural developments up to the time of Reconstruction, when Congress refused to redistribute plantation lands to the former slaves who had worked it, insisting instead that they required only civil and political rights. Informing current discussions about the growing gap between rich and poor in the United States, The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America is surprising and enlightening.

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Monday, November 8th, 7:00 pm

Virtual Event

The Library Company’s bookbinding collections are remarkable, ranging from leather to cloth and vellum to printed paper—we find them impossible not to love! In this presentation, five Library Company staff members will each give a short talk on an aspect of bookbinding history that has caught their eye.

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Billy Coleman, Postdoctoral Fellow in Early American History with the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, University of Missouri

Following the creation of the United States, profound disagreements remained over how to secure the survival of the republic and unite its diverse population. In this pathbreaking account, Billy Coleman uses the history of American music to illuminate the relationship between elite power and the people from the early national period to the Civil War. Based on deep archival research in sources such as music periodicals, songbooks, and manuals for musical instruction, Coleman argues that a particular ideal of musical power provided conservative elites with an attractive road map for producing the harmonious union they desired. He reassesses the logic behind the decision to compose popular patriotic anthems like “The Star-Spangled Banner,” reconsiders the purpose of early American campaign songs, and brings to life a host of often forgotten but fascinating musical organizations and individuals. The result is not only a striking interpretation of music in American political life but also a fresh understanding of conflicts that continue to animate American democracy.

Billy Coleman is a postdoctoral fellow in early American history with the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri. He is the author of Harnessing Harmony: Music, Power, and Politics in the United States, 1788-1865 (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) as well as articles about early American music and politics published in the Journal of the Early Republic the Journal of Southern History. His next project, “Making Music National in a Settler State,” explores the transnational origins of national music in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

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Wednesday, December 1, 2021, 7pm

Featuring Sarah Weatherwax

A Library Company Virtual Collection Review

Although Black professional musicians such as Philadelphia bandleader Francis Johnson, vocalist Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, and composer James Reese Europe had a significant impact on American music, their contributions are not widely known today. Join Sarah Weatherwax, Senior Curator of Graphic Arts and curator of the Library Company’s 1997 exhibition, A Noteworthy City: Music in Philadelphia, 1750-1915, as she shares the stories of professional and amateur Black musicians as seen through the Library Company’s collection of sheet music, broadsides, books, graphics, and ephemera.

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Image: Treble Clef String Orchestra. Philadelphia: Sullivan Studio. Gelatin silver photograph, ca. 1910. Stevens-Cogdell/ Sanders-Venning Collection. Gift of descendants Cordelia H. Brown, Lillie V. Dickerson, Mary Hinkson Jackson, and Georgine E. Willis in honor of Phil Lapsansky. 

Sandra Moats, Associate Professor of History, University of Wisconsin–Parkside

Navigating Neutrality explores the unexpected role George Washington’s 1793 Neutrality Proclamation played in energizing the U.S. government’s constitutional responsibilities to support and promote America’s commercial and sovereign interests. Designed to avoid warfare as Great Britain and France battled in the Atlantic during the French Revolutionary Wars, neutrality encompassed a wide range of issues, including diplomacy, law, defense, commerce, and domestic politics.

Proclaiming neutrality proved easier than enforcing it. American citizens eagerly accepted lucrative French privateering commissions, and Britain retaliated by attacking American ships, cargos, and sailors. In response, Washington and his cabinet formulated policies to enforce neutrality across all three branches of the government and around the globe. Maritime citizens, stranded in the Caribbean and Mediterranean, especially came to appreciate the government’s rescue efforts. As Sandra Moats shows, enforcing neutrality galvanized all three branches of the nascent U.S. government, serving as a manifesto of the young nation’s quest to be respected in its independence and helping to build a U.S. government capable of supporting its global aspirations.

Sandra Moats is Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Parkside and author of Celebrating the Republic: Presidential Ceremony and Popular Sovereignty, from Washington to Monroe.

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Save the Date

290th Annual Dinner featuring Dr. Annette Gordon Reed 

at the Union League of Philadelphia in Lincoln Hall
Discussing Her Most Recent Book, On Juneteenth

December 6, 2021

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. She has won sixteen book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2009 and the National Book Award in 2008, for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton, 2008). 

Gordon-Reed was the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford (Queens College) 2014-2015. Between 2010 and 2015, she was the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She was the 2018-2019 President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She is the current President of the Ames Foundation. 

On Juneteenth is the essential, sweeping story of Juneteenth’s integral importance to American history. Weaving together American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed provides a historian’s view of the country’s long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African-Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond. All too aware of the stories of cowboys, ranchers, and oilmen that have long dominated the lore of the Lone Star State, Gordon-Reed―herself a Texas native and the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas as early as the 1820s―forges a new and profoundly truthful narrative of her home state, with implications for us all. With the recent appointment of June 19 as a national holiday, On Juneteenth is both an essential account and a stark reminder that the fight for equality is exigent and ongoing.

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Zachary M. Schrag, Professor of History and Art History, George Mason University

Zachary M. Schrag will discuss the steps in a research project — as laid out in the newly-published Princeton Guide to Historical Research — with examples from his other new book, The Fires of Philadelphia.

The Princeton Guide to Historical Research (Princeton University Press, 2021) provides students, scholars, and professionals with the skills they need to practice the historian’s craft in the digital age, while never losing sight of the fundamental values and techniques that have defined historical scholarship for centuries.

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This presentation examines the parallel lives of two white gentlemen who were born in Great Britain, became enslavers in the West Indies and West Africa, and then published works of History on Africa and peoples of African descent in the year 1793. It argues that their texts were reactions to the rise of the abolitionist movement. For over three centuries, enslavers had collaborated with metropolitan chroniclers to produce new knowledge about the Atlantic World. With the rise of abolition, enslavers lost their trust in these inherited structures of knowledge production and were compelled to create an archive of their own.

Devin Leigh is a PhD Candidate and Teaching Assistant in the History Department at the University of California, Davis. He studies the Atlantic World in the early-modern period, with a particular focus on connections between the British Isles, West Africa, and the Caribbean in the late eighteenth century. His research has been supported by such institutions as the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. His work has recently appeared in such journals as New West Indian Guide, History in Africa, and The Journal of Caribbean History.

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An Exploration of Imperfect History and Graphic Arts

Tuesday, January 25th, at 7:00 pm

We are excited to welcome back Kwasi Agyemang, historian and founder of the virtual program Hidden History, and a graduate of the Library Company’s Mellon Scholars Program. Join us as he returns to the Library Company to connect with curators Erika Piola and Sarah Weatherwax to review their newest exhibition, Imperfect History.  Kwasi is passionate about books, libraries, and discovering and discussing  “the voices of the forgotten” and “hidden stories” so that “we bring value into our daily lives.” Join us for the Library Company’s debut on his virtual series Hidden History as Kwasi looks behind the scenes of the Imperfect History exhibition and explores the hidden stories found within this unique graphic arts collection. This on-site program will feature a question and answer session and reception to follow. 

Short Biography 

Kwasi Hope Agyeman is the founder and CEO of Pax Data, a data strategy service for private and public sector organizations. As a trained historian and experienced data scientist, Kwasi is dedicated to one idea – use data to address pressing economic and social issues.

Kwasi also runs an online series called “Hidden History” that provides fun and engaging social media tours of cultural attractions and tourist favorites. The show has become wildly popular as relaxed travel restrictions have led people to book new trip destinations. As an award-winning speaker, audiences love Kwasi’s online content because it is insightful, engaging and relevant.

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Tuesday, February 8th, at 7:00 pm

Virtual Event

Before Amanda Gorman, or Maya Angelou or Toni Morrison there was Phillis Wheatley–an enslaved colonial poet who wrote her way to freedom. Hear Wheatley’s remarkable story, while mixing up a wintery riff on a classic cocktail: The Poet’s Dream. 

Hosted by storyteller and mixologist Jacey Powers of Feminist Cocktail Hour. The ingredient list for our cocktail (and mocktail) will be sent upon registration.

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Kirsten Fischer, Associate Professor of History, University of Minnesota

The first comprehensive biography of Elihu Palmer tells the life story of a freethinker who was at the heart of the early United States’ protracted contest over religious freedom and free speech. When the United States was new, a lapsed minister named Elihu Palmer shared with his fellow Americans the radical idea that virtue required no religious foundation. A better source for morality, he said, could be found in the natural world: the interconnected web of life that inspired compassion for all living things. Religions that deny these universal connections should be discarded, he insisted. For this, his Christian critics denounced him as a heretic whose ideas endangered the country.
Although his publications and speaking tours made him one of the most infamous American freethinkers in his day, Elihu Palmer has been largely forgotten. No cache of his personal papers exists and his book has been long out of print. Yet his story merits telling, Kirsten Fischer argues, and not only for the dramatic account of a man who lost his eyesight before the age of thirty and still became a book author, newspaper editor, and itinerant public speaker. Even more intriguing is his encounter with a cosmology that envisioned the universe as interconnected, alive with sensation, and everywhere infused with a divine life force.
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Van Gosse, Professor of History and Chair of Africana Studies, Franklin and Marshall College

It may be difficult to imagine that a consequential black electoral politics evolved in the United States before the Civil War, for as of 1860, the overwhelming majority of African Americans remained in bondage. Yet free black men, many of them escaped slaves, steadily increased their influence in electoral politics over the course of the early American republic. Despite efforts to disfranchise them, black men voted across much of the North, sometimes in numbers sufficient to swing elections. In this meticulously-researched book, Van Gosse offers a sweeping reappraisal of the formative era of American democracy from the Constitution’s ratification through Abraham Lincoln’s election, chronicling the rise of an organized, visible black politics focused on the quest for citizenship, the vote, and power within the free states.

Full of untold stories and thorough examinations of political battles, this book traces a First Reconstruction of black political activism following emancipation in the North. From Portland, Maine and New Bedford, Massachusetts to Brooklyn and Cleveland, black men operated as voting blocs, denouncing the notion that skin color could define citizenship.
Van Gosse (he/him) is a Professor of History at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He is the author of numerous articles and books on post-1945 politics and social movements, including Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America, and the Making of a New Left. More recently, he has written on African American politics in the antebellum era. He is also co-chair of Historians for Peace and Democracy (www.historiansforpeace.org).

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Date: February 24, 2022
Time: 5:30 p.m.

Exhibition curators Sarah Weatherwax and Erika Piola will have a conversation with Librarian Emily Guthrie about her “reading” of and insights about the exhibition and the graphic arts collection during her first year as Librarian.

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Supported by the Henry Luce Foundation

Tuesday, March 8th, at 7:00 pm

Virtual Event

In the mid-19th Century it was Lucy Stone who first “stirred the hearts of Americans” on the issue of women’s suffrage. Yet Stone’s story is often an overlooked piece of  the quest for women’s rights. Together we’ll explore Lucy’s legacy while mixing up a riff on the classic Suffragette cocktail. 

Hosted by storyteller and mixologist Jacey Powers of Feminist Cocktail Hour. The ingredient list for our cocktail (or alternate mocktail) will be sent upon registration.

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Tuesday, March 15, at 7:00 pm

Mary Putnam Jacobi: Advocate for Gender Equality
featuring Cornelia King Curator of Women’s History

A Library Company Virtual Collection Review

In her career, Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842-1906) de-pathologized women’s sexuality. Her 1876 prize-winning essay “The Question of Rest for Women during Menstruation” countered the then-prevalent belief that physical and mental exertion during menses threatened a woman’s health. Jacobi’s own life as a professional woman, wife, and mother underscored her central thesis: menses, sex, and pregnancy were all aspects of healthy women’s physiology and not impediments to gender equality. Curator of Women’s History Cornelia King will show items from the collection that trace Jacobi’s career from her early efforts as a short-story writer (encouraged by her father, publisher G.P. Putnam) to her many contributions to 19th-century medical literature.

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Friday, March 25

8:30 am to 7:00 pm

A one-day symposium that seeks to examine changing and innovative directions in how historical popular graphic art is curated, interpreted, used, and understood by those who produced, viewed, and consumed it. Collecting, Curating, and Consuming asks how does historical American popular graphic art act as a mirror, bridge, and barrier in facilitating our visual conceptions of our past and present? Program includes keynote address by Makeda Best, Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography, Harvard Art Museums.

Full schedule forthcoming early 2022.

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Supported by the Walter J. Miller Trust