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Upcoming Events
february
09feb6:00 pm7:30 pmVirtual EventMaking Gullah: A Black History Celebration & ConversationFree

Event Details
Making Gullah: A Black History Celebration & Conversation February 9th, 2023 6:00pm ET Virtual & Free 2023 Black History Month speaker Dr. Melissa L. Cooper, author of Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo
Event Details
Making Gullah: A Black History Celebration & Conversation
February 9th, 2023
6:00pm ET
Virtual & Free
2023 Black History Month speaker Dr. Melissa L. Cooper, author of Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination, which examines the emergence of “the Gullah” in scholarly and popular works during the 1920s and the 1930s will be in conversation with Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens, Director of the Program in African American History. They’ll discuss Gullah/Geechee heritage, the history of its depiction, the realities of Black life in the Low Country, and their shared Gullah heritage.
Sponsored by The Program in African-American History
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Time
(Thursday) 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

Event Details
Fireside Chat with Dr. Susan Brandt Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia February 16th,
Event Details
Fireside Chat with Dr. Susan Brandt
Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia
February 16th, 2023 7:00 p.m. ET
Virtual & Free
Women Healers recovers numerous women of European, African, and Native American descent who provided the bulk of health care in the greater Philadelphia area for centuries. Spanning a century and a half and drawing on extensive archival research, Brandt demonstrates that women healers were not inflexible traditional practitioners destined to fall victim to the onward march of Enlightenment science, capitalism, and medical professionalization. Instead, women of various classes and ethnicities found new sources of healing authority, engaged in the consumer medical marketplace, and resisted physicians’ attempts to marginalize them. Brandt reveals that women healers participated actively in medical and scientific knowledge production and the transition to market capitalism.
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Time
(Thursday) 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Event Details
Historical Happy Hour: Forget-Me-Not(ini): The Unexamined Life of Sarah Mapps Douglass Tuesday, February 21st, at 7:00 pm Virtual Event
Event Details
Historical Happy Hour: Forget-Me-Not(ini): The Unexamined Life of Sarah Mapps Douglass
Tuesday, February 21st, at 7:00 pm
Virtual Event
Members: Free, Nonmembers: $10
Who was Sarah Mapps Douglass? An educator, an abolitionist, one of the first black women to enroll in medical school, and the creator of perhaps the earliest surviving signed painting by an African American woman. While her accomplishments are numerous, her name remains unknown. We’ll raise a Forget-Me-Not(tini) inspired by one of her earliest paintings, while we remember this remarkable Philadelphia woman. The ingredient list for our cocktail (and mocktail) will be sent roughly two weeks before the event.
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Time
(Tuesday) 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Event Details
Live from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania: Book Talk with Andrew Diemer on Vigilance: The Life of William Still, Father of the Underground
Event Details
Live from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania: Book Talk with Andrew Diemer on Vigilance: The Life of William Still, Father of the Underground Railroad
Friday, February 24th
Reception and Lunch at the Philadelphia Club, 1301 Walnut St., 11:30 am – 1:00 pm
Book Talk at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1300 Locust St., 1:15 pm – 2:15 pm
In-Person Members-Only Event
The Library Company of Philadelphia invites you to join Philadelphia Club members as well as members of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the American Philosophical Society for a presentation by historian Andrew Diemer on his book, Vigilance: The Life of William Still, Father of the Underground Railroad (Knopf, 2022). The book tells the remarkable story of William Still, who dedicated his life to managing a critical section of the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia. Co-sponsored by the Philadelphia Club, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the American Philosophical Society, and the Library Company of Philadelphia.
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Time
(Friday) 11:15 am - 2:15 pm
march

Event Details
The Families’ Civil War: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice A Book Talk with Dr. Holly A. Pinheiro Jr. Thursday, March 9th, 2023 Free & Hybrid Taking a
Event Details
The Families’ Civil War: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice
A Book Talk with Dr. Holly A. Pinheiro Jr.
Thursday, March 9th, 2023
Free & Hybrid
Taking a long view, from 1850 to the 1920s, Holly A. Pinheiro Jr. shows how Civil War military service worsened already difficult circumstances due to its negative effects on family finances, living situations, minds, and bodies. The Families’ Civil War provides a compelling account of the lives of USCT soldiers and their entire families but also argues that the Civil War was but one engagement in a longer war for racial justice.
Dr. Holly A. Pinheiro Jr. is an assistant professor of African American history at Furman University. He is the author of articles in American Nineteenth Century History, the African American Intellectual History Society’s Black Perspectives blog, and the Journal of the Civil War Era‘s Muster blog.
Sponsored by The Program in African-American History
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Time
(Thursday) 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm

Event Details
The Families’ Civil War: Collection Review with Dr. Holly Pinheiro Friday, March 10th, 12:00-1:00 pm Virtual Event
Event Details
The Families’ Civil War: Collection Review with Dr. Holly Pinheiro
Friday, March 10th, 12:00-1:00 pm
Virtual Event
Members: Free, Nonmembers: $10
As a follow-up to Dr. Holly Pinheiro’s March 9th Book Talk, The Families’ Civil War: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice, join us for a special virtual collection review of some of the Library Collection materials he used in his research, including Civil War recruiting materials and ephemera, maps, and more.
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Time
(Friday) 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

Event Details
Fireside Chat with Dr. Daniel Diez Couch American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic
Event Details
Fireside Chat with Dr. Daniel Diez Couch
American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic
March 16th, 2023 7:00 p.m. ET
Virtual & Free
In the years between the independence of the colonies from Britain and the start of the Jacksonian age, American readers consumed an enormous number of literary texts called “fragments.” American Fragments recovers this archive of the romantic period to raise a set of pressing questions about the relationship between aesthetic and national realities: What kind of artistic creation was a fragment?, And how and why did deliberately unfinished writing emerge alongside a country that was itself still unfinished?
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Time
(Thursday) 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
23mar6:00 pm7:30 pmVirtual EventThe Woman Suffrage Movement in the United StatesFree

Event Details
Celebrate Women’s History Month at the Library Company of Philadelphia The Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States: a Book Talk by Joan M. Johnson, Director for
Event Details
Celebrate Women’s History Month at the Library Company of Philadelphia
The Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States: a Book Talk by Joan M. Johnson, Director for Faculty at Northwestern University
March 23rd, 2023 at 6:00 p.m. ET
Virtual & Free
The Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States presents important moments and participants in the history of the American suffrage movement, ranging from the mid-nineteenth century through the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The book highlights the many participants in the suffrage movement, including well-known leaders, lesser-known activists, major national organizations, and local efforts across the country. An array of perspectives is examined: the garment factory worker working for protective labor laws, the wealthy wife hoping to control her inheritance, the Black activist seeking voting power for her community, and the temperance worker wanting to vote for prohibition laws.
Sponsored by The Davida T. Deutsch Program in Women’s History
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Time
(Thursday) 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
april

Event Details
Phillis Wheatley and Friends: Celebrating 250 Years of Wheatley’s Poems with Dr. Tara Bynum First Session: Wednesday April 12th, 6pm to 7:30pm ET $200 Non-members
Event Details
Phillis Wheatley and Friends: Celebrating 250 Years of Wheatley’s Poems
with Dr. Tara Bynum
First Session: Wednesday April 12th, 6pm to 7:30pm ET
$200 Non-members | $175 Members
(Cost includes all three sessions)
Phillis Wheatley is often fixed in time as a lone, singular voice. This course will introduce students to another story for the young poet and, by implication, a new story for early African American writing. What if Wheatley is not by herself, but is instead an active interlocutor, friend, writer, and lover in various communities throughout New England, England, and elsewhere? These communities buy Wheatley’s book, live through a war, and later have to mourn the loss of their friend. They are communities, too, that write, read, and leave behind a legacy in manuscript and in print. The aim of the class is to ask new questions and to situate this writing amidst old, new, and different ways of reading and to center the living of Black women and men in the latter half of the eighteenth century.
Schedule for Phillis Wheatley and Friends
Wednesday, April 12th | 6:00-7:30pm ET
Wednesday, April 19th | 6:00-7:30pm ET
Wednesday, April 26th | 6:00-7:30pm ET
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Time
(Wednesday) 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Related Events

Event Details
Phillis Wheatley and Friends: Celebrating 250 Years of Wheatley’s Poems with Dr. Tara Bynum Second Session: Wednesday April 19th, 6 PM to 7:30pm ET $200
Event Details
Phillis Wheatley and Friends: Celebrating 250 Years of Wheatley’s Poems
with Dr. Tara Bynum
Second Session: Wednesday April 19th, 6 PM to 7:30pm ET
$200 Non-members | $175 Members
(Cost includes all three sessions)
Phillis Wheatley is often fixed in time as a lone, singular voice. This course will introduce students to another story for the young poet and, by implication, a new story for early African American writing. What if Wheatley is not by herself, but is instead an active interlocutor, friend, writer, and lover in various communities throughout New England, England, and elsewhere? These communities buy Wheatley’s book, live through a war, and later have to mourn the loss of their friend. They are communities, too, that write, read, and leave behind a legacy in manuscript and in print. The aim of the class is to ask new questions and to situate this writing amidst old, new, and different ways of reading and to center the living of Black women and men in the latter half of the eighteenth century.
Schedule for Phillis Wheatley and Friends
Wednesday, April 12th | 6:00-7:30pm ET
Wednesday, April 19th | 6:00-7:30pm ET
Wednesday, April 26th | 6:00-7:30pm ET
more
Time
(Wednesday) 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

Event Details
Fireside Chat with Dr. Michael D’Alessandro Contesting Class in Popular American Theater and Literature, 1873-75 April 20th,
Event Details
Fireside Chat with Dr. Michael D’Alessandro
Contesting Class in Popular American Theater and Literature, 1873-75
April 20th, 2023 7:00 p.m. ET
Virtual & Free
Staged Readings studies the social consequences of 19th-century America’s two most prevalent leisure forms: theater and popular literature. In the midst of watershed historical developments—including numerous waves of immigration, two financial Panics, increasing wealth disparities, and the Civil War—American theater and literature were developing at unprecedented rates. Playhouses became crowded with new spectators, best-selling novels flew off the shelves, and, all the while, distinct social classes began to emerge. While the middle and upper classes were espousing conservative literary tastes and attending family matinees and operas, laborers were reading dime novels and watching downtown spectacle melodramas like Nymphs of the Red Sea and The Pirate’s Signal or, The Bridge of Death!!! As audiences traveled from the reading parlor to the playhouse (and back again), they accumulated a vital sense of social place in the new nation. In other words, culture made class in 19th-century America.
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Time
(Thursday) 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Event Details
Phillis Wheatley and Friends: Celebrating 250 Years of Wheatley’s Poems with Dr. Tara Bynum Third Session: Wednesday April 26th, 6pm to 7:30pm ET $200 Non-members
Event Details
Phillis Wheatley and Friends: Celebrating 250 Years of Wheatley’s Poems
with Dr. Tara Bynum
Third Session: Wednesday April 26th, 6pm to 7:30pm ET
$200 Non-members | $175 Members
(Cost includes all three sessions)
Phillis Wheatley is often fixed in time as a lone, singular voice. This course will introduce students to another story for the young poet and, by implication, a new story for early African American writing. What if Wheatley is not by herself, but is instead an active interlocutor, friend, writer, and lover in various communities throughout New England, England, and elsewhere? These communities buy Wheatley’s book, live through a war, and later have to mourn the loss of their friend. They are communities, too, that write, read, and leave behind a legacy in manuscript and in print. The aim of the class is to ask new questions and to situate this writing amidst old, new, and different ways of reading and to center the living of Black women and men in the latter half of the eighteenth century.
Schedule for Phillis Wheatley and Friends
Wednesday, April 12th | 6:00-7:30pm ET
Wednesday, April 19th | 6:00-7:30pm ET
Wednesday, April 26th | 6:00-7:30pm ET
more
Time
(Wednesday) 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Related Events
2022 Holiday Closings
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day – Jan 17, 2022
President’s Day – Feb 21, 2022
Memorial Day – May 30, 2022
Juneteenth – June 20, 2022
Independence Day – July 4, 2022
Labor Day – September 5, 2022
Thanksgiving- November 24 & 25, 2022
Christmas Day (observed) – December 23, 2022
Winter Break – December 26, 2022 – January 2, 2023
For more information on these events please call 215-546-3181 or email events@librarycompany.org