April 20, 2021, 7:00 pm

Members and Non-Members Free

Special Premier Event

The Library Company is excited to announce a new interactive program, Historical Happy Hours. This interactive experience will allow you to gain insight into our nation’s history, while also enjoying a cocktail amidst your Library Company family and friends. Sponsored by the Young Advisors Program, representing Library Company members and friends who are young and young-at-heart.

Join us for this exciting launch event and hear the story of one of the most enduring heroines of all-time and the author who drew from her own remarkable life to tell this iconic story. Guests will learn where fact diverged from fiction in the life of Louisa May Alcott while mixing up a Moji-Jo March to raise in honor of these remarkable “Little Women.”

The ingredient list for our sage and blueberry riff on this classic cocktail (and mocktail, for prohibitionists like Alcott) will be sent upon registration.

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Philadelphia at the Table: Misadventures in Culinary Sleuthing with William Woys Weaver and Katie Maxwell

Tuesday, April 27

5:30 p.m. EST

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Join William Woys Weaver and Katie Maxwell for Philadelphia at the Table: Misadventures in Culinary Sleuthing with William Woys Weaver and Katie Maxwell.

This is a virtual event.

April 28, 2021, 5:30 pm

Members: Free | Non-members: $15

Andrea Krupp, exhibition curator and visual artist, invites us into her studio. She will give a behind-the-scenes look at the materials and processes that influenced the creation of the artwork in the upcoming exhibit, Seeing Coal, followed by a question and answer session about the creative/curatorial process.

Seeing Coal looks at Pennsylvania anthracite coal and raises questions about the significance of its visible and invisible presence in our world. Through historic images, material specimens, artwork, and digital displays, coal is presented as a material that can help us rethink our relationship with nature and time and act with consideration for future generations.

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Wednesday, May 12 | 5:00 pm

Shareholders Only

Meet and mingle with other shareholders, trustees, and staff as we elect our Board of Trustees and celebrate this new exhibition!

Join us as exhibition curator Andrea Krupp displays some of the collection materials that inspired and influenced her curatorial and creative process. Live from the Library Company’s McLean Conversation Department, Andrea will tell us about how she sees coal and why it is a material worthy of attention. A question and answer session will follow this exclusive behind-the-scenes visit.

To register for this event, please contact Chief Development Officer, Raechel Hammer at rhammer@librarycompany.org

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In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America (Book Talk)

Tuesday, May 18, 2021

5:30 p.m. EST

The story of school desegregation in the United States often begins in the mid-twentieth-century South. Drawing on archival sources and genealogical records, Kabria Baumgartner uncovers the story’s origins in the nineteenth-century Northeast and identifies a previously overlooked group of activists: African American girls and women. In Pursuit of Knowledge argues that African American girls and women strategized, organized, wrote, and protested for equal school rights—not just for themselves, but for all. Their activism gave rise to a new vision of womanhood: the purposeful woman, who was learned, active, resilient, and forward-thinking. Moreover, these young women set in motion equal-school-rights victories at the local and state level, and laid the groundwork for further action to democratize schools in twentieth-century America.

About the Author:

Kabria Baumgartner, Ph.D., is an associate professor of American Studies and English and core faculty in the Women’s and Gender Studies department at the University of New Hampshire, where she was named the 2019 Outstanding Assistant Professor. Her research and writing interests focus on African American history, literature, and culture in nineteenth-century New England. She is the author of the award-winning book, In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America (New York University Press, 2019), which tells the story of African American girls and women who fought to democratize public and private schools in the nineteenth-century Northeast. She has also published numerous scholarly articles and book chapters, and her op-eds and other popular writing have been featured in the Washington Post, WBUR’s blog Cognoscenti, and Historic New England Magazine. She is writing a biography of the African American lawyer Robert Morris. To learn more, visit www.kabriabaumgartner.com.

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Tuesday, May 25 | 7:00 pm

The Library Company is excited to announce a new interactive program, Historical Happy Hours. This interactive experience will allow you to gain insight into our nation’s history, while also enjoying a cocktail amidst your Library Company family and friends. Sponsored by the Young Advisors Program, representing Library Company members and friends who are young and young-at-heart.

Ann Hampton Brewster was rising as one of America’s first female foreign correspondents, as Charlotte Cushman was ascending to prominence on the stage playing every role from Lady Macbeth to Hamlet. Hear how these two groundbreaking women intertwined while mixing up a Brewster & Cushman-hattan.

The ingredient list for our coffee-based twist on this iconic cocktail (or alternate mocktail) will be sent upon registration.

Members Free | Non-Members $10

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In Liberty and Insanity in the Age of the American Revolution, Sarah L. Swedberg examines how conceptions of mental illness intersected with American society, law, and politics during the early American Republic. Swedberg illustrates how concerns about insanity raised difficult questions about the nature of governance. Revolutionaries built the American government based on rational principles, but could not protect it from irrational actors that they feared could cause the body politic to grow mentally or physically ill. This book is recommended for students and scholars of history, political science, legal studies, sociology, literature, psychology, and public health.

Wednesday, June 2 | 7:00 pm

African-American attorneys played significant roles in important Philadelphia events, including the drafting of the City’s Home Rule Charter, the desegregation of Girard College, and the Philadelphia Transportation Company strike in 1944. Black Philadelphia attorneys were also involved in momentous national events such as the Brown v. Board of Education litigation and the drafting of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. We will also discuss the Liacouras Committee, which in 1970 exposed systemic racial discrimination in the administration of the Pennsylvania Bar Examination. Please join us for a comprehensive discussion of the history of Black Lawyers in Philadelphia and learn how they elegantly overcame obstacles, assisted others, and were dedicated to civil rights and equality for all.

Members: Free | Non-Members $15

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Donald F. Johnson, Assistant Professor of History, North Dakota State University
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Tuesday, June 15 | 7:00 pm

The Library Company is excited to announce a new interactive program, Historical Happy Hours. This interactive experience will allow you to gain insight into our nation’s history, while also enjoying a cocktail amidst your Library Company family and friends. Sponsored by the Young Advisors Program, representing Library Company members and friends who are young and young-at-heart.

“The truth is powerful and it shall prevail,” these words spoken by women’s rights activist and abolitionist Sojourner Truth are as resonant today as they were in 1863. Guests will hear Truth’s harrowing and inspiring story while mixing up a Sojourner Vermouth, a vermouth forward martini made with gin and blackberries.

Members Free | Non-Members $15

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Juneteenth: They Were Her Property

Thursday, June 17

5:30-7:00 p.m. EST

Sponsored by the Program in African American History

This year’s Juneteenth Freedom Program: They Were Her Property explores Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers book “They were her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South”. It will also feature poet David Mills, who will reading be poems about slavery in New York City and Massachusetts.

“Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery.” Jones-Rogers argues that white women who owned slaves were “sophisticated economic actors” who benefited from the slave market in the South economically and socially. Ultimately, Jones-Rogers book causes the reader to question & revaluate the economics and social conventions of slaveholding in America.

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About Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley where she specializes in African-American history, women’s and gender history, and the history of American slavery. She is the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (Yale University Press, 2019), which won the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery (at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture) 2020 Harriet Tubman Prize for the best nonfiction book published in the United States on the slave trade, slavery, and anti-slavery in the Atlantic World,  the Southern Association for Women’s Historians 2020 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize awarded for the best book in southern women’s history, the Southern Historical Association’s 2020 Charles S. Sydnor Award which is awarded for the best book in southern history published in an odd-numbered year, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic’s 2020 Best Book Prize, and the Organization of American Historians’ 2020 Merle Curti Prize for the best book in American social history. Jones-Rogers is also the first African-American and the third woman to win the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History since the award’s inception in 1980.

They Were Her Property is based on Jones-Rogers’s revised dissertation which won the Organization of American Historians’ Lerner-Scott Prize for the best doctoral dissertation in U.S. women’s history in 2013. Her work has appeared in Slavery and Abolition, Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas, as well as online platforms.

She is currently at work on a few new projects. My second book Women of the Trade (under contract with Liveright) reorients our understanding of the British Atlantic slave trade by centering the lives and experiences of English, African, and Afro-English women, free and captive, in its telling. Organized like the typical slave ship journey, Women of the Trade crafts a narrative about the British slave trade in which English and African women were fundamental, one wherein their financial investments and support, their strategies and political maneuvering, their labor and commercial savvy, their love, and their resistance proved crucial. My third Women, American Slavery, and the Law (also under contract with Liveright) will be the first book-length manuscript to examine the relationship between gender and the evolution of American slave/property law in both the North and the South from the colonial period to slavery’s legal end. It considers how the gradual abolition of slavery in the North affected free women’s lives, especially those who owned enslaved people. It also examines the relationship between the expansion of slavery into the West and the implementation of laws that protected married women’s property rights, particularly those living in newly formed states in which slavery would become economically fundamental. More profoundly, it explores how slave-owning women’s actions—particularly their demands that local and state courts recognize their rights to hold enslaved people in bondage—shaped the legal transformations that unfolded in both regions. And my study “She had…a Womb Subjected to Bondage”: The Afro-Atlantic Origins of British Colonial Descent Law examines the ways that West African customs and laws influenced English thinking about matrilineal descent and may have influenced their decisions to implement matrilineal descent laws in their North American colonies. Funds from the NEH, the Ford Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation have supported this work.

About David Mills

Mr. Mills holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and an MA from New York University. He’s published three poetry collections, The Dream Detective, The Sudden Country and After Mistic (Massachusetts slavery poems). Individual poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Brooklyn Rail, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Jubilat, Callaloo, Obsidian and Fence. He has also received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Breadloaf and the Lannan Foundation.  He lived in Langston Hughes’ landmark Harlem home for three years. He wrote the audio script for Macarthur-Genius-Award Winner Deborah Willis’ curated exhibition: Reflections in Black:100 Years of Black Photography, which showed at the Whitney and Getty West Museums. The Juilliard School of Drama commissioned and produced a play by Mr. Mills. He has also recorded his poetry on ESPN and RCA Records.

Zachary Dorner, Assistant Clinical Professor, University Honors, University of Maryland, College Park

The period from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century—the so-called long eighteenth century of English history—was a time of profound global change, marked by the expansion of intercontinental empires, long-distance trade, and human enslavement. It was also the moment when medicines, previously produced locally and in small batches, became global products. As greater numbers of British subjects struggled to survive overseas, more medicines than ever were manufactured and exported to help them. Most historical accounts, however, obscure the medicine trade’s dependence on slave labor, plantation agriculture, and colonial warfare.

In Merchants of Medicines, Zachary Dorner follows the earliest industrial pharmaceuticals from their manufacture in the United Kingdom, across trade routes, and to the edges of empire, telling a story of what medicines were, what they did, and what they meant. He brings to life business, medical, and government records to evoke a vibrant early modern world of London laboratories, Caribbean estates, South Asian factories, New England timber camps, and ships at sea. In these settings, medicines were produced, distributed, and consumed in new ways to help confront challenges of distance, labor, and authority in colonial territories. Merchants of Medicines offers a new history of economic and medical development across early America, Britain, and South Asia, revealing the unsettlingly close ties among medicine, finance, warfare, and slavery that changed people’s expectations of their health and their bodies.

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Tuesday, July 20 | 7:00 pm

From women on the battlefield to nurses at camps; from authors inspiring the masses to ladies posing as spies—many of the unsung heroes of the American Revolution wore corsets rather than tricorne hats. We’ll discuss Phillis Wheatley, Mercy Otis Warren, Margaret Cochran Corbin, and Mammy Kate in a happy hour that mixes colonial America stories with a contemporary take on Martha Washington’s famous Revolutionary Rum Punch.

The ingredient list for our cocktail (or alternate mocktail for those who believe tea is for more than dumping in harbors) will be sent upon registration.

Members: Free | Non Members: $10

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Tuesday, July 27 | 5:30 pm

As we begin to consider climate change as an everyday problem, it’s valuable to know how people did that in the past. With support from the Library Company and the Guggenheim Foundation, Joyce Chaplin is compiling and analyzing a database of manuscript notes about weather in early American almanacs, 1646- 1821, out of 10,578 almanacs. Her talk focuses on how people recorded the weather in numbers (including degrees Fahrenheit) and in words, from “dull” to “elegant!” These notations are significant as records of a period of climate change, the Little Ice Age, and as records of how people understood and coped with that climatic disruption.

Joyce E. Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. A former Fulbright Scholar and Library Company Fellow, she’s taught at six universities on two continents, an island, and a peninsula, and in a maritime studies program on the Atlantic Ocean.

Members: Free / Non Members: $15

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Tuesday, August 10 | 5:30 pm

Join Edwin Wolf 2nd Director, Dr. Michael Barsanti and Chief Development Officer, Raechel Hammer as we explore the history of James and Phoebe Rush, their long-standing connection to the Library Company, and the amazing legacy they built for our library, scholars and learning community.

Members: Free / Non Members: $15

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Before Civil War greenbacks and a national bank network established a uniform federal currency in the United States, the proliferation of loosely regulated banks saturated the early American republic with upwards of 10,000 unique and legal bank notes. This number does not even include the plethora of counterfeit bills and the countless shinplasters of questionable legality issued by unregulated merchants, firms, and municipalities. Adding to the chaos was the idiosyncratic method for negotiating their value, an often manipulative face-to-face discussion consciously separated from any haggling over the price of the work, goods, or services for sale. In Bank Notes and Shinplasters, Joshua R. Greenberg shows how ordinary Americans accumulated and wielded the financial knowledge required to navigate interpersonal bank note transactions.

Locating evidence of Americans grappling with their money in fiction, correspondence, newspapers, printed ephemera, government documents, legal cases, and even on the money itself, Greenberg argues Americans, by necessity, developed the ability to analyze the value of paper financial instruments, assess the strength of banking institutions, and even track legislative changes that might alter the rules of currency circulation. In his examination of the doodles, calculations, political screeds, and commercial stamps that ended up on bank bills, he connects the material culture of cash to financial, political, and intellectual history.

Joshua R. Greenberg is the editor of Commonplace: the journal of early American life.
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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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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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