Libraries & Liberty Seminar Two: The Writerly Voice with Kelsey Scouten Bates 

Starts Thursday September 29th, 6 PM to 7:30 PM

 $200 Non-members | $180 Members

How have libraries aided the cause of liberty, in the United States and elsewhere? What kind of liberty, and for whom? What role do libraries play now in ensuring the continued freedom of people in our country and around the world?

From the founding of the United States through the Civil War, creative and expository writers used their pens to persuade people to buy into their version of liberty. In this second course in the Libraries and Liberty Series, we’ll look closely at the rhetoric of writers from the Revolution through Emancipation–from the moral and intellectual weight of writing in the early republic (Phillis Wheatley and The Federalist Papers) to the persuasive power of writing during the Civil War (Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman).

Schedule for The Writerly Voice

Thursday Sep 29 6:00-7:30pm ET

Thursday Oct 20 6:00-7: 30pm ET

Thursday Nov 10 6:00-7: 30pm ET

Thursday, Dec 15 6:00-7: 30pm ET

*This closing session will be hosted in-person at The Rosenbach with a reception.

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Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, October 7th, 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 America’s first library of Congress and oldest cultural institution. Guests will also learn more about art and artifacts on display in the Logan Room, and hear a guided tour of our current exhibition, Hearing Voices: Memoirs from the Margins of Mental Health.

Space is limited, so please sign up for only one tour time per person. Tickets are available for:

Friday, September 2, from 11:00 am-12:00 pm

Friday, October 7, from 11:00 am-12:00 pm

Friday, November 4, from 11:00 am-12:00 pm

Friday, December 2, 11:00 am-12:00 pm

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Fireside Chat with Caylin Carbonell

Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity

Charlotte Cushman Society Lecture featuring Dr. C. Riley Snorton

October 18th, 2022 at 6:00 p.m. ET

Free & Virtual

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Libraries & Liberty Seminar Two: The Writerly Voice with Kelsey Scouten Bates 

Second Session: Thursday October 20th, 6 PM to 7:30 PM

 $200 Non-members | $180 Members

How have libraries aided the cause of liberty, in the United States and elsewhere? What kind of liberty, and for whom? What role do libraries play now in ensuring the continued freedom of people in our country and around the world?

From the founding of the United States through the Civil War, creative and expository writers used their pens to persuade people to buy into their version of liberty. In this second course in the Libraries and Liberty Series, we’ll look closely at the rhetoric of writers from the Revolution through Emancipation–from the moral and intellectual weight of writing in the early republic (Phillis Wheatley and The Federalist Papers) to the persuasive power of writing during the Civil War (Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman).

Schedule for The Writerly Voice

Thursday Sep 29 6:00-7:30pm ET

Thursday Oct 20 6:00-7: 30pm ET

Thursday Nov 10 6:00-7: 30pm ET

Thursday, Dec 15 6:00-7: 30pm ET

*This closing session will be hosted in-person at The Rosenbach with a reception.

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John Dickinson Symposium: New Perspectives on the American Founding

Plenary Address by Jack N. Rakove:

“John Dickinson, Political Conscience, and the Dilemma of the Moderates”

Free & Hybrid

Thursday,  October 20th at 6:00pm ET 

To commemorate the publication of the first volumes of The Complete Writings and Selected Correspondence of John Dickinson, ed. Jane E. Calvert (University of Delaware Press/Rutgers University Press), this symposium will, for the first time, assemble a range of scholars from various disciplines doing new and original work on Dickinson. Thursday evening Jack N. Rakove, emeritus William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies, and Professor of Political Science and (by courtesy) Law at Stanford University, will open the symposium at the American Philosophical Society with a keynote address, “John Dickinson, Political Conscience, and the Dilemma of the Moderates.”

Hosted by the American Philosophical Society

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John Dickinson Symposium: New Perspectives on the American Founding

Day Long Symposium

Free & Hybrid

Friday,  October 20th at 8:30am – 5:15 pm ET 

To commemorate the publication of the first volumes of The Complete Writings and Selected Correspondence of John Dickinson, ed. Jane E. Calvert (University of Delaware Press/Rutgers University Press),this symposium will, for the first time, assemble a range of scholars from various disciplines doing new and original work on Dickinson. Based on early access to sources collected by the John Dickinson Writings Project, their work demonstrates the breadth of research possible on this heretofore understudied but central figure in the American Founding. This two-day event is free and open to the public and will be hosted and sponsored jointly by the American Philosophical Society, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Friday will feature a series of expert panels hosted at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and a closing reception at the Library Company.

Hosted by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania

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John Dickinson Symposium: New Perspectives on the American Founding

Reception

Free & In-Person

Friday,  October 20th at 5:15pm – 6:45 pm ET 

To commemorate the publication of the first volumes of The Complete Writings and Selected Correspondence of John Dickinson, ed. Jane E. Calvert (University of Delaware Press/Rutgers University Press),this symposium will, for the first time, assemble a range of scholars from various disciplines doing new and original work on Dickinson. Based on early access to sources collected by the John Dickinson Writings Project, their work demonstrates the breadth of research possible on this heretofore understudied but central figure in the American Founding. This two-day event is free and open to the public and will be hosted and sponsored jointly by the American Philosophical Society, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Friday will feature a series of expert panels hosted at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and a closing reception at the Library Company.

Hosted by the Library Company of Philadelphia

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“Nothing Thou Loved Be Lost or Die”: An 1846 Quilt Made at the Vermont Asylum for the Insane

Wednesday, October 26th, at 6:00 pm

Reception for in-person guests 5:30 – 6:00 pm

Hybrid Event

Members: Free, Nonmembers: $10

One hundred and seventy-six years ago, two women from different socio-economic backgrounds were committed to a new insane asylum in Vermont. Less than four months later, one of those inmates made and gifted a friendship quilt to the other bearing the inked words “Insane Hospital.” Join scholars Charlene Bongiorno Stephens and William Stephens for a discussion of the history of their quilt and its importance as an artifact of the then-revolutionary “moral treatment” for mental illnesses. The Vermont Asylum Quilt is currently on display in the Library Company’s exhibition, Hearing Voices: Memoirs from the Margins of Mental Health.

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Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, November 4th, 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 America’s first library of Congress and oldest cultural institution. Guests will also learn more about art and artifacts on display in the Logan Room, and hear a guided tour of our current exhibition, Hearing Voices: Memoirs from the Margins of Mental Health.

Space is limited, so please sign up for only one tour time per person. Tickets are available for:

Friday, September 2, from 11:00 am-12:00 pm

Friday, October 7, from 11:00 am-12:00 pm

Friday, November 4, from 11:00 am-12:00 pm

Friday, December 2, 11:00 am-12:00 pm

REGISTER

Libraries & Liberty Seminar Two: The Writerly Voice with Kelsey Scouten Bates 

Third Session: Thursday November 10th, 6 PM to 7:30 PM

 $200 Non-members | $180 Members

How have libraries aided the cause of liberty, in the United States and elsewhere? What kind of liberty, and for whom? What role do libraries play now in ensuring the continued freedom of people in our country and around the world?

From the founding of the United States through the Civil War, creative and expository writers used their pens to persuade people to buy into their version of liberty. In this second course in the Libraries and Liberty Series, we’ll look closely at the rhetoric of writers from the Revolution through Emancipation–from the moral and intellectual weight of writing in the early republic (Phillis Wheatley and The Federalist Papers) to the persuasive power of writing during the Civil War (Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman).

Schedule for The Writerly Voice

Thursday Sep 29 6:00-7:30pm ET

Thursday Oct 20 6:00-7: 30pm ET

Thursday Nov 10 6:00-7: 30pm ET

Thursday, Dec 15 6:00-7: 30pm ET

*This closing session will be hosted in-person at The Rosenbach with a reception.

REGISTER

“Books Are My Disease” : A Two-Part Series Exploring the Loganian Library

Part I: The Loganian Library at Stenton

Free & Virtual

Tuesday,  November 15 at 12:30pm ET

Join Stenton’s Curator Laura Keim and the Library Company’s Librarian Emeritus Jim Green for a virtual tour and conversation exploring the original rooms, closets, and shelf locations that housed the Loganian Library at Stenton, James Logan’s house near Germantown. After the pre-recorded tour, there will be time for LIVE discussion and an audience Q&A.

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“Books Are My Disease” Tour at Stenton

Thursday, November 17, from 1:30-3:30 pm

In-Person Members-Only Event

Stenton, 4601 N. 18th St., Philadelphia, PA 19140

Members: $10

Join Library Company members for a reception and in-person tour with Stenton’s Curator Laura Keim. Explore the original rooms, closets, and shelf locations that housed the Loganian Library at Stenton, James Logan’s house near Germantown. This tour is a special members-only event in support of the free, two-part virtual series exploring the Loganian Library, which included over 2,600 volumes at the time of Logan’s death in 1751 and is now housed at the Library Company.

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Fireside Chat with Nicholas Guyatt

“Books Are My Disease” : A Two-Part Series Exploring the Loganian Library

Part II The Loganian Library at the Library Company of Philadelphia

Free & Virtual

Tuesday,  November 22 at 12:30pm ET 

Building upon the November 15 event discussing 18^th-century book storage at Stenton, Emily Guthrie and Jim Green will share highlights and stories from Logan’s collection in its present home at the Library Company. Commonly referred to as the “Loganian Library,” the collection comprised over 2,600 volumes at the time of Logan’s death in 1751. Consisting chiefly of books in Latin and Greek, the collection was among the finest in Colonial America.

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“Books Are My Disease” Open House at the Library Company

Free & In-Person

Thursday,  December 1st at 1:00pm ET

After participating in our two-part virtual series with Stenton exploring the Loganian Library, join us for a free, in-person open house at the Library Company. See a selection of materials from James Logan’s 2,600-volume library, now housed at the Library Company, as well as art and artifacts on display in our first-floor Logan Room.

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Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, December 2nd, 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 America’s first library of Congress and oldest cultural institution. Guests will also learn more about art and artifacts on display in the Logan Room, and hear a guided tour of our current exhibition, Hearing Voices: Memoirs from the Margins of Mental Health.

Space is limited, so please sign up for only one tour time per person. Tickets are available for:

Friday, September 2, from 11:00 am-12:00 pm

Friday, October 7, from 11:00 am-12:00 pm

Friday, November 4, from 11:00 am-12:00 pm

Friday, December 2, 11:00 am-12:00 pm

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291st Annual Dinner Featuring Jim Downs

Monday, December 5, 2022, at 5:30 pm

Hybird Event

Union League of Philadelphia, 140 Broad St., Philadelphia, PA

For almost 300 years, the Library Company has gathered annually to celebrate our steadfast commitment to learning. This year, we are pleased to be featuring Dr. Jim Downs, one of the country’s foremost young historians, as well as a former Library Company fellow. He will be discussing his latest book, Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine.

Downs is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College, and a 2022-2023 fellow in residence at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. He is the author and editor of seven books, and has published articles and essays in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Slate, Vice, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. He is also the co-series-editor with Catherine Clinton of History in the Headlines, at the University of Georgia Press.

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Live from the Morgan Room: Book Talk with Adam Van Doren on In the Founders’ Footsteps

Friday, December 9th, at 12:00 pm

Reception and lunch for in-person guests 11:30 am – 2:00 pm

Hybrid Members-Only Event

The Library Company of Philadelphia invites you to join Philadelphia Club members and their guests for a presentation by award-winning author Adam Van Doren on his latest book, In the Founders’ Footsteps: Landmarks of the American Revolution (Godine, 2022). The book is a tour through the original thirteen colonies in search of historical sites and their stories in America’s founding. Thanks to Library Company Trustee Robert DeMento for helping to secure Van Doren as a speaker. Co-sponsored by the Philadelphia Club, the American Philosophical Society, the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, and the Library Company of Philadelphia.

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27th Annual Junto: A Collector’s Talk and Reception Featuring Clarence Wolf

Wednesday, December 14th

Reception for in-person guests 5:15 pm | Lecture at 6:00 pm

Hybrid Event

Event is open to members at the Phillis Wheatley level and above, as well as those who make contributions to the Junto Campaign

Support the Library Company’s 27th Annual Junto and help grow our Natural History collection. We hope to raise $35,000 to acquire historical materials that help document the natural world and record the changing relationship between humans and the world around them. Join us on December 14th as Wolf shares some of his stories and experiences as a bookseller, and we celebrate his fondness for turtles, reptiles, and natural history. For more information about the 27th Annual Junto, or to learn more about how to register for the event, please contact development@librarycompany.org or call 215-546-3181 ext. 136.

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Libraries & Liberty Seminar Two: The Writerly Voice with Kelsey Scouten Bates 

Fourth Session: Thursday December 15th, 6 PM to 7:30 PM

 $200 Non-members | $180 Members

How have libraries aided the cause of liberty, in the United States and elsewhere? What kind of liberty, and for whom? What role do libraries play now in ensuring the continued freedom of people in our country and around the world?

From the founding of the United States through the Civil War, creative and expository writers used their pens to persuade people to buy into their version of liberty. In this second course in the Libraries and Liberty Series, we’ll look closely at the rhetoric of writers from the Revolution through Emancipation–from the moral and intellectual weight of writing in the early republic (Phillis Wheatley and The Federalist Papers) to the persuasive power of writing during the Civil War (Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman).

Schedule for The Writerly Voice

Thursday Sep 29 6:00-7:30pm ET

Thursday Oct 20 6:00-7: 30pm ET

Thursday Nov 10 6:00-7: 30pm ET

Thursday, Dec 15 6:00-7: 30pm ET

*This closing session will be hosted in-person at The Rosenbach with a reception.

REGISTER

Fireside Chat with Brian Luskey

Men Is Cheap: Exposing the Frauds of Free Labor in Civil War America 

Fireside Chat with Etta Madden

“Mr. Kate Cromo”: News Correspondent Anne Hampton Brewster in Rome, 1869-1890

A Newly Unearthed Poem by Phillis Wheatley (Peters) and the Future of the Wheatley Canon

January 26th, 2023 at 6:00 p.m. ET

Free & Virtual

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Making Gullah: A Black History Celebration & Conversation 

February 9th, 2023
6:00 p.m. ET
Hybrid & 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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Fireside Chat with Dr. Susan Brandt

Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia

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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Live from the Morgan Room: Book Talk with Andrew Diemer on Vigilance: The Life of William Still, Father of the Underground Railroad

Friday, February 24th, at 12:00 pm

Reception and lunch for in-person guests 11:30 am – 2:00 pm

Hybrid Members-Only Event

The Library Company of Philadelphia invites you to join Philadelphia Club members and their guests 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, and the Library Company of Philadelphia.

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The Families’ Civil War: Collection Review with Dr. Holly Pinheiro

Thursday, March 9th, 6:00-6:45 pm

In-Person Event

Members: Free, Nonmembers: $10

Before 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 in-person collection review of some of the Library Collection materials he used in his research, including Civil War recruiting materials and ephemera, maps, and more. Space is limited.

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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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Head Into the Stacks: How a Portrait Medallion of King George II Ended Up at the Library Company, with Emily Guthrie

Wednesday, March 15h, at 7:00 pm

Virtual Event

Members: Free, Nonmembers: $10

In 1872, the Library Company returned a wooden portrait medallion of King George II to Christ Church Philadelphia — allowing it to later be restored to the church’s facade after a nearly century-long absence. Librarian Emily Guthrie will explore this story of commemoration and public memory, including who may have removed the medallion from the church in the 18th century and how the medallion made its way back. Co-sponsored by the Christ Church Preservation Trust.

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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

Hybrid & Free

Sponsored by The Davida T. Deutsch Program in Women’s History

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