Talking in the Library

Talking in the Library is an audio platform in which researchers share the varied research they’ve pursued using the rich collections at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Episodes are available here as well as on SoundCloud and Apple iTunes.

In 2019–20, Talking in the Library was hosted by Will Fenton, former Director of Scholarly Programs, and produced by Ann McShane, Project Digital Asset Librarian at Emory University. In 2021, the Library Company’s Fireside Chats were shared on the podcast platform as well as in video format. Currently, the Talking in the Library program is on pause.

Logo design by Nicole Graham. Theme music by Krestovsky (“Terrible Art”).

Fireside Chat: The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North (Book Talk)

Fireside Chat: Carbon Futures: Cultivating Coal Consumption in the Second Quarter of the 19th Century

Fireside Chat: Art & Spectacle in the 19th-Century United States (Part 2)

Fireside Chat: Art & Spectacle in the 19th-Century United States (Part 1)

Fireside Chat: When Novels Were Books (Book Talk)

Fireside Chat: Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic (Book Talk)

Fireside Chat: Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys (Vincent DiGirolamo)

Fireside Chat: From Boston Marriages to the Lavender Menace (Megan Springate)

Fireside Chat: Female Husbands: A Trans History (Jen Manion)

Fireside Chat: The Hymnal: A Reading History (Chris Phillips)

Fireside Chat: Eighteenth-Century Seeds & the Case for Greening Book History (Maria Zytaruk)

Fireside Chat: Grassroots Leviathan: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic (Ariel Ron)

Season 3, Episode 2: Breaking News in Benjamin Rush History! (Stephen Fried & Yen Ho)

Fireside Chat: Making of Civil War Medicine (Carole Adrienne)

Fireside Chat: William Penn’s Letter to the King of the Lenape, a Choral Work (Jeff Thomas)

Season 3, Episode 1: Pandemic Reading: The Interview (Jim Green)

Fireside Chat: The Mysteries of the Lost Colony and the Iroquois Confederacy (Arwin D. Smallwood)

Fireside Chat: Slave Revolt and the Practices of Containment (Cameron Seglias)

Fireside Chat: Elizabeth Powel and the Founding of the Republic (Anthony & Snyder)

Fireside Chat: How Parson Weems Remade George Washington (Steven C. Bullock)

Fireside Chat: Writing across the Color Line: U.S. Print Culture and the Rise of Ethnic Literature, 1877-1920 (Lucas A. Dietrich)

Fireside Chat: Lawyers in Early American Cities: Loyalists as Clients (Sally Hadden)

Fireside Chat: Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution (Tyson Reeder)

Juneteenth Seminar: Unfreedom: The Limits of the Fourteenth Amendment (Dr. Walter Greason)

Fireside Chat: Nonviolent Protest and the American Revolution (Dr. Michael Goode)

Fireside Chat: Lincoln and Viruses: The Past and the Present Collide (David J. Kent)

 Fireside Chat: Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women’s Suffrage Movement (Allison K. Lange)

Fireside Chat: The Long Reach of the Great Depression of the 1780s (Scott C. Miller)

Fireside Chat: An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (Lauren Klein)

Fireside Chat: Joseph Lancaster and the ‘Delusion’ of Public Schools (Adam Laats)

Fireside Chat: Protestant Images of Other Religions in the Eighteenth Century (Mark Valeri)

Fireside Chat: Mediterranean Quarantine: Perspectives of a Person of Privilege (Etta Madden)

Fireside Chat: African Voices from the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Aaron Fogleman)

Season 2, Episode 8: Redrawing History Symposium

Season 2, Episode 7: Dr. Richard Bell (Stolen)

Season 2, Episode 6: Force & Freedom (Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson)

Season 2, Episode 5: Touch This Page! (Dr. Sari Altschuler & Dr. David Weimer) 

Season 2, Episode 4: Ghost River (Weshoyot Alvitre & Dr. Lee Francis IV)

Season 2, Episode 3: PLOT (Rebecca Kamen)

Season 2, Episode 2: Mother is a Verb (Dr. Sarah Knott)

Season 2, Episode 1: The Alchemy of Slavery (Dr. Scott Heerman)

Bonus Episode: From Negro Pasts to Afro-Futures (Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens)

Season 1, Episode 5: Designing Afrofuturism (Dr. Walter Greason)

Season 1, Episode 4: Benjamin Franklin and Immigration (Dr. Carla J. Mulford)

Season 1, Episode 3: Woman in Silk (Dr. Zara Anishanslin)

Season 1, Episode 2: Specters of Peace (Dr. Michael Goode)

Season 1, Episode 1: Talking with Michael (Dr. Michael Barsanti)