Talking In The Library

Dr. John Smolenski is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California at Davis. A historian of early America, he has written primarily on creolization and violence. He has written or edited four books, including, recently, Friends and Strangers: the Making of a Creole Culture in Colonial Pennsylvania and New World Orders: Violence, Sanction, and Authority in the Colonial Americas, co-edited with Thomas Humphrey (both of which were published with University of Pennsylvania Press). Dr. Smolenski is currently writing a book about the history of creolization throughout the colonial Atlantic World. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, January 14, 2021.

The nostalgic mist surrounding farms can make it hard to write their history, encrusting them with stereotypical rural virtues and unrealistically separating them from markets, capitalism, and urban influences. The Nature of the Future aims to remake this staid vision. Emily Pawley examines a place and period of enormous agricultural vitality—antebellum New York State—and follows thousands of “improving agriculturists,” part of the largest, most diverse, and most active scientific community in nineteenth-century America. Pawley shows that these improvers practiced a kind of science hard for contemporary readers to recognize, in which profit was not only a goal but also the underlying purpose of the natural world. Far from producing a more rational vision of nature, northern farmers practiced a form of science where conflicting visions of the future landscape appeared and evaporated in quick succession. Drawing from environmental history, US history and the history of science, and extensively mining a wealth o

Drawing on period texts and illustrations (travelogues, almanacs, journals, advertisements) promoting coal, this talk will consider how contemporary audiences came to understand this fossil fuel in three ways: through the lens of landscape, as a geological specimen, and as a central component of the domestic sphere. Come learn about how coal’s multiple roles in the visual economy of the early-19th-century prompted a broadening of its use in the following decades. Rebecca Szantyr was the 2019-2020 William H. Helfand Visual Culture Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University, where her research focuses on 18th- and 19th-century print culture. Her dissertation on the Neapolitan-American artist Nicolino Calyo examines the overlap of popular culture and the fine arts in the Atlantic World. From 2015-2018, Rebecca was the Florence B. Selden Fellow in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Yale U

This Fireside Chat is based on a collaboration between the Visual Culture Program and Dr. Pauwels Art & Spectacle in the 19th-Century United States class. The seminar explored spectacle and the historical construction of vision as founding conditions of art reception in the United States during the long nineteenth century. This Chat will showcase students’ research experience and work with an object from the Library Company’s collection. Led by Erin Pauwels, Assistant Professor of American Art, Temple University and Erika Piola, Curator of Graphic Arts and Director of the Visual Culture Program, Library Company of Philadelphia This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, November 19, 2020.

This Fireside Chat is based on a collaboration between the Visual Culture Program and Dr. Pauwels Art & Spectacle in the 19th-Century United States class. The seminar explored spectacle and the historical construction of vision as founding conditions of art reception in the United States during the long nineteenth century. This Chat featured presentation by graduate students Clare Nicholls, Emily Schollenberger, and Ashley Marie Stahl. Nicholls, Schollenberger, and Stahl discussed their research experience and work with an object from the Library Company’s collection. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, November 12, 2020.

Literary scholars have explained the rise of the Anglophone novel using a range of tools, from Ian Watt's theories to James Watt's inventions. Contrary to established narratives, When Novels Were Books reveals that the genre beloved of so many readers today was not born secular, national, middle-class, or female. For the first three centuries of their history, novels came into readers' hands primarily as printed sheets ordered into a codex bound along one edge between boards or paper wrappers. Consequently, they shared some formal features of other codices, such as almanacs and Protestant religious books produced by the same printers. Novels are often mistakenly credited for developing a formal feature ("character") that was in fact incubated in religious books. The novel did not emerge all at once: it had to differentiate itself from the goods with which it was in competition. Though it was written for sequential reading, the early novel's main technology for dissemination was the codex, a platform designe

Scattered in archives and historical societies across the United States are hundreds of volumes of manuscript music, copied by hand by eighteenth-century amateurs. Often overlooked, amateur music making played a key role in the construction of gender, class, race, and nation in the post-revolution years of the United States. These early Americans, seeking ways to present themselves as genteel, erudite, and pious, saw copying music by hand and performing it in intimate social groups as a way to make themselves—and their new nation-appear culturally sophisticated. Following a select group of amateur musicians, Cultivated by Hand makes the case that amateur music making was both consequential to American culture of the eighteenth century and aligned with other forms of self-fashioning. This interdisciplinary study explores the social and material practices of amateur music making, analyzing the materiality of manuscripts, tracing the lives of individual musicians, and uncovering their musical tastes and sensib

Voter Suppression in U.S. Elections is a round table discussion between Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University, Dr. Kevin Kruse, Professor of History at Princeton University, Dr. Jim Downs, Gilder Lehrman NEH Chair of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College and hosted by Dr. William D. Fenton, Director of Scholarly Innovation at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Voter Suppression in U.S. Elections emerges from an extraordinary conversation held at Library Company last year in conjunction with the annual conference of the Organization of American Historians. This round table conversation will reflect upon that conversation and assess recent developments related to voter disenfranchisement and the voting barriers that ostracize the poor, Black, and Latino communities. About the Panelists: Carol Anderson (Author) Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory Universi

From the brilliant Benjamin Franklin to the dauntless Ragged Dick and the high-kicking Jack Kelley, hero of the Disney musical Newsies, newsboys have long commanded attention as symbols of struggle and success. But what do we really know about them? Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys places this idealized occupational group at the center of the American experience, analyzing their dual role as economic actors and cultural symbols over a century of war and peace, prosperity and depression, exploitation and reform. The book chronicles the career of hawkers and carriers from the 1830s to the 1930s in all parts of the country and on the railroads that linked them. It examines the place of girls in the trade and the distinctive experience and representation of black, immigrant, and disabled news peddlers. Based on a wealth of primary sources, including rare and iconic visual material, Crying the News reveals the formative role of newsboys in corporate welfare schemes, scientific management practices,

If we learned about the battle for women's suffrage in history class, we likely didn't learn that the fight went well beyond the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. And we definitely didn't learn that many of the people fighting for voting rights were different from their peers in ways that we might now think of as queer. But LGBTQ+ history IS American history. Join us as we meet some of the folks who were key to winning and protecting women's suffrage from the 19th century through the Civil Rights Era, who were gender variant or in same-sex relationships. As we meet them, we'll talk about how we know what we know (or don't) about their private lives and whether it matters. Megan Springate is the National Coordinator for the National Park Service 19th Amendment Centennial Commemoration, and editor of LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History (National Park Foundation and National Park Service, 2016). An historical archaeologist by training, she received her PhD

Long before people identified as transgender or lesbian, there were female husbands and the women who loved them. Female husbands - people assigned female who transed gender, lived as men, and married women - were true queer pioneers. Moving deftly from the colonial era to just before the First World War, Jen Manion uncovers the riveting and very personal stories of ordinary people who lived as men despite tremendous risk, danger, violence, and threat of punishment. Female Husbands weaves the story of their lives in relation to broader social, economic, and political developments in the United States and the United Kingdom, while also exploring how attitudes towards female husbands shifted in relation to transformations in gender politics and women's rights, ultimately leading to the demise of the category of 'female husband' in the early twentieth century. Groundbreaking and influential, Female Husbands offers a dynamic, varied, and complex history of the LGBTQ past. Jen Manion is Associate Professor of His

Christopher N. Phillips’s The Hymnal is the first study to reconstruct the practices of reading and using hymnals, which were virtually everywhere in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Isaac Watts invented a small, words-only hymnal at the dawn of the eighteenth century. For the next two hundred years, such hymnals were their owners’ constant companions at home, school, church, and in between. They were children's first books, slaves’ treasured heirlooms, and sources of devotional reading for much of the English-speaking world. Hymnals helped many people learn to memorize poetry and to read; they provided space to record family memories, pass notes in church, and carry everything from railroad tickets to holy cards to business letters. In communities as diverse as African Methodists, Reform Jews, Presbyterians, Methodists, Roman Catholics, and Unitarians, hymnals were integral to religious and literate life. An extended historical treatment of the hymn as a read text and media form, rather than a source

Maria Zytaruk is Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary. She is the Principal Investigator of the Canadian Research Council-funded project, "Seeds for Tomorrow: A Material History of Eighteenth-Century Seed Exchange and Seed Collections." Her articles on material culture and book history have appeared in such journals as Victorian Studies, Studies in Romanticism, Museum History Journal, and the Journal of British Studies. In 2019, she curated the exhibition, "Nature on the Page: The Print and Manuscript Culture of Victorian Natural History," for the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto and is author of the catalogue by the same name. Dr. Zytaruk was a research fellow at the Library Company in 2003 and 2015. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, September 17, 2020.

Ariel Ron is the Glenn M. Linden Assistant Professor of the US Civil War Era at Southern Methodist University. He focuses on the interplay of politics and economics in nineteenth-century America. Dr. Ron has published several articles in scholarly venues such as the Journal of American History and his book, Grassroots Leviathan: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic, forthcoming from the Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company of Philadelphia from Johns Hopkins University Press in November 2020. His research has been supported by the Yale Center for the Study of Representative Institutions, the Cornell Society for the Humanities, and the Library of Congress’s Kluge Center. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Ron was a PEAES Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia in 2008 and 2012. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, September 10, 2020.

Biographer and Penn faculty member Stephen Fried will discuss new access to Rush’s writings, the nascent Rush Papers Project by Penn Libraries and the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Penn Libraries’ evolving Benjamin Rush Portal. Fried will describe how the Portal has blossomed thanks to the work of Yen Ho, a library science intern at the Penn Libraries Biomedical Library working under his guidance. Hear about the abundance of Rush papers, lecture notes, and journals that are now united and easily accessible, ranging from Rush’s medical training and teachings to his writings about the 1793 Yellow Fever pandemic to race and abolition. The Portal pulls together resources from numerous institutions, including Penn Libraries and the Library Company of Philadelphia. Many of the materials presented on the Benjamin Rush portal were digitized as part of a multi-institution project organized by the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries, “For the Health of the New Nation: Philadelphia

Carole Adrienne is the Writer/Producer of a four-part documentary series-in-production, "Civil War Medicine." The series is drawn from primary source materials including letters, diaries, periodicals and memorabilia from more than 40 American libraries, archives, museums and private collections. Her fiscal sponsor is the Greater Philadelphia Film Office. Carole is the host of "Student Docs," an interview program presenting social issue and social justice documentaries by students from schools including Villanova University and Rowan University. It airs on MLTV-Main Line Network, and will also be airing on PhillyCAM this fall. She is a frequent lecturer at libraries and museums, presenting a multi-media program called "Civil War Medicine: What Went Right." Carole is also currently working on a book proposal about the topic with a literary agent in New York. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, September 3, 2020.

Pandemic Reading is a series of eight blog posts that take readers inside the Library Company of Philadelphia’s collections of contagion and confinement, epidemics and quarantines. The author of the series, Librarian James Green, was interviewed by the Director of Research and Public Programs Will Fenton. https://librarycompany.org/pandemic-reading/

Fireside Chat: William Penn’s Letter to the King of the Lenape: A Choral Work Jeff Thomas is a musician, composer, teacher and producer working in the Philadelphia area. He worked in London while signed to EMI Records, composed music for theater and television, and toured Europe performing his original piano compositions. A life-long resident of Pennsylvania, raised in the countryside of Wellsboro in the north-central part of the state, Thomas has been an avid enthusiast of colonial American history since he found in an arrowhead lodged in a rock while riding his horse Sundance through the heart of the Pennsylvania wilds as a mere youth. His Stride10Nine Recordings Studio is located in Havertown, PA where he records and produces jazz bands and World Music direct to analog tape. Thomas and Fenton were also joined by Andrew R. Murphy, Professor of Political Science and Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of William Penn: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2018). This chat originally aired at 7:00 p

Arwin D. Smallwood is Professor and Chair of the Department of History and Political Science at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro. He is the author of several books including The Atlas of African American History and Politics: From the Slave Trade to Modern Times and Bertie County: An Eastern North Carolina History. His research focuses on the relationships between African-Americans, Native-Americans and Europeans in Eastern North Carolina. He has been an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow for the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, held the American Philosophical Society’s, Library Resident Research Fellowship and the recipient of their Franklin Research Grant, a Fellow for the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, an Archie K. Davis Fellow of the North Caroliniana Society, a Joel Williamson Visiting Scholar of the Southern Historical Collection and a Gilder Lehrman Fellow. This chat originally aired

Cameron Seglias is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Studies at the Graduate School of North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. Recent and forthcoming publications have appeared/will appear in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography and H-Soz-Kult. Research and archival work for his dissertation, tentatively entitled “Paradoxes of Liberty: Antislavery, Print, and Colonial Power in Crisis, 1729-1793,” has been generously supported by fellowships from the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. His teaching interests include slavery and antislavery in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, the history of pacifism in America, as well as modern and contemporary poetry and poetics. Seglias was a Barra Foundation International Fellow at the Library Company in 2019. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, August 13, 2020.