Talking in the Library

Liberty Displaying the Arts & Sciences: Abolition and Empire in the Post-Revolution Atlantic World Emily Casey, Art Historian and Educator

The first half of the 19th century was an era of upheaval. The United States nearly lost the War of 1812. Partisanship became endemic during violent clashes regarding States' Rights and the abolition of slavery. The battle between Andrew Jackson and Nicholas Biddle over the Second Bank of the United States epitomized a nation in turmoil: Biddle, the erudite aristocrat versus Jackson, the plain-spoken warrior. The conflict altered America's political arena. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson vowed to kill the Central Bank, setting in motion the infamous Bank War that almost bankrupted the nation. Under Biddle's guidance, the Second Bank of the United States had become the most stable financial institution in the world. Biddle fought Jackson with tenacity and vigor; so did members of Congress not under the sway of “Old Hickory.” Jackson accused Biddle of treason; Biddle declared that the president promoted anarchy. The fight riveted the nation. The United States is experiencing a reappearance of deep schisms within our population. They hearken back to the earliest debates about the federal government's role regarding fiduciary responsibility and social welfare. The ideological descendants of Nicholas Biddle and Andrew Jackson are as polarized today as they were during the nineteenth century. With this book, author Cordelia Frances Biddle documents the epic fight between Nicholas Biddle and Andrew Jackson over the fate of the Second Bank of the United States, shedding new light with previously undiscovered documents while bringing the story to life in a compelling biography of political intrigue.

For all that is known about the depth and breadth of African American history, we still understand surprisingly little about the lives of African American children, particularly those affected by northern emancipation. But hidden in institutional records, school primers and penmanship books, biographical sketches, and unpublished documents is a rich archive that reveals the social and affective worlds of northern Black children. Drawing evidence from the urban centers of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, Crystal Webster's innovative research yields a powerful new history of African American childhood before the Civil War. Webster argues that young African Americans were frequently left outside the nineteenth century's emerging constructions of both race and childhood. They were marginalized in the development of schooling, ignored in debates over child labor, and presumed to lack the inherent innocence ascribed to white children. But Webster shows that Black children nevertheless carved out physical and social space for play, for learning, and for their own aspirations. Reading her sources against the grain, Webster reveals a complex reality for antebellum Black children. Lacking societal status, they nevertheless found meaningful agency as historical actors, making the most of the limited freedoms and possibilities they enjoyed.

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.

In Occupied America, Donald F. Johnson chronicles the everyday experience of ordinary people living under military occupation during the American Revolution. Focusing on day-to-day life in port cities held by the British Army, Johnson recounts how men and women from a variety of backgrounds navigated harsh conditions, mitigated threats to their families and livelihoods, took advantage of new opportunities, and balanced precariously between revolutionary and royal attempts to secure their allegiance. Between 1775 and 1783, every large port city along the Eastern seaboard fell under British rule at one time or another. As centers of population and commerce, these cities—Boston, New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Savannah, Charleston—should have been bastions from which the empire could restore order and inspire loyalty. Military rule's exceptional social atmosphere initially did provide opportunities for many people—especially women and the enslaved, but also free men both rich and poor—to reinvent their lives, and while these opportunities came with risks, the hope of social betterment inspired thousands to embrace military rule. Nevertheless, as Johnson demonstrates, occupation failed to bring about a restoration of imperial authority, as harsh material circumstances forced even the most loyal subjects to turn to illicit means to feed and shelter themselves, while many maintained ties to rebel camps for the same reasons. As occupations dragged on, most residents no longer viewed restored royal rule as a viable option. Don Johnson is associate professor of early American history at North Dakota State University, where his research focuses on popular politics and everyday experience during the American Revolution. His first book, Occupied America: British Military Rule and the Experience of Revolution, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2020, and other writings have appeared in the Journal of American History, The Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History, and the William and Mary Quarterly, among other venues. Johnson earned his PhD in American History from Northwestern University and also holds an MA from the University of Delaware's Winterthur Program in American Material Culture.

A conversation with Orchid Tierney, author of A Year of Misreading the Wildcats; Jena Osman, author of Motion Studies; and Andrea Krupp, curator of Seeing Coal.

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. Sarah L. Swedberg, Professor of History, Colorado Mesa University Sarah Swedberg is a Professor of History at Colorado Mesa University where she has taught since 1999. She is a regular writer for Nursing Clio. Her book, Liberty and Insanity in the Age of the American Revolution (Lexington, 2020) began with a 2011 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College and University Professors on the problem of governance in the early American Republic houses at the Library Company.

In Cry of Murder on Broadway, Julie Miller shows how a woman's desperate attempt at murder came to momentarily embody the anger and anxiety felt by many people at a time of economic and social upheaval and expanding expectations for equal rights. Julie Miller earned her doctorate in United States history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2003. She taught in the history department at Hunter College, City University of New York, before moving to Washington DC. Her first book was Abandoned: Foundlings in Nineteenth-Century New York City (NYU Press, 2008). Her second book, Cry of Murder on Broadway: A Woman’s Ruin and Revenge in Old New York, was published by the Three Hills Imprint of Cornell University Press in October, 2020. It was begun with a Bernard and Irene Schwartz postdoctoral fellowship from the New-York Historical Society in 2006-2007. She is the curator of early American Manuscripts at the Library of Congress. Her chapter, “British Beginnings,” in The Two Georges: Parallel Lives in an Age of Revolution (Washington DC: Library of Congress), is forthcoming. Cry of Murder was written entirely outside of her responsibilities at the Library of Congress and does not reflect the Library’s views. In Bringing Down the Colonel, the journalist Patricia Miller tells the story of Madeline Pollard, an unlikely nineteenth-century women’s rights crusader. After an affair with a prominent politician left her “ruined,” Pollard brought the man—and the hypocrisy of America’s control of women’s sexuality—to trial. And, surprisingly, she won. Patricia Miller is an award-winning author and journalist whose fascination with the untold stories of women led her on a 10-year journey to unearth the story of the Breckinridge–Pollard scandal. Her work on the interplay of politics and sexual morality has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Salon, The Nation, Huffington Post, and Ms. Magazine. She received a master’s degree in journalism from New York University and is the editor of Encyclopedia Virginia.

When James Ogilvie arrived in America in 1793, he was a deeply ambitious but impoverished teacher. By the time he returned to Britain in 1817, he had become a bona fide celebrity known simply as Mr. O, counting the nation’s leading politicians and intellectuals among his admirers. And then, like so many meteoric American luminaries afterward, he fell from grace. The Strange Genius of Mr. O is at once the biography of a remarkable performer--a gaunt Scottish orator who appeared in a toga--and a story of the United States during the founding era. Ogilvie's career featured many of the hallmarks of celebrity we recognize from later eras: glamorous friends, eccentric clothing, scandalous religious views, narcissism, and even an alarming drug habit. Yet he captivated audiences with his eloquence and inaugurated a golden age of American oratory. Examining his roller-coaster career and the Americans who admired (or hated) him, this fascinating book renders a vivid portrait of the United States in the midst of invention. Carolyn Eastman is an associate professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research focuses on the cultural and intellectual history of early America and the Atlantic world, political culture, and the history of print, oral, and visual media. Her book, A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution (Chicago, 2009), received the James Broussard Best First Book Prize from SHEAR. Her second book, The Strange Genius of Mr. O: Celebrity and the Invention of the United States, appeared in March 2021 as part of a new initiative by the Omohundro Institute to seek broader audiences for books about early American history. Dr. Eastman was a Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Fellow at the Library Company in 2015.

The abolition of Russian serfdom in 1861 and American slavery in 1865 transformed both nations as Russian peasants and African Americans gained new rights as subjects and citizens. During the second half of the long nineteenth century, Americans and Russians responded to these societal transformations through a fascinating array of new cultural productions. Analyzing portrayals of African Americans and Russian serfs in oil paintings, advertisements, fiction, poetry, and ephemera housed in American and Russian archives, Amanda Brickell Bellows argues that these widely circulated depictions shaped collective memory of slavery and serfdom, affected the development of national consciousness, and influenced public opinion as peasants and freed people strove to exercise their newfound rights. While acknowledging the core differences between chattel slavery and serfdom, as well as the distinctions between each nation’s post-emancipation era, Bellows highlights striking similarities between representations of slaves and serfs that were produced by elites in both nations as they sought to uphold a patriarchal vision of society. Russian peasants and African American freed people countered simplistic, paternalistic, and racist depictions by producing dignified self-representations of their traditions, communities, and accomplishments. This book provides an important reconsideration of post-emancipation assimilation, race, class, and political power. Amanda Bellows is a historian of the United States in comparative and transnational perspective. She received her Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a Lecturer at The New School and Hunter College in New York City. Her first book, American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of Global Slavery, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Talking Points Memo, and Public Seminar.

In Past and Prologue, Michael Hattem shows how colonists’ changing understandings of their British and colonial histories shaped the politics of the American Revolution and the origins of American national identity. Between the 1760s and 1800s, Americans stopped thinking of the British past as their own history and created a new historical tradition that would form the foundation for what subsequent generations would think of as “American history.” This change was a crucial part of the cultural transformation at the heart of the Revolution by which colonists went from thinking of themselves as British subjects to thinking of themselves as American citizens. Rather than liberating Americans from the past—as many historians have argued—the Revolution actually made the past matter more than ever. Past and Prologue shows how the process of reinterpreting the past played a critical role in the founding of the nation. Michael Hattem received his PhD in History from Yale University. He has taught at Knox College and Lang College at The New School and is currently the Associate Director of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. He is a producer and contributor to The JuntoCast, the first podcast on early American history, and History Talks, a new YouTube channel delivering content created by historians. He has been awarded fellowships from the Library Company, the American Philosophical Society, the New-York Historical Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, Mount Vernon, and other institutions, and his work and writing have been featured in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Chris Kuncio, creator of Young Ben Franklin, discusses his efforts to reintroduce Benjamin Franklin to new audiences (including his own students) through walking tours, modern editions of his writings, curricula, and even his own four-part "hip-hopera," B. Franklin: Corrected and Amended. Visit http://franklinforprez.com to learn more about the unfolding project. Chris Kuncio is a born and raised Philadelphian who has spent the last seven years teaching twelfth-grade English at Mastery Charter Lenfest in Old City. For the same period, he has run a tour company where he has portrayed Young Ben Franklin. As the character, he produced rap album that covers Ben Franklin's entire life. He is currently trying to animate the album and generate more entertaining content around American history and civics.

What can we make of the fact that Robinson Crusoe was invoked in an 1835 issue of Mechanics’ Magazine in an article extolling the economic power of labor? Or that Harriet Jacobs patterned parts of her autobiographical slave narrative after Samuel Richardson’s Pamela? Or that The American Sunday School Union issued a cautionary poem about little girls’ tendencies to misread Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress as an adventure tale and strike out on their own unsupervised pilgrimages? “On the Margins” examines how early novelistic fictions made their way into the reading lives of American readers who were disempowered along lines of race, gender, age, and economic status, and argues that we can begin to answer the questions posed above by attending to the material reconfigurations of these works in the emerging mass-print marketplace of the antebellum United States. This project sits at the intersection of novel theory, histories of reading, and histories of the book, and like many transatlantic studies of popular literature, is interested in the way reprinting, editing, and imitation transform a work across time and space. This presentation will focus on the ways abridgements, adaptations, chapbooks, children’s editions, and visual culture invocations of each of these novels influenced their reception, generic status, and canonization in the nineteenth century, and reveal ways readers resisted or subverted prevailing accounts of both the risks and benefits associated with evolving projects of literary inclusion. Emily Gowen is the current Albert M. Greenfield Dissertation Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia and a Ph.D. Candidate in Boston University's department of English. Essays adapted from her dissertation project are forthcoming in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists and American Literature. Her work has also been supported by fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and she will be a 2021-22 Fellow at the Boston University Center for the Humanities. She is also an affiliate at Boston University's Center for Antiracist Research.

Following the American Revolution, it was a cliché that the new republic's future depended on widespread, informed citizenship. However, instead of immediately creating the common schools--accessible, elementary education--that seemed necessary to create such a citizenry, the Federalists in power founded one of the most ubiquitous but forgotten institutions of early American life: academies, privately run but state-chartered secondary schools that offered European-style education primarily for elites. By 1800, academies had become the most widely incorporated institutions besides churches and transportation projects in nearly every state. In this book, Mark Boonshoft shows how many Americans saw the academy as a caricature of aristocratic European education and how their political reaction against the academy led to a first era of school reform in the United States, helping transform education from a tool of elite privilege into a key component of self-government. And yet the very anti-aristocratic critique that propelled democratic education was conspicuously silent on the persistence of racial and gender inequality in public schooling. By tracing the history of academies in the revolutionary era, Boonshoft offers a new understanding of political power and the origins of public education and segregation in the United States. Mark Boonshoft received his Ph.D. in history from Ohio State University, and then spent two years at the New York Public Library, where he worked on the Early American Manuscripts Project. Since then, he has taught at a number of universities, including SUNY-New Paltz and Norwich University. He is the author of Aristocratic Education and the Making of the American Republic, and, along with Nora Slonimsky and Ben Wright, is co-editor of American Revolutions in the Digital Age (under contract with Cornell University Press). Mark was a SHEAR fellow at the Library Company in 2014. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, April 8, 2021.

New Books for a New Nation: Jesuit Library Building in 19th-Century Chicago Exiled European-born Jesuits founded a network of Catholic colleges across the United States in the century following the restoration of the Society of Jesus in 1814. At the heart of these colleges were libraries. Dr Kyle Roberts will talk about a collaborative teaching and research project to reconstruct the library of one such school, St Ignatius College (precursor to Loyola University Chicago). Working at the intersection of library, urban, and religious history, Roberts will explore how these libraries reveal the centrality of print to nineteenth-century Catholicism and the transnational, hybrid identities of urban American Catholics, balancing allegiances to the state, homeland, and global Catholic Church. Kyle Roberts is the Associate Director of Library & Museum Programming of the American Philosophical Society Library & Museum. Prior to coming to the APS, Dr. Roberts was an Associate Professor of Public History and New Media and Director of the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities at Loyola University Chicago. A prize-winning scholar and educator of Atlantic World religion, print, and library history, he is the author or editor of several books, including Evangelical Gotham: Religion and the Making of New York City, 1783-1860 (Chicago, 2016), and digital humanities projects, including the Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project (2012-present). This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, April 1, 2021.

Print culture expanded significantly in the nineteenth century due to new print technologies and more efficient distribution methods, providing literary critics, who were alternately celebrated and reviled, with an ever-increasing number of venues to publish their work. Adam Gordon embraces the multiplicity of critique in the period from 1830 to 1860 by exploring the critical forms that emerged. Prophets, Publicists, and Parasites is organized around these sometimes chaotic and often generative forms and their most famous practitioners: Edgar Allan Poe and the magazine review; Ralph Waldo Emerson and the quarterly essay; Rufus Wilmot Griswold and the literary anthology; Margaret Fuller and the newspaper book review; and Frederick Douglass’s editorial repurposing of criticism from other sources. Revealing the many and frequently competing uses of criticism beyond evaluation and aesthetics, this insightful study offers a new vision of antebellum criticism, a new model of critical history, and a powerful argument for the centrality of literary criticism to modern life. Adam Gordon is Associate Professor of English at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA, where he teaches early and nineteenth-century American literature. He received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania and his PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. Before starting at Whitman, Adam served as the Greenfield Dissertation Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Hench Post-Dissertation Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, and held William K. Peck and Mellon Foundation fellowships at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA. His work has appeared in journals such as American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, Early American Literature, and the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review. This past year, his book, Prophets, Publicists, and Parasites: Antebellum Print Culture and the Rise of the Critic was published by the University of Massachusetts Press. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, March 11, 2021.

In her Fireside Chat, Agnès Trouillet examined how the surveying of the city of Philadelphia and the province of Pennsylvania, notably under first Surveyor General Thomas Holme, laid out the map of governance imagined by William Penn. The use of property survey profoundly reshaped the space, ensuring land tenure but also granting proximity and access to the seats of political power. Dr. Agnès Trouillet is an Associate Professor of British Studies at University Paris Nanterre. Her research focuses on contemporary and colonial political history, more specifically on Pennsylvania with which she has a special relationship after having taught four years at the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in the issue of division as generative of power, and her current project examines the role of William Penn’s settlement design in reshaping space and sovereignty in the Delaware Valley. She has a forthcoming article on the boundary dispute between Pennsylvania and Maryland in the volume from the American Philosophical Society Conference “The Power of Maps and the Politics of Borders.” Dr. Trouillet is currently a fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, March 4, 2021.

In the years between the American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War, as legal and cultural understandings of citizenship became more racially restrictive, black writers articulated an expansive, practice-based theory of citizenship. Grounded in political participation, mutual aid, critique and revolution, and the myriad daily interactions between people living in the same spaces, citizenship, they argued, is not defined by who one is but, rather, by what one does. In The Practice of Citizenship, Derrick R. Spires examines the parallel development of early black print culture and legal and cultural understandings of U.S. citizenship, beginning in 1787, with the framing of the federal Constitution and the founding of the Free African Society by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, and ending in 1861, with the onset of the Civil War. Between these two points he recovers understudied figures such as William J. Wilson, whose 1859 "Afric-American Picture Gallery" appeared in seven installments in The Anglo-African Magazine, and the physician, abolitionist, and essayist James McCune Smith. He places texts such as the proceedings of black state conventions alongside considerations of canonical figures such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Frederick Douglass. Dr. Derrick R. Spires is Associate Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University. He specializes in early African American and American print culture, citizenship studies, and African American intellectual history. His first book, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), won the MLA Prize for First Book and the Bibliographical Society/St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize. His work appears or is forthcoming in African American Review, American Literary History, and edited collections on early African American print culture, and the Colored Conventions movement. Dr. Spires was an Albert M. Greenfield Foundation Fellow in African American History at the Library Company in 2008. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, February 25, 2021.

After the British surrender at Yorktown, the American Revolution blazed on—and as peace was negotiated in Europe, grave problems surfaced at home. The government was broke and paid its debts with loans from France. Political rivalry among the states paralyzed Congress. The army’s officers, encamped near Newburgh, New York, and restless without an enemy to fight, brooded over a civilian population indifferent to their sacrifices. The result was the so-called Newburgh Conspiracy, a mysterious event in which Continental Army officers, disgruntled by a lack of pay and pensions, may have collaborated with nationalist-minded politicians such as Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Robert Morris to pressure Congress and the states to approve new taxes and strengthen the central government. A Crisis of Peace tells the story of a pivotal episode of George Washington's leadership and reveals how the American Revolution really ended: with fiscal turmoil, out-of-control conspiracy thinking, and suspicions between soldiers and civilians so strong that peace almost failed to bring true independence. David Head is associate lecturer of history at the University of Central Florida. David received his B.A. from Niagara University and his Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo. He was a Library Company/Historical Society of Pennsylvania Fellow while researching his dissertation in 2006. His most recent book, A Crisis of Peace: George Washington, the Newburgh Conspiracy, and the Fate of the American Revolution, received honorable mention for the Journal of the American Revolution’s 2020 Best Book Award. It was also a finalist for the 2020 George Washington Book Prize. In addition to his academic work, David has written for venues such as USA Today and the Orlando Sentinel on topics ranging from George Washington’s shopping habits to the musical Hamilton. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, February 11, 2021.

A history of the book in the Americas, across deep time, would reveal the origins of a literary tradition woven rather than written. It is in what Danielle Skeehan calls material texts that a people's history and culture is preserved, in their embroidery, their needlework, and their woven cloth. In defining textiles as a form of cultural writing, The Fabric of Empire challenges long-held ideas about authorship, textuality, and the making of books. It is impossible to separate text from textiles in the early modern Atlantic: novels, newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets were printed on paper made from household rags. Yet the untethering of text from textile served a colonial agenda to define authorship as reflected in ink and paper and the pen as an instrument wielded by learned men and women. Skeehan explains that the colonial definition of the book, and what constituted writing and authorship, left colonial regimes blind to nonalphabetic forms of media that preserved cultural knowledge, history, and lived experience. This book shifts how we look at cultural objects such as books and fabric and provides a material and literary history of resistance among the globally dispossessed. Danielle Skeehan is Associate Professor of English and Comparative American Studies at Oberlin College. Her work has appeared in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, The Appendix, The Journal of the Early Republic, Commonplace, and Early American Studies. She is a former PEAES postdoctoral fellow, and her first book, The Fabric of Empire: Material and Literary Cultures of the Global Atlantic, 1650–1850, was recently published by Johns Hopkins University Press in the series “Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia,” edited by Cathy Matson. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, February 4, 2021.

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 of antebellum agricultural publications, The Nature of the Future uncovers the rich loam hiding beneath ostensibly infertile scholarly terrain, revealing a surprising area of agricultural experimentation that transformed American landscapes and American ideas of expertise, success, and exploitation. Emily Pawley is Associate Professor of History at Dickinson College where she teaches agricultural history, food studies, environmental history, and the history of science. Her research focuses on cultivated landscapes as sources of knowledge and has been supported by grants from the NSF, the NEH, the ACLS, the Smithsonian, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. Her book The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Capitalism, and Science in the Antebellum North is newly out with Chicago in 2020. She has published on analytic tables, cattle portraiture, counterfeit apples, and aphrodisiacs for sheep, and she’s currently juggling projects on climate change pedagogy, carbon sequestration, and the history of ideas of nurture. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, December 10, 2020.

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 University Art Gallery, where she curated exhibitions on Jacob Lawrence and the history of caricature. Her research has been supported by the American Antiquarian Society, the Joukowsky Research Travel Fund at Brown, the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, and the Library Company. This chat originally aired at 5:00 p.m. Thursday, December 3, 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 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 designed for random access. This peculiar circumstance led to the genre's insistence on continuous, cover-to-cover reading even as the "media platform" it used encouraged readers to dip in and out at will and read discontinuously. Jordan Alexander Stein traces this tangled history, showing how the physical format of the book shaped the stories that were fit to print. Jordan Alexander Stein is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Fordham University. His publications include Avidly Reads Theory (New York University Press, 2019) and the volume he co-edited with Lara Langer Cohen, Early African American Print Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Dr. Stein's research has been supported by a number of agencies, including grants at the HSP and an NEH postdoctoral fellowship at the LCP. The research he conducted here eventuated in When Novels Were Books (Harvard University Press, 2020), which he discusses in this Fireside Chat. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, November 5, 2020.

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 sensibilities. Author Glenda Goodman explores highly personal yet often denigrated experiences of musically "accomplished" female amateurs in particular, who grappled with finding a meaningful place in their lives for music. Revealing the presence of these unacknowledged subjects in music history, Cultivated by Hand reclaims the importance of such work and presents a class of musicians whose labors should be taken into account. Dr. Glenda Goodman is an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania, where she works on the history of early American music. She publishes in musicology and history journals and her research has been supported by the ACLS, the Institute for Advanced Studies, and other fellowships, including the Library Company of Philadelphia in 2010. Dr. Goodman is currently working on a book on sacred music and colonial encounter in eighteenth-century New England, as well as a collaborative project, American Contact: Intercultural Encounter and the History of the Book, which will result in a volume and digital project. Today she'll discuss her first book, Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic (Oxford University Press, 2020). This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, October 29, 2020.

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 University and a Guggenheim Fellow in Constitutional Studies. She is the author of several books, including Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955, which was published by Cambridge University Press and awarded both the Gustavus Myers and Myrna Bernath Book Awards; White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, which won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and was also a New York Times best seller and a New York Times Editor’s Pick. Her most recent book, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy, was long-listed for the National Book Award in Nonfiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Book Award in Nonfiction. Kevin M. Kruse (Author) Kevin M. Kruse specializes in twentieth-century American political history, with special attention to conflicts over race, religion, and rights. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his MA and PhD degrees from Cornell University. He is a professor of history at Princeton University, where he has served on the faculty since 2000. Kruse is the author of White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, and, with Julian Zelizer, Fault Lines: A History of the United States since 1974, as well as the coeditor of three essay collections. He is currently working on his next project, titled “The Division: John Doar, the Justice Department, and the Civil Rights Movement.” Jim Downs (Editor) Jim Downs is Gilder Lehrman NEH Chair of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College. He is the author of Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction and the coeditor of Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation (Georgia) and Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America. This panel discussion originally aired at 6:00 p.m. Tuesday, October 27, 2020. To learn more and purchase the book: https://ugapress.org/book/9780820357737/voter-suppression-in-u-s-elections/

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, and employee liability laws. It documents scores of forgotten newsboy strikes and unions, and their affiliation with the Knights of Labor, American Federation of Labor, and Industrial Workers of the World. The result is an epic history of print capitalism and working-class childhood from the pavement up. Vincent DiGirolamo is an associate professor of history at Baruch College, where he specializes in 19th and 20th-century US history, with a focus on workers, children, immigrants, city life, and print culture. He is the author of Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys, published by Oxford University Press and winner of the 2020 Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Philip Taft Labor History Prize, Frank Luther Mott Research Award, and Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize from the American Historical Association. Originally from Monterey, California, DiGirolamo received his BA from UC Berkeley, MA from UC Santa Cruz, and PhD from Princeton University. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, October 22, 2020.

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 in Anthropology from the University of Maryland in 2017. Sponsored by the Library Company’s Charlotte Cushman Society. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, October 15, 2020.

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 History at Amherst College. They are a social and cultural historian whose work examines the role of gender and sexuality in American life. Dr. Manion is author of Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America (Penn, 2015) which received the inaugural Mary Kelley Best Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. Their most recent book, Female Husbands: A Trans History (Cambridge, 2020) was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dr. Manion has published dozens of essays for popular and scholarly audiences and serves on the editorial boards of Amherst College Press, Early American Studies, and The William and Mary Quarterly. They are currently chair of the OAH Committee on the Status of LGBTQ Historians & Histories. Dr. Manion is working on a two-volume series, The Cambridge History of Sexuality in the United States with co-editor Nicholas Syrett. Previously, they worked for ten years at Connecticut College as a faculty member in the history department and founding director of the LGBTQ Resource Center. Dr. Manion was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at the Library Company in 2005. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, October 8, 2020.

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 used solely for singing, this book traces the lives people lived with hymnals, from obscure schoolchildren to Emily Dickinson. Readers will discover a wealth of connections between reading, education, poetry, and religion in Phillips’s lively accounts of hymnals and their readers. Chris Phillips is Professor of English at Lafayette College and a scholar of historical poetics and the history of reading. He is the author of The Hymnal: A Reading History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) and Epic in American Literature, Settlement to Reconstruction (2012), and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Renaissance (2018). He is also the PI for the Easton Library Company Database Project, which reconstructs the usage of the first subscription library in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. Dr. Phillips was a research fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia in 2016. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, October 1, 2020.

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 as the Center of American Medical Education, 1746-1868.” This project was generously funded by a grant from the Digitizing Hidden Collections initiative of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The Hidden Collections initiative in turn is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This event was co-sponsored by Penn Libraries and was recorded on September 8, 2020.

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.m. Thursday, August 27, 2020.

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 at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, August 20, 2020.

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.

Kayla Anthony serves as Executive Director of the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks (PhilaLandmarks), currently in her second year. For eighty-nine years PhilaLandmarks has played a significant role in the historic preservation movement in Philadelphia by restoring, furnishing and presenting to the public its distinguished house museums: the Powel House, Grumblethorpe, Hill-Physick House and Historic Waynesborough. Previous to this position, Ms. Anthony served as PhilaLandmarks' Development and Programs Manager where she honed her vision to focus the organization on programmatic community engagement and contributed revenue development. She also served as the Resident Site Manager of the Hill-Physick House. Graduating summa cum laude with a B.A. in French and a B.A. in Theatre Arts from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, she brings a diverse, creative background to the organization, along with a keen understanding of strategic partnerships and networking. Samantha Snyder is the Reference Librarian at the Washington Library at George Washington's Mount Vernon. She has an upcoming chapter on Elizabeth Powel in the edited volume, Women in the World of Washington, set to be published by the University of Virginia Press in early 2021. She is also currently working on a longer biography of Elizabeth Powel. She earned her Master's of Library and Information Studies, and B.A. in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, and is currently pursuing a Master's in History at George Mason University, with a focus on Early American Women's History. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, July 30, 2020.

Fireside Chat: America's First Celebrity Preacher and How He Perfected the Protestant Art of Talking about Yourself Dr. Seth Perry is Associate Professor of Religion in America at Princeton University. His first book, Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States (Princeton University Press, 2018) explores the performative, rhetorical, and material aspects of bible-based authority in early-national America. His work has appeared in Church History, Early American Studies, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Scholarly Publishing, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Sightings, and the LA Review of Books. Current projects include; an article on "scriptural failure"; a project on animals in early American religious history; and a biography of Lorenzo Dow, the early-national period's most famous itinerant preacher. Dr. Perry was a McNeil Center for Early American Studies Fellow at the Library Company in 2011. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, July 23, 2020.

Dr. Steven C. Bullock is Professor of History at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His books include Tea Sets and Tyranny: The Politics of Politeness in Early America and Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730-1840. Winner of WPI’s award for Outstanding Research and Creative Scholarship, he has served as a Fulbright Lecturer in Japan. He also been published in Newsday and the Wall Street Journal, and appeared on ABC, CNN, NPR, and in documentaries that have aired on PBS, the History Channel, and elsewhere. Dr. Bullock was the Reese Fellow in American Bibliography at the Library Company of Philadelphia in 2017. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, July 16, 2020.

Dr. Lucas A. Dietrich is Adjunct Professor of Humanities at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is a council member and former president of the New England American Studies Association and the recipient of a Northeast Modern Language Association Fellowship at the Newberry Library and a Directors' Scholarship at Rare Book School. Dr. Dietrich has published articles in Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS), Book History, and Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (PBSA). His book, Writing Across the Color Line: U.S. Print Culture and the Rise of Ethnic Literature, has just been released by the University of Massachusetts Press. Dr. Dietrich was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia in 2016. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, July 9, 2020.

Dr. Sally Hadden is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Western Michigan University. Hadden writes about and researches law and history in early America. She is the author of Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Harvard University Press, 2001) and coeditor of three books: Signposts: New Directions in Southern Legal History (University of Georgia Press, 2013); A Companion to American Legal History (Wiley Blackwell, 2013); and Traveling the Beaten Path: Charles Tait’s Charges to Federal Grand Juries, 1822-1825 (University of Alabama School of Law/University of Alabama Press, 2013). Dr. Hadden is currently working on a study of the earliest U.S. Supreme Court (under contract with Cambridge University Press) and a monograph on eighteenth-century lawyers in colonial American cities, the subject of this talk. She has been a research fellow at the Library Company on three occasions (2003, 2005, and 2016). This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m., Thursday, July 2, 2020.

Dr. Tyson Reeder is an expert in early U.S. foreign relations and state building. He is an assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia where he serves as an editor with the Papers of James Madison. He is the author of Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution and the editor of the Routledge History of U.S. Foreign Relations. He is currently writing a book called Foreign Intrigues: James Madison, Party Politics, and Foreign Meddling in Early America. Dr. Reeder was a Program in Early American Economy and Society Fellow at the Library Company in 2013. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m., Thursday, June 25, 2020.

Unfreedom: The Limits of the Fourteenth Amendment Under Reconstruction discusses race in the twentieth century as a specific form of ideological technology. Focusing on the events and voices between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. Walter Greason lead a discussion about the economic, political, social, and cultural foundations of white supremacy as products of an emerging industrial order. From the regimentation of the plantation in the early nineteenth century through the rigidity of commodity and financial markets at the start of the Cold War, this talk illuminates the networks that led to entrenched inequality for more than a century. Dr. Walter D. Greason is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Educational Counseling and Leadership at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. Dr. Greason’s research focuses on the comparative, economic analysis of slavery, industrialization, and suburbanization. With a variety of co-editors, Dr. Greason has published Planning Future Cities(2017) – an innovative look at architecture, urbanism, and municipal design; The American Economy (2016) – a provocative examination of race, property, and wealth in the United States since 1750; and the Afrofuturist design textbook, Cities Imagined. His scholarly monograph, Suburban Erasure, won the Best Work of Non-Fiction award from the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance in 2014. He also won grants from the Mellon Foundation (2011) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (2016). He is also the creator of the #WakandaSyllabus. The subsequent series of essays can be found on the award-winning website, Black Perspectives. This event originally aired at 5:00 p.m., Thursday, June 18, 2020.

Dr. Michael Goode is Associate Professor of History and Political Science at Utah Valley University, where he specializes in early America and the British Atlantic with a focus on religion, political culture, and the history of peace and violence. He is the editor of The Specter of Peace: Rethinking Violence and Power in the Colonial Atlantic (Brill, 2018) and he will contribute an article to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Peace History. His book project, "A Colonizing Peace: The Struggle for Order in Early America," examines the role of peace as a language and practice of government in colonial Pennsylvania. Michael was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at the Library Company in 2009. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m., Thursday, June 11, 2020.

David J. Kent is a lifelong Abraham Lincoln researcher, career scientist, Vice President of the Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia, and board member of the Abraham Lincoln Institute. His most recent book is Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America, and he has also written on Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. Kent writes a regular book review column in the Lincolnian, publishes many articles and reviews, and gives regular public talks. David’s next book project focuses on Lincoln's interest in technology. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m., Thursday, June 4, 2020.

Dr. Allison K. Lange is Associate Professor of History at the Wentworth Institute of Technology. She received her Ph.D. in History from Brandeis University. The subject of this Fireside Chat, is her book Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women's Suffrage Movement, published in May 2020 by the University of Chicago Press. Dr. Lange's book focuses on the ways that women's rights activists and their opponents used images to define gender and power during the suffrage movement. Numerous institutions have supported her work, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Library of Congress, and American Antiquarian Society. Dr. Lange was the William H. Helfand Fellowship in American Visual Culture at the Library Company in 2012. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m., Thursday, May 28, 2020.

Dr. Scott C. Miller is the International Center for Finance postdoctoral fellow in Economic and Business History at the Yale School of Management. He earned his Ph.D from the University of Virginia in 2018, specializing in the transformation of the American economy after independence from Great Britain. His work explores the effect of economic, political, and social turmoil on commercial networks, domestic markets, trade systems, and business practices in the post-Revolutionary United States and early 19th-Century Europe. Dr. Miller was a Library Company PEAES Research Fellow in 2017. This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m., Thursday, May 21, 2020.