Podcasts about library company

“Monday, September 5, 1774. A number of the Delegates chosen and appointed by the Several Colonies and Provinces in North America to meet and hold a Congress at Philadelphia assembled at the Carpenters' Hall.”  That statement begins the Journals of the Continental Congress, the official meeting minutes of the First and Second Continental Congresses. Between September 1774 and March 1789, the congressmen filled 34-printed volumes worth of entries. Join Michael Norris, the Executive Director of the Carpenters' Company of the City and County of Philadelphia, for a tour of Carpenters' Hall, the meeting place of the First Continental Congress, and discover more about this historic building and the historic work of the First Continental Congress. Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/396 Sponsor Links Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Ben Franklin's World Listener Community Complementary Episodes Episode 001: The Library Company of Philadelphia Episode 153: Committees and Congresses: Governments of the American Revolution Episode 207: Young Benjamin Franklin Episode 229: The Townshend Moment Episode 292: Craft in Early America Episode 294: 1774: The Long Year of Revolution Listen! Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts Amazon Music Ben Franklin's World iOS App Ben Franklin's World Android App Helpful Links Join the Ben Franklin's World Facebook Group Ben Franklin's World Twitter: @BFWorldPodcast Ben Franklin's World Facebook Page Sign-up for the Franklin Gazette Newsletter

Women make up eight out of every ten healthcare workers in the United States. Yet they lag behind men when it comes to working in the roles of medical doctors and surgeons. Why has healthcare become a professional field dominated by women, and yet women represent a minority of physicians and doctors who serve at the top of the healthcare field? Susan H. Brandt, a historian and lecturer at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, seeks to find answers to these questions. In doing so, she takes us into the rich history of women healers with details from her book, Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia. Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/379 Sponsor Links Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Complementary Episodes Episode 003: Director of the Library Company of Philadelphia Episode 005: Revolutionary Medicine: The Founding Fathers and Mothers in Sickness and Health Episode 116: Disease & the Seven Years' War Episode 174: Yellow Fever in the Early American Republic Episode 263: The Medical Imagination Episode 273: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Early Republic Episode 276: Benjamin Rush: Founding Father Episode 301: From Inoculation to Vaccination, Part 1 Episode 302: From Inoculation to Vaccination, Part 2   Listen! Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts Amazon Music Ben Franklin's World iOS App Ben Franklin's World Android App Helpful Links Join the Ben Franklin's World Facebook Group Ben Franklin's World Twitter: @BFWorldPodcast Ben Franklin's World Facebook Page Sign-up for the Franklin Gazette Newsletter

On August 12, 2022, noted author Salman Rushdie was stabbed multiple times as he was about to deliver a talk at the Chautauqua Institute, in Chautauqua, New York. Popular in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Chautauquas have declined in popularity over the years, although they are still held throughout the United States. Join us today for a discussion with a KHS research fellow who has written an article about a Black Chautauqua that was held in Owensboro, Kentucky, as we delve into the local history of Chautauquas. Dr. Patterson is an associate professor of English at the University of South Florida. She holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from George Mason University. In 2010, she published Art for the Middle Classes: America's Illustrated Magazines of the 1840s with the University Press of Mississippi. She has held many fellowships, including the Library Company of Philadelphia and the American Antiquarian Society. Kentucky Chronicles is inspired by the work of researchers from across the world who have conducted research at the Kentucky Historical Society, or who have contributed to the scholarly journal, The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, which has been published continuously, since 1903. Hosted by Dr. Daniel J. Burge, associate editor of The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, and coordinator of our Research Fellows program, which brings in researchers from across the world to conduct research in the rich archival holdings of the Kentucky Historical Society. KHS Chronicles is presented by the Kentucky Historical Society, with support from the Kentucky Historical Society Foundation. https://history.ky.gov/about/khs-foundation Our show is recorded and edited by Gregory Hardison, who also wrote the original underscoring of the interview. Thanks to Dr. Stephanie Lang for her support and guidance. Our theme music, “Modern Documentary” was created by Mood Mode and is used courtesy of Pixabay. To learn more about our publication of The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, or to learn more about our Research Fellows program, please visit our website: https://history.ky.gov/

Welcome to Episode 7 of the 2nd season of The R.A.C.E. Podcast. Today's episode is a continuation of our Race, Healing, & Joy Series. During this series, I will engage Reproductive Justice leaders to spotlight KHA's Race, Healing & Joy initiative and share preliminary insights gathered through more than 40 conversations (including interviews, circles of accountability, and an in-person convening).I am honored to welcome Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens as our guest on today's podcast.Meet Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens:Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens is an award-winning historian and popular public speaker. She is the Charles and Linda Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine and Director of the Humanities in Medicine Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In this position, Dr. Cooper Owens is one of two Black women in the U.S. running a medical humanities program. Dr. Cooper Owens is also the Director of the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia founded by Benjamin Franklin in 173. Cooper Owens is a proud graduate of two historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), the all-women's Bennett College and Clark Atlanta University. She earned her Ph.D. in history at UCLA. As one of the country's most "acclaimed experts in U.S. history," according to Time Magazine, Cooper Owens is steadily working towards making history more accessible and inspiring for all.Listen in as Deirdre shares:What reproductive justice means to her and how her identities inform her workHer role as an academic, a historian, an advocate, and an activist and how they all come togetherThe role of "nonclosure" in Reproductive workWhat she wants people to think, feel, or know as they go deeper into their commitment of black reproductive justiceLearn more and connect with Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens:Website: Deirdre Cooper OwensTwitterFacebookInstagramHi listener! Please take our short Listener Survey HERE to give The R.A.C.E. Podcast team feedback on the show. We will use the feedback to inform how we approach conversations in the future. Upon completion, you will be entered in our quarterly drawing for a $100 Visa gift card! Your email address will only be used for this purpose. Thanks in advance - we appreciate your feedback.Connect with Keecha Harris and Associates: Website: https://khandassociates.com/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/keecha-harris-and-associates/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/khandassociates YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCukpgXjuOW-ok-pHtVkSajg/featured Connect with Keecha: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keechaharris/

“People are complicated” is a truism that holds in the past and the present. Seldom do we find a person where all of their actions and thoughts are black and white. What we see instead is that people are colorful because they aren't just one thing and they don't think and act in one way. Human identities are one area where we find a lot of colorfulness and complexity. Most humans have multiple Identities based in geography, nationality, religious affiliation, race and ethnicity, and also gender. Jen Manion, a Professor of History and of Sexuality and Women's and Gender Studies at Amherst College and author of the book, Female Husbands: A Trans History, joins us to investigate the early American world of female husbands, people who were assigned female at birth and then transed-gender at some point in their lives to live as men. Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/359 Join Ben Franklin's World! Subscribe and help us bring history right to your ears! Sponsor Links Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Juneteenth at Colonial Williamburg Complementary Episodes Episode 002: Cornelia King, “That So Gay” Exhibit at the Library Company of Philadelphia Episode 013: Rachel Hope Cleves, Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America Episode 080: Jen Manion, Liberty's Prisoners: Prisons and Prison Life in Early America  Episode 266: Johann Neem, Education in Early America Episode 292: Craft in Early America Episode 309: Philip Reid, Merchant Ships of the Eighteenth Century Episode 354: John Wood Sweet, The Sewing Gir's Tale Episode 357: Eric Jay Dolin, Privateering During the American Revolution  Listen! Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts Amazon Music Ben Franklin's World iOS App Ben Franklin's World Android App Helpful Links Join the Ben Franklin's World Facebook Group Ben Franklin's World Twitter: @BFWorldPodcast Ben Franklin's World Facebook Page Sign-up for the Franklin Gazette Newsletter

Links from the show:* First Among Men: George Washington and the Myth of American Masculinity* Jefferson's Body: A Corporeal Biography* Do we need political parties?* Dude food is not patriotic – vegetables and moderation are more deeply rooted in the nation's early historyAbout my guest:Maurizio Valsania is professor of American history at the University of Turin, Italy. An expert on the Early American Republic, he analyzes the founders within their social, intellectual, and material context, especially through the lens of the 18th-century body. He is the author of The Limits of Optimism: Thomas Jefferson's Dualistic Enlightenment (University of Virginia Press, 2011), Nature's Man: Thomas Jefferson's Philosophical Anthropology (University of Virginia Press, 2013), Jefferson's Body: A Corporeal Biography (University of Virginia Press, 2017), and First Among Men: George Washington and the Myth of American Masculinity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022, a book represented by literary agent Scott Mendel of the Mendel Media Group). Valsania is the recipient of several fellowships from leading academic institutions, including the American Antiquarian Society, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the Library Company, the John D. Rockefeller Library, the DAAD (Germany), the International Center for Jefferson Studies, and the George Washington's Mount Vernon. He has written for the Oxford University Press's Academic Insights for the Thinking World, for the Oxford Bibliographies Online, and has collaborated with the BBC World Service. He has also written several Op-Eds and articles that have appeared in major media outlets, such as the Chicago Tribune, the Mississippi Free Press, Salon, the Wisconsin State Journal, Government Executive, Defense One, and the Conversation. He lives in Chapel Hill, NC. Get full access to Dispatches from the War Room at dispatchesfromthewarroom.substack.com/subscribe

Hello dear readers! Happy Listening Love month! Join Beth and Kelly as we try to learn the real story of Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman immigrant in America. 1834 was the year when middle-class Americans were looking to spend some cash at Marshalls, but could only attend exploitative shows featuring Afong. Learn as little as possible about a woman who everyone was talking about, and no one really cared about. Welcome to ‘merica! Theme music: Big White Lie by A Cast of Thousands Cite your sources: https://www.nyhistory.org/blogs/afong-moy-the-chinese-lady. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afong_Moy. Davis, Nancy E. “Afong Moy on the 21st Century Stage.” OUPBlog, 2021. OUPBlog, https://blog.oup.com/2021/12/afong-moy-on-the-21st-century-stage/. Accessed 05 02 2023. Haddad, John R. The Romance of China: Excursions to China in US Culture: 1776-1876. Columbia University Press. http://www.gutenberg-e.org/haj01/frames/printframe.html. Hsiao, Irene. “Afong Moy Was a Real Person.” Chicago Reader, 11 May 2022. “Remembering Afong Moy – The Library Company of Philadelphia.” The Library Company of Philadelphia, 1 February 2021, https://librarycompany.org/2021/02/01/remembering-afong-moy/. Accessed 6 February 2023.  

The second half of the nineteenth century was a momentous time in Italian history, marked by the unification of the peninsula and the formation of the Kingdom of Italy. Three American women writers had a front-seat view of this history while they lived in Italy: Caroline Crane Marsh, the wife of the United States Minister; journalist Anne Hampton Brewster; and Emily Bliss Gould, founder of a vocational school for Italian children. Joining me to help us learn more about these American women in Italy in the late 19th Century is Dr. Etta Madden, the Clif & Gail Smart Professor of English at Missouri State University and author of several books, including Engaging Italy: American Women's Utopian Visions and Transnational Networks. Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. Photo credits: Engraving of Emily Bliss Gould, by A.H. Ritchie, based on a portrait by Lorenzo Suszipj, in A Life Worth Living, by Leonard Woolsey Bacon, 1879, Public Domain; Anne Hampton Brewster, Albumen photograph, ca. 1874, McAllister Collection, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Caroline Crane Marsh, ca 1866, Fratelli Alinari, Florence, Special Collections Library, University of Vermont.  Additional Sources: “How Italy became a country, in one animated map,” by Zack Beauchamp, Vox, December 1, 2014. “Issues Relevant to U.S. Foreign Diplomacy: Unification of Italian States,” Office of the Historian, US Department of State. “The Italian Risorgimento: A timeline,” The Florentine, March 10, 2011. “About George Perkins Marsh,” The Marsh Collection, Smithsonian. “Ambasciatrice, Activist, Auntie, Author: Caroline Crane Marsh,” by Etta Madden, New York Public Library, December 19, 2018. “Traveling with Caroline Crane Marsh,” University of Vermont Special Collections, June 11, 2020. “Anne Hampton Brewster,” Archival Gossip Collection. “Anne Hampton Brewster: Nineteenth-Century News from Rome,” by Etta Madden, November 21, 2018. “Anne Hampton Brewster papers finding aid,” Library Company of Philadelphia. “Emily Bliss Gould: An American in Italy–A Guest Post,” by Etta Madden, History in the Margins, September 30, 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Philly cheesesteak was developed in the early 20th century "by combining frizzled beef, onions, and cheese in a small loaf of bread", according to a 1987 exhibition catalog published by the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania

This week Maureen Taylor, The Photo Detective, is joined by Sarah Weatherwax, Senior Curator of Graphic Arts at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Sarah has worked at the Library Company for nearly thirty years. From political cartoons to incredible daguerrotypes, these images are preserved for generations to come at the Library. In addition, the two discuss visual literacy and how this can be key for working with any type of image.Related Episodes:Episode 182: The Archive Lady, Melissa BarkerEpisode 165: Reading the Clues in World War I ImagesLinks:Imperfect HistorySign up for my newsletter.Watch my YouTube Channel.Like the Photo Detective Facebook Page so you get notified of my Facebook Live videos.Need help organizing your photos? Check out the Essential Photo Organizing Video Course.Need help identifying family photos? Check out the Identifying Family Photographs Online Course.Have a photo you need help identifying? Sign up for photo consultation.About My Guest:Sarah Weatherwax has worked at the Library Company of Philadelphia since 1993 and has been the Senior Curator of Graphic Arts since 2020. She has written articles about photography for the Daguerreian Annual and Pennsylvania History and has co-authored a book about 19th-century photographic views of Center City Philadelphia from the Library's collections. She has curated exhibitions on diverse topics including Philadelphia daguerreotypes; the work of William Rau, the Pennsylvania Railroad's official photographer; and most recently, Imperfect History: Curating the Graphic Arts Collection at Benjamin Franklin's Public Library, a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Graphic Arts Department at the Library Company. Her research interests include women in photography and Philadelphia's built environment. She currently serves on the board of the Daguerreian Society and is Assistant Editor of the Daguerreian Annual. About Maureen Taylor:Maureen is a frequent keynote speaker on photo identification, photograph preservation, and family history at historical and genealogical societies, museums, conferences, libraries, and other organizations across the U.S., London, and Canada.  She's the author of several books and hundreds of articles and her television appearances include The View and The Today Show .  She's been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Better Homes and Gardens, The Boston Globe, Martha Stewart Living, Germany's topVivid-Pix Restore is a really easy-to-use photo improvement tool. It does the work for you? You can restore scanned prints, slides, documents, and digital camera images in seconds. It is fast and easy and affordable. It uses patented artificial intelligence, which restores images with one click. And then you can fine-tune. Well, here's the good news. It's on sale this week@maureentaylor.com. It's usually $49. 99 this week. It is $10 off at $39. 99. Support the show

The theater of Philadelphia was being staged during the roiling years of the 1840s. Bankruptcies, riots, labor unrest, growing religious fervor and racial tensions, rising crime (and public perception of crime due to increasing availability of journals and newspapers) were everywhere. This is the context for the first episode of our Season Two: "Drama is Conflict," in which we set the scene for the coming battle over the play at Philadelphia's Chestnut Street Theater, entitledThe Quaker City, or the Monks of Monk Hall, by George Lippard. How and why this production came about will be the story of our next two episodes, as well.For more about the historical context of today's episode, including images of many of the people and events we discuss, see the blog post on our website: https://www.aithpodcast.com/blog/philadelphia-in-1844/The image used for this episode is a detail from an 1844 lithograph entitled "The Death of George Shifler." It was a bit of popular propaganda produced by the nativist "American Republican Party," and supposedly depicted the death of the 19 year-old Shifler during the Kensington Riots of May 6, 1844. It is from the collection of the Library Company of Philadelphia. Persistent link: https://digital.librarycompany.org/islandora/object/digitool%3A65090For more information about the riots, there is an excellent article in the online Encyplopedia of Greater Philadelphia: https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/nativist-riots-of-1844/If you enjoyed the show, PLEASE LEAVE US A REVIEW! You can do it easily, right here:https://www.aithpodcast.com/reviews/If you have any questions, inquiries or additional comments, you can write us at our email address: AITHpodcast@gmail.comOr, follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/schmeterpitzFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/AITHpodcastTo become a Patron of the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/AITHpodcast

In June, Clay Jenkinson was invited to give an endowed lecture on the humanities at the Library Company of Philadelphia, America's first successful lending library and oldest cultural institution. It was founded in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin. We discuss that lecture and Alexander von Humboldt, as well as the amazing artifacts Clay saw while in Philadelphia. Mentioned on this episode. Subscribe to the Thomas Jefferson Hour on YouTube. Support the show by joining the 1776 Club or by donating to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, Inc. You can learn more about Clay's cultural tours and retreats at jeffersonhour.com/tours. Check out our merch.  You can find Clay's books on our website, along with a list of his favorite books on Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and other topics. Thomas Jefferson is interpreted by Clay S. Jenkinson.

Everything you need to know about Monkeypox right now. Also, the struggles facing NJ produce farmers, and we talk about a Library Company mental health exhibition.

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is the traditional name for the unfinished record of his own life written by Benjamin Franklin from 1771-90, and has become one of the most famous and influential examples of an autobiography ever written.Benjamin Franklin's account of his life is divided into four parts, reflecting the different periods at which he wrote them. In the "Introduction" of the 1916 publication of the Autobiography, editor F. W. Pine wrote that Franklin's biography provided the "most remarkable of all the remarkable histories of our self-made men" with Franklin as the greatest exemplar.Benjamin Franklin (1706 –1790) was an American polymath active as a writer, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, printer, publisher and political philosopher. Among the leading intellectuals of his time, Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States and the first United States Postmaster General. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. As an inventor, he is known for the lightning rod, bifocals, and the Franklin stove, among other inventions. He founded many civic organizations, including the Library Company, Philadelphia's first fire department, and the University of Pennsylvania. (From Wikipedia).Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is the traditional name for the unfinished record of his own life written by Benjamin Franklin from 1771-90, and has become one of the most famous and influential examples of an autobiography ever written.Benjamin Franklin's account of his life is divided into four parts, reflecting the different periods at which he wrote them. In the "Introduction" of the 1916 publication of the Autobiography, editor F. W. Pine wrote that Franklin's biography provided the "most remarkable of all the remarkable histories of our self-made men" with Franklin as the greatest exemplar.Benjamin Franklin (1706 –1790) was an American polymath active as a writer, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, printer, publisher and political philosopher. Among the leading intellectuals of his time, Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States and the first United States Postmaster General. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. As an inventor, he is known for the lightning rod, bifocals, and the Franklin stove, among other inventions. He founded many civic organizations, including the Library Company, Philadelphia's first fire department, and the University of Pennsylvania. (From Wikipedia).Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is the traditional name for the unfinished record of his own life written by Benjamin Franklin from 1771-90, and has become one of the most famous and influential examples of an autobiography ever written.Benjamin Franklin's account of his life is divided into four parts, reflecting the different periods at which he wrote them. In the "Introduction" of the 1916 publication of the Autobiography, editor F. W. Pine wrote that Franklin's biography provided the "most remarkable of all the remarkable histories of our self-made men" with Franklin as the greatest exemplar.Benjamin Franklin (1706 –1790) was an American polymath active as a writer, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, printer, publisher and political philosopher. Among the leading intellectuals of his time, Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States and the first United States Postmaster General. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. As an inventor, he is known for the lightning rod, bifocals, and the Franklin stove, among other inventions. He founded many civic organizations, including the Library Company, Philadelphia's first fire department, and the University of Pennsylvania. (From Wikipedia).Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is the traditional name for the unfinished record of his own life written by Benjamin Franklin from 1771-90, and has become one of the most famous and influential examples of an autobiography ever written.Benjamin Franklin's account of his life is divided into four parts, reflecting the different periods at which he wrote them. In the "Introduction" of the 1916 publication of the Autobiography, editor F. W. Pine wrote that Franklin's biography provided the "most remarkable of all the remarkable histories of our self-made men" with Franklin as the greatest exemplar.Benjamin Franklin (1706 –1790) was an American polymath active as a writer, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, printer, publisher and political philosopher. Among the leading intellectuals of his time, Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States and the first United States Postmaster General. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. As an inventor, he is known for the lightning rod, bifocals, and the Franklin stove, among other inventions. He founded many civic organizations, including the Library Company, Philadelphia's first fire department, and the University of Pennsylvania. (From Wikipedia).Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Join us as we revisit our spotlight on Aristotle's Masterpiece with Professor Mary Fissell, from October 2020. To see the visuals that Dr. Fissell references in the podcast, go to: www.chstm.org/video/83 Follow along with Professor Fissell as she discusses her research on this late 17th century sex, midwifery, and childbirth manual popular in England and America from its publication until well into the 20th century. Dr. Fissell explores the ways in which readers used their copies of the book to record births and vows of love and companionship, performing a similar function to the Bible. Dig into the similarities and differences between copies of the Masterpiece held at Kislak Center for Special Collections at the University of Pennsylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, and the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. To explore more resources related to this presentation, please visit: www.chstm.org/video/83

This nation has a long history of exploiting Black Americans in the name of medicine. A practice which began with the Founding Fathers using individual enslaved persons for gruesome experimentation evolved into state-sanctioned injustices such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, among others. Award-winning author, historian Deirdre Cooper-Owens details a chronology of medical malpractice and racist misconceptions about health while highlighting lesser-known stories of medical innovations by African Americans. Be sure to visit the enhanced episode transcript for additional classroom resources for teaching about the intersection of sports and race during the Jim Crow era. Like this online exhibition – Déjà Vu, We've Been Here Before: Race, Health, and Epidemics. This helpful resource was created by some of Dr. Cooper Owens' students for the Library Company of Philadelphia, where she also serves as Director of the Program in African American History. And educators! Get a professional development certificate for listening to this episode—issued by Learning for Justice. Listen for the code word, then visit learningforjustice.org/podcastpd.

Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston on January 17, 1706, to Abiah Folger and Josiah Franklin. Although Franklin began his life as the youngest son of a youngest son, he traveled through many parts of what is now the northeastern United States and the Province of Quebec and lived in four different cities in three different countries: Boston, Philadelphia, London, and Passy, France. In honor of Benjamin Franklin's 316th birthday, Márcia Balisciano, the Founding Director of the Benjamin Franklin House museum in London, joins us to explore Benjamin Franklin's life in London using details from the largest artifact Franklin left behind: his rented rooms at 36 Craven Street. Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/320 Join Ben Franklin's World! Subscribe and help us bring history right to your ears! Sponsor Links Omohundro Institute Colonial Williamsburg Foundation The Ben Franklin's World Shop Complementary Episodes Episode 001: James N. Green, Library Company of Philadelphia Episode 022: Vivian Bruce Conger, Deborah Read Franklin & Sally Franklin Bache Episode 149: George Goodwin, Benjamin Franklin in London Episode 169: Thomas Kid, The Religious Life of Benjamin Franklin Episode 175: Daniel Epstein, The Revolution in Ben Franklin's House Episode 207: Nick Bunker, Young Benjamin Franklin   Listen! Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts Amazon Music Ben Franklin's World iOS App Ben Franklin's World Android App Helpful Links Join the Ben Franklin's World Facebook Group Ben Franklin's World Twitter: @BFWorldPodcast Ben Franklin's World Facebook Page Sign-up for the Franklin Gazette Newsletter

Dr. Lewis Eliot is a professor of History at the University of South Carolina. His research explores the intersection of anti-slavery and imperialism during the nineteenth century. Dr. Eliot's dissertation, Rebellion and Empire in Britain's Atlantic World, 1807-1884, analyzes how enslaved uprisings and the British Empire's response to them created a new strain of abolitionism. This new form of anti-slavery touted racial hierarchies and British authorities forced this ideology upon rivals in Europe, Latin America, and Africa in order to maintain white supremacy while the bonds of slavery loosened.    His research has been funded by the John Carter Brown Library, American Historical Association, Library Company of Philadelphia, Gilder Lehrman Institute, Walker Institute, and the University of South Carolina's History Department, Graduate School, and Office of the Vice-President for Research. In the 2019-2020 academic year he was a Bridge Humanities Corps Fellow.    He is the author of several articles including, “We Don't Recognize Your Freedom: Slavery, Imperialism, and Statelessness in the Nineteenth Century Atlantic World” recently published in Atlantic Studies and "Exultations, Agonies, and Love: The Romantics and the Haitian Revolution". In this episode we explore how racism as it is experienced today has been constantly developing for the past 400 years and is a direct product of colonialism and imperialism. We explore how the Haitian Revolution affected the very nature of abolitionism in Western thought, ultimately instilling the race-based white supremacy that continues to this day.   You can check out the latter article here: https://activisthistory.com/2017/07/07/exultations-agonies-and-love-the-romantics-and-the-haitian-revolution/  #haitianrevolution #history #haiti

An exciting collaboration between the American Philosophical Society, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and  the Library Company of Philadelphia, is changing the way future historians will be able to access historical collections. Kyle Roberts, Sabrina Bocanegra, and  Bayard Miller tell us about the "Revolutionary City  Portal" a ground-breaking one-stop portal into Philadelphia's role in the American Revolution.  This remarkable collaboration, and mining of  metadata, will bring to life the people who brought on the American Revolution. 

Join Dr. Rachel Walker as she recounts how reading a curious passage in the Anglo-African Magazine, which she found in the archives of the Library Company of Philadelphia, led to her research on race and science in early America, and more specifically, the nineteenth-century sciences of phrenology and physiognomy. Professor Walker uses images from the archives of member institutions such as the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Huntington Library to illustrate how phrenology and physiognomy were used by both scientists and laypeople in the nineteenth century. Although we often rightly associate these techniques with pseudo-scientific ways of supporting racist and sexist social hierarchies, Dr. Walker shows us how Black scientists and laypeople also used these sciences to forward their own assertions of Black excellence and genius. Dr. Walker shows us how scientists and the many Americans who read and talked about phrenology and physiognomy used facial angles, head shapes, and other measurements of the face and skull to make judgments and predictions about friends, family members, strangers, business partners, and ultimately, entire groups of people. She emphasizes the need to understand these practices—even though we now reject them as pseudo-sciences—because they tell us a lot about how nineteenth-century individuals understood their social world and the people with whom they interacted on a daily basis. Rachel Walker specializes in the history of gender, race, and popular science in early America. She is currently working on her first book project, which uncovers the history of physiognomy: a once-popular but now-discredited science, rooted in the idea that people's facial beauty reveals their moral and mental character. In 2018, Dr. Walker received her PhD from the University of Maryland in College Park.

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren't an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we'd bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler05(at)gmail.com or dr.danamalone(at)gmail.com or find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you'll hear about: reclaiming lost voices, recovering history, and a discussion of the book Never Caught: The Washington's Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge. Our guest is: Dr. Erica Armstrong Dunbar, a late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century scholar with a specialization in African American women's history. From 2011 to 2018 she was the Inaugural Director of the Program in African American history at the Library Company of Philadelphia. She has written numerous articles, reviews, essays, and books including Never Caught, and has given scholarly talks across the country. She is the National Director of the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), and is the Charles and Mary Beard Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode might be interested in: Never Caught: The Washington's Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman by Erica Armstrong Dunbar A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City by Erica Armstrong Dunbar Daina Ramey Berry and Erica Armstrong Dunbar, “The Unbroken Chain of Enslaved African Resistance and Rebellion.” In The Birth of a Nation: Nat Turner and the Making of a Movement, edited by N. Parker, 35-61. New York: Atria/Simon and Schuster, September 2016. The Association of Black Women Historians http://abwh.org The Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia  Dr. Armstrong's website The African-American studies channel on NBN  The History Department at the College of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/academic-life

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren't an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we'd bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler05(at)gmail.com or dr.danamalone(at)gmail.com or find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you'll hear about: reclaiming lost voices, recovering history, and a discussion of the book Never Caught: The Washington's Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge. Our guest is: Dr. Erica Armstrong Dunbar, a late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century scholar with a specialization in African American women's history. From 2011 to 2018 she was the Inaugural Director of the Program in African American history at the Library Company of Philadelphia. She has written numerous articles, reviews, essays, and books including Never Caught, and has given scholarly talks across the country. She is the National Director of the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), and is the Charles and Mary Beard Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode might be interested in: Never Caught: The Washington's Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman by Erica Armstrong Dunbar A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City by Erica Armstrong Dunbar Daina Ramey Berry and Erica Armstrong Dunbar, “The Unbroken Chain of Enslaved African Resistance and Rebellion.” In The Birth of a Nation: Nat Turner and the Making of a Movement, edited by N. Parker, 35-61. New York: Atria/Simon and Schuster, September 2016. The Association of Black Women Historians http://abwh.org The Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia  Dr. Armstrong's website The African-American studies channel on NBN  The History Department at the College of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

​Founded by Benjamin Franklin, the Library Company of Philadelphia is the thriving epicenter of early American book history, and the inspiration of librarianship in America. James N. Green, Librarian Emeritus of the Library Company and a scholar of early American book history, introduces us to the history of the Library Company, the contours of its Pennsylvania German collections, and possible futures for the fields of material texts, Pennsylvania German studies, and cultural heritage preservation broadly conceived. Sharing personal memories of his long and distinguished career in librarianship and the history of material texts, Green also reflects on the unique library ecosystem that defines the Philadelphia region, the foundation of the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL), and the evolving civic role of libraries.

We are joined by Meg Dillon, a former BBC librarian, who explains about her new adventure in books. Meg runs the Small Library Company where she buys, sells and organizes books for small private collections. We also learn about Meg's first impressions of life in the rare bookselling business.

The fight for racial equality in the nineteenth century played out not only in marches and political conventions but also in the print and visual culture created and disseminated throughout the United States by African Americans.  Producing printed and photographic images for activists that advanced their campaigns for black rights. Related Episodes:Episode 101: Rediscovering an American Community of Color Episode 120: Good Pictures: Amateur Photography and Our Family with Art Historian Kim BeilLinks:African American Visual Culture in the 19th Century: An Online Lecture for the New York Historical SocietySign up for my newsletter.Watch my YouTube Channel.Like the Photo Detective Facebook Page so you get notified of my Facebook Live videos.Need help organizing your photos? Check out the Essential Photo Organizing Video Course.Need help identifying family photos? Check out the Identifying Family Photographs Online Course.Have a photo you need help identifying? Sign up for photo consultation.About My Guest:Dr. Aston Gonzalez is a historian of African American culture and politics during the long nineteenth century. He is an associate professor of History at Salisbury University. Before teaching in Maryland, he completed a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship through the Library Company of Philadelphia's Program in African American History and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.The University of North Carolina Press published his first book, Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century, in September 2020. He has published articles about African American portraiture during the Early Republic, picturing Black citizenship during the Civil War, the creation of African American archives, the visual representations of escaped slaves, and the visual production of free Black abolitionists.About Maureen Taylor:Maureen is a frequent keynote speaker on photo identification, photograph preservation, and family history at historical and genealogical societies, museums, conferences, libraries, and other organizations across the U.S., London, and Canada.  She's the author of several books and hundreds of articles and her television appearances include The View and The Today Show (where she researched and presented a complete family tree for host Meredith Vieira).  She's been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Better Homes and Gardens, The Boston Globe, Martha Stewart Living, Germany's top newspaper Der Spiegel, American Spirit, and The New York Times. Maureen was recently a spokesperson and photograph expert for MyHeritage.com, an internationally known family history website, and also writes guidebooks, scholarly articles, and online columns for such media as Smithsonian.com. Learn more at Maureentaylor.comDid you enjoy this episode? Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts

​Nestled amid the rolling hills and verdant landscape of the Brandywine River Valley in Delaware, The Winterthur Library brims with rare books and manuscripts documenting material life in America, including early German Pennsylvania. Join Emily Guthrie, who until recently served as Director and NEH Librarian at The Winterthur Library, for a conversation about this remarkable repository of American history and culture, and how The Winterthur Library fits into the work of the Winterthur Museum and its surrounding 1,000-acre country estate. Ms. Guthrie, who recently took over as Librarian at the Library Company of Philadelphia, introduces us to the rich collections of Pennsylvania German rare books and manuscripts that reside in The Winterthur Library and tells us about her old side-gig as a shepherd and goatherd on the Winterthur estate. Well-known as one of the most prominent cultural institutions specializing in American history, the Winterthur Museum, Garden, & Library comes to life in dynamic new ways in this special episode of Cloister Talk Live!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Today is the third of three COVIDCalls special episodes in partnership with two great research libraries: the American Philosophical Society and the Linda Hall Library.  These episodes will explore challenges and new approaches for research libraries and the patrons that use them in the time of COVID.  Today I welcome Nicole Schroeder and Andrew Seaton.Nicole Schroeder is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Virginia and a current Dolores Liebmann Fund Fellow. In 2018-19 she held the Friends of the APS Predoctoral Fellowship in Early American History (to 1840) at the American Philosophical Society and from 2019-2020 she held the Program in Early American Economy and Society Predoctoral Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Nicole studies the history of disability, welfare, and medicine in early America. Andrew Seaton is a Ph.D. candidate in history at New York University. His dissertation explores the relationship between politics, society, and universal health care through a transnational history of the British National Health Service (NHS). Andrew argues that this pivotal postwar institution demonstrates overlooked endurances to social democratic structures and political cultures. This interpretation challenges historical narratives that map the rising hegemony of late twentieth-century neoliberalism. His research scales from the everyday work that embedded communitarian ideals in hospital wards and health centers across Britain, to the NHS's wider significance in trans-Atlantic discussions about health reform, processes of decolonization, and the movement of medical professionals across borders. Andrew has published articles in Twentieth Century British History and the Bulletin of the History of Medicine.

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.

In 1763 twenty indigenous people in the colony of Pennsylvania were murdered by an armed gang. The victims had been a peaceful group of Conestogas, who had been wrongfully accused of aiding in violent raids against the settlers. The infamous attack would go down in history as the Conestoga massacre. However, almost immediately after the murders the meaning of the event became the source of a fierce war in the press. The so-called "pamphlet war" saw two competing groups trying to sell contrasting interpretations of the attack. The perspective that was inevitably left out of these pamphlets, and the "official" historical record, was the indigenous perspective. The new graphic novel Ghost River: The Fall and Rise of Conestoga seeks to remedy that by telling the story with the focus squarely on the Conestoga people. In this episode Sebastian is joined by the creative team behind Ghost River, Weshoyot Alvitre, Lee Francis IV, and Will Fenton, to discuss the graphic novel and how fake news can become fake history. Tune in and find out how hand ground paints, blood memory, and Ben Franklin's biggest political defeat all play a role in the story.Read Ghost River for FREE here: https://read.ghostriver.org/Thank you to our guests!Lee Francis 4 (Author): https://redplanetbooksncomics.com/Weshoyot Alvitre (Illustrator): https://www.weshoyot.com/Will Fenton (Editor): https://www.willfenton.com/Ghost River: The Fall and Rise of the Conestoga is part of Redrawing History: Indigenous Perspectives on Colonial America, a project of the Library Company of Philadelphia supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In 1763 twenty indigenous people in the colony of Pennsylvania were murdered by an armed gang. The victims had been a peaceful group of Conestogas, who had been wrongfully accused of aiding in violent raids against the settlers. The infamous attack would go down in history as the Conestoga massacre. However, almost immediately after the murders the meaning of the event became the source of a fierce war in the press. The so-called "pamphlet war" saw two competing groups trying to sell contrasting interpretations of the attack. The perspective that was inevitably left out of these pamphlets, and the "official" historical record, was the indigenous perspective. The new graphic novel Ghost River: The Fall and Rise of Conestoga seeks to remedy that by telling the story with the focus squarely on the Conestoga people. In this episode Sebastian is joined by the creative team behind Ghost River, Weshoyot Alvitre, Lee Francis IV, and Will Fenton, to discuss the graphic novel and how fake news can become fake history. Tune in and find out how hand ground paints, blood memory, and Ben Franklin's biggest political defeat all play a role in the story.Read Ghost River for FREE here: https://read.ghostriver.org/Thank you to our guests!Lee Francis 4 (Author): https://redplanetbooksncomics.com/Weshoyot Alvitre (Illustrator): https://www.weshoyot.com/Will Fenton (Editor): https://www.willfenton.com/Ghost River: The Fall and Rise of the Conestoga is part of Redrawing History: Indigenous Perspectives on Colonial America, a project of the Library Company of Philadelphia supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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.

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.

Season 1 Episode 2 features an interview with professor Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens. We discuss a brief history of American gynecology and we reflect on what this history means in present day gynecological care, including her own experiences of medical racism.But before we jump into this week's episode, we take a moment of silence for Sha-Asia Washington - a 26 year old Black woman who died during childbirth in early July at Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn. Say her name. Learn her story. Here is the gofundme page to support her newborn and her family.Deirdre Cooper Owens Bio:Deirdre Cooper Owens is the Linda and Charles Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine and Director of the Humanities in Medicine program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is an Organization of American Historians' (OAH) Distinguished Lecturer and has won a number of prestigious honors for her scholarly and advocacy work. A popular public speaker, Dr. Cooper Owens has spoken widely across the U.S. and Europe. She has published articles, essays, book chapters, and think pieces on a number of issues that concern African American experiences. Her first book, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology (Univ. of Georgia Press, 2017) won the 2018 Darlene Clark Hine Book Award from the Organization of American Historians as the best book written in African American women's and gender history.  Professor Cooper Owens is also the Director of the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the country's oldest cultural institution. She is working on a second book project that examines mental illness during the era of United States slavery and is writing a popular biography of Harriet Tubman that examines her through the lens of disability. References During the Episode:[Book] Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology[Lecture] Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens presenting on her book Medical Bondage at Carnegie Mellon University (2019)[Organization] East Harlem Preservation Society (Marina Ortiz, founder)Questions to consider after the episode:What are some examples of practices, behaviors and policies that are considered “normal” in healthcare that do not sit right with you? Consider how racist practices, behaviors and policies have become so rampant and routine that they are accepted as a normal part of American healthcare.Hosted by Taja LindleyProduced by Colored Girls HustleMusic, Soundscape and Audio Engineering by Emma AlabasterSupport our work on Patreon or make a one-time payment via PayPalFor more information visit BirthJustice.nyc This podcast is made possible, in part, by the Narrative Power Stipend - a grant funded by Forward Together for members of Echoing Ida.Support the show

On the morning of November 1, 1755, a devastating earthquake struck the Portuguese capital of Lisbon. The quake leveled buildings, triggered fires, and caused a tsunami that laid waste to the urban landscape. When it was all over, thousands were dead.  The Lisbon earthquake was a disaster of epic proportions, so much so that it became the subject of the first major international disaster relief effort. People from around the Atlantic world contributed funds to Lisbon and its inhabitants, including a £100,000 donation from King George II of Great Britain.  The quake also marked a change in how people around the Atlantic world responded to disasters. Surely, many who awoke that morning to celebrate All Saints Day attributed the devastation to God's wrath, but in the era of the Enlightenment, many more still looked to reason and science as modes of explanation, and to alleviate the suffering. On today's episode, Dr. Cindy Kierner of George Mason University joins us to discuss the origins of our modern attitudes toward disasters. She is the author of the new book, Inventing Disaster: The Culture of Calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood. And as you might have divined from the book's subtitle, how we now respond to disasters like the coronavirus, California wildfires, or Hurricane Katrina is the product of a long history that dates back to the 17th century. About Our Guest: Cindy Kierner received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1986. A specialist in the fields of early America, women and gender, and early southern history, she is the author or editor of eight books and many articles. Kierner is an OAH Distinguished Lecturer and past president of the Southern Association for Women Historians (SAWH), and she has served on several editorial boards. Her research has received support from the American Historical Association, the Virginia Historical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Antiquarian Society, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. About Our Host: Jim Ambuske, Ph.D. leads the Center for Digital History at the Washington Library. A historian of the American Revolution, Scotland, and the British Atlantic World, Ambuske graduated from the University of Virginia in 2016. He is a former Farmer Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia Law Library. At UVA Law, Ambuske co-directed the 1828 Catalogue Project and the Scottish Court of Session Project.  He is currently at work on a book about emigration from Scotland in the era of the American Revolution as well as a chapter on Scottish loyalism during the American Revolution for a volume to be published by the University of Edinburgh Press.

In the war's waning days, the American Revolution neared collapse when Washington's senior officers were rumored to approach the edge of mutiny.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 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: George Washington, the Newburgh Conspiracy, and the Fate of the American Revolution tells the story of a pivotal episode of General Washington's leadership and reveals how the American Revolution really ended: with fiscal turmoil, political unrest, out-of-control conspiracy thinking, and suspicions between soldiers and civilians so strong that peace almost failed to bring true independence. -David Head is a history professor at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, whose research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and by George Washington's Mt. Vernon. His prior academic books benefited from an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, a Gilder Lehrman Fellowship at the New-York Historical Society, and a Lord Baltimore Fellowship at the Maryland Historical Society. Head's previous work in the academic community has been honored with several awards and prizes, including Mystic Seaport Museum's John Gardner Maritime Research Award and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic's Ralph D. Gray Article Prize.

This magisterial study, ten years in the making by one of the field's most distinguished historians, will be the first to explore the impact fugitive slaves had on the politics of the critical decade leading up to the Civil War. Through the close reading of diverse sources ranging from government documents to personal accounts, Richard J. M. Blackett traces the decisions of slaves to escape, the actions of those who assisted them, the many ways black communities responded to the capture of fugitive slaves, and how local laws either buttressed or undermined enforcement of the federal law. Every effort to enforce the law in northern communities produced levels of subversion that generated national debate so much so that, on the eve of secession, many in the South, looking back on the decade, could argue that the law had been effectively subverted by those individuals and states who assisted fleeing slaves.Richard Blackett is a historian of the abolitionist movement in the US and particularly its transatlantic connections and the roles African Americans played in the movement to abolish slavery. He is the author of Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830-1860; Beating Against the Barriers. Biographical Essays in Nineteenth-Century Afro-American History; Thomas Morris Chester: Black Civil War Correspondent; Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War; Making Freedom: The Underground Railroad and the Politics of Slavery, and Running A Thousand Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery. His most recent work is The Captive's Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery.Blackett has been named the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University for the 2013-14 academic year. On May 5, 2008, the Library Company held its Annual Dinner in its 277th year. Professor Richard J. Blackett, the Andrew Jackson Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, was the featured speaker. Click Here for an audio pod cast of his talk about the African American struggle in the age of emancipation. Blackett taught previously at the University of Pittsburgh (1971-85), Indiana University (1985-1996); University of Houston where he was the John & Rebecca Moores professor of history and African American Studies (1996-2002). He has been Associate Editor of the Journal of American History (1985-1990), Acting Editor (1989-1990); editor of the Indiana Magazine of History (1993-1996). He is also past president of the Association of Caribbean Historians.