Spring Events

Capitalism by Gaslight: The Shadow Economies of 19th-Century America (on view until August 24)
Exhibition Opening Reception, Tuesday, January 24, 5:30 to 7:00 p.m.

Drawing on books, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, prints, photographs, and ephemera in the Library Company's collection, guest curator Wendy Woloson explores underground urban commerce in the 19th century in our current exhibition. From pick-pocketing to gambling, counterfeiting to prostitution, “Capitalism by Gaslight” describes the myriad ways people participated in an earlier, shadowy realm of commerce that required a surprising degree of creativity, cunning, and financial acumen.

Black Gotham: African American Family History in the 19th Century

Wednesday, February 15, Reception at 5:30 p.m., Program at 6:00 p.m.

Carla L. Peterson, Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, and author of Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in 19th-Century New York City, will speak about Philadelphia’s 19th-century African American elites. Black Gotham is Peterson's riveting account of her quest to reconstruct the lives of her 19th-century ancestors.

Members-Only Tour of Girard College and Mother Bethel AME Church

Thursday, February 16, 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.

Join us for a guided tour of Founders Hall, Girard College’s original classroom building, by Director of Historic Resources Elizabeth Laurent, and visit the museum collections and Girard archives housed in this National Historic Landmark. Following lunch (provided), there will be a guided tour of Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded by Bishop Richard Allen in 1816. Call 215-546-3181 for more information about costs and transportation.

Before Madison Avenue: Advertising in Early America

Visual Culture Program Conference, Wednesday, March 15, and Thursday, March 16

Speakers at this conference will present new research on advertising in North America before the rise of the modern advertising agency (late 1870s). Co-sponsored by the Center for Historic American Visual Culture at the American Antiquarian Society. Free of charge for Library Company members, $50 for the general public, and $25 for students.

Freedom’s Cap: The United States Capitol and the Coming of the Civil War

Tuesday, March 27, Reception at 5:30 p.m., Program at 6:00 p.m.

The history of the modern U.S. Capitol, the iconic seat of American government, is also the history of America’s most tumultuous years. As the majestic new building rose above Washington’s skyline, battles over slavery and secession ripped the country apart. Author Guy Gugliotta will speak at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Co-sponsored by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Teachers may receive Act 48 credit. 

Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Orality in 19th-Century American Visual Culture

Thursday, April 12, Reception at 5:30 p.m., Program at 6:00 p.m.

Visual Culture Program Fellow Catherine Walsh explores the text-image relationship in how viewers saw, described, and “read” original art and popular print depictions of storytelling.

Members-Only Annual Meeting & Public Lecture
Tuesday, May 15, 5:00 p.m. and 5:45 p.m.

Join us for our Annual Meeting (5:00) followed by a talk by Wendy Woloson, guest curator of “Capitalism by Gaslight” (5:45). Dr. Woloson will discuss legitimate but marginal ways that people earned money in the 19th century and will focus on seamstresses, rag pickers, beggars, dog catchers, newsboys, and street sellers.

Capitalism by Gaslight Symposium
Thursday, June 7, and Friday, June 8
This two-day symposium will highlight the many ways Americans earned livings through economic transactions made beyond the spheres of “legitimate” commerce and explore the crucial importance of the shadow economy to the development of commercial and industrial capitalism in 19th-century America. Co-sponsored by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Thursday, June 7, at 3355 Woodland Walk; Friday, June 8, at the Library Company.

Making Freedom in the Atlantic World

Saturday, June 16, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.                                                 

A one-day conference exploring the process and impact of emancipation across the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries. The conference celebrates Juneteenth, commemorating the news that slavery had ended. The program will include a panel discussion featuring Gary Nash, Roseanne Adderly, Jasmine Cobb, and Edna Medford; a roundtable discussion on collecting Afro-Americana; and a keynote address by James Stewart of Macalester College.

For more information  please visit http://www.librarycompany.org/events/index.htm or call 215-546-3181.

Carey Conference Part Two at Trinity College

The Dublin half of the two-part “Ireland, America, and the Worlds of Mathew Carey” conference co-sponsored by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Program in Early American Economy and Society, and the University of Pennsylvania Libraries kicked off last month at the National Library of Ireland. In his plenary address, Rutgers Distinguished Professor of History Richard Sher asked if Carey’s publishing practices were best understood as “Piracy or Patriotic Publishing?" Outlining the central debate about competitive reprinting as one between inferior quality of production versus affordable consumption, Sher posited a theory of “heroic reprinting,” in which Carey’s influences include “rich traditions of Scottish and Irish justifications of reprinting on the basis of appeals to public utility rather than to law or needs of the trade.” A lively discussion about Carey’s understanding of copyright ensued.

In the two days that followed at Trinity College Dublin’s Long Room Hub, a number of papers focused on Carey’s milieu in Dublin, showing that the trajectory of Carey’s life was not unique, though the particularities certainly were. Papers examined other Irish radicals of the period, including George Douglas, Matthias O’Conway, and Peter Finnerty.

Despite spending less than a third of his life in Ireland, Carey was influenced by what he experienced there, from his defense of protectionism and staunch patriotism to his magazine formats and his “heroic reprinting” practices. Many papers examined his first newspaper, Volunteers Journal, including James Kelly’s close reading of it and Tim Murtagh’s comparison of it to Mathew’s brother William Paulet Carey’s own radical newspaper. William Paulet Carey received more than a little attention, as Niall Gillespie also gave a paper on him in the “House of Carey” panel. At that same panel, Library Company Librarian Jim Green explained why Carey and Benjamin Franklin were more at odds than we might imagine. Participants also considered how Carey’s perspectives morphed when he crossed the Atlantic: an ardent separatist in Ireland, he would staunchly defend the union of his newfound nation in the Nullification Crisis of 1832.

Following the spirit of Sher’s plenary address, the conference examined Carey’s experiences as a printer and publisher. Sarah Arndt looked at the motivations behind Carey’s bookshop in Baltimore, which Carey called his “Bible Warehouse.” Carl Keyes looked at innovations in Carey’s advertising practices in his newspapers and magazines, and I showed how Carey, Richard Allen, and Absalom Jones used copyright claims to stake authority during 1793 yellow fever debates.

The idea of a Carey biography kept coming up at the conference, but it seems that despite the firmament of eighteenth-century specialists in attendance in Philadelphia and Dublin, no one feels qualified to write his life. The fact that a biography of Carey has not been written speaks volumes about him. The multiple disciplinary specialists at the conference and the dual locations of the conference are indeed representative of the many worlds that Mathew Carey has left us. 

See a report on the Philadelphia half of the conference from November 8 on "Beyond the Reading Room."

Molly Hardy, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Writing Fellow at Southwestern University, and 2010-2011 Library Company o Philadelphia/American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies Fellow.

International Photography Curators Visit LCP

Photo by Harris Fogel

About twenty-five members of Oracle, an international group of photographic curators, visited the Library Company on November 8. Oracle’s annual meeting had been held in Blue Bell, a Philadelphia suburb, the week before, and attendees from as far away as China, Spain, and the Netherlands stayed on to visit area museums and galleries including the Princeton University Art Museum, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Curator of Prints and Photographs Sarah Weatherwax, a new Oracle member, organized and led a tour of the Library Company that included a brief talk outlining the history of the library and our mission today, as well as an opportunity to view the current exhibition John A. McAllister’s Civil War: The Philadelphia Home Front. Visitors also had the chance to see a selection of daguerreotypes displayed in the Logan Room and to tour the Print Department’s second floor reading room where more highlights of the photographic collection were on display. Prior to their visit, very few Oracle members had been aware of the Library Company and the richness of our photographic holdings. From an outdoor daguerreotype by the Langenheim brothers, to early experiments with the paper negative/positive process by Robert Montgomery Bird, to a motion study by Thomas Eakins, our guests were treated to a morning of visual treasures.