Talking in the Library

In Past and Prologue, Michael Hattem shows how colonists’ changing understandings of their British and colonial histories shaped the politics of the American Revolution and the origins of American national identity. Between the 1760s and 1800s, Americans stopped thinking of the British past as their own history and created a new historical tradition that would form the foundation for what subsequent generations would think of as “American history.” This change was a crucial part of the cultural transformation at the heart of the Revolution by which colonists went from thinking of themselves as British subjects to thinking of themselves as American citizens. Rather than liberating Americans from the past—as many historians have argued—the Revolution actually made the past matter more than ever. Past and Prologue shows how the process of reinterpreting the past played a critical role in the founding of the nation.

Michael Hattem received his PhD in History from Yale University. He has taught at Knox College and Lang College at The New School and is currently the Associate Director of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. He is a producer and contributor to The JuntoCast, the first podcast on early American history, and History Talks, a new YouTube channel delivering content created by historians. He has been awarded fellowships from the Library Company, the American Philosophical Society, the New-York Historical Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, Mount Vernon, and other institutions, and his work and writing have been featured in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Chris Kuncio, creator of Young Ben Franklin, discusses his efforts to reintroduce Benjamin Franklin to new audiences (including his own students) through walking tours, modern editions of his writings, curricula, and even his own four-part "hip-hopera," B. Franklin: Corrected and Amended. Visit http://franklinforprez.com to learn more about the unfolding project.

Chris Kuncio is a born and raised Philadelphian who has spent the last seven years teaching twelfth-grade English at Mastery Charter Lenfest in Old City. For the same period, he has run a tour company where he has portrayed Young Ben Franklin. As the character, he produced rap album that covers Ben Franklin's entire life. He is currently trying to animate the album and generate more entertaining content around American history and civics.

What can we make of the fact that Robinson Crusoe was invoked in an 1835 issue of Mechanics’ Magazine in an article extolling the economic power of labor? Or that Harriet Jacobs patterned parts of her autobiographical slave narrative after Samuel Richardson’s Pamela? Or that The American Sunday School Union issued a cautionary poem about little girls’ tendencies to misread Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress as an adventure tale and strike out on their own unsupervised pilgrimages? “On the Margins” examines how early novelistic fictions made their way into the reading lives of American readers who were disempowered along lines of race, gender, age, and economic status, and argues that we can begin to answer the questions posed above by attending to the material reconfigurations of these works in the emerging mass-print marketplace of the antebellum United States.

This project sits at the intersection of novel theory, histories of reading, and histories of the book, and like many transatlantic studies of popular literature, is interested in the way reprinting, editing, and imitation transform a work across time and space. This presentation will focus on the ways abridgements, adaptations, chapbooks, children’s editions, and visual culture invocations of each of these novels influenced their reception, generic status, and canonization in the nineteenth century, and reveal ways readers resisted or subverted prevailing accounts of both the risks and benefits associated with evolving projects of literary inclusion.

Emily Gowen is the current Albert M. Greenfield Dissertation Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia and a Ph.D. Candidate in Boston University's department of English. Essays adapted from her dissertation project are forthcoming in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists and American Literature. Her work has also been supported by fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and she will be a 2021-22 Fellow at the Boston University Center for the Humanities. She is also an affiliate at Boston University's Center for Antiracist Research.

Following the American Revolution, it was a cliché that the new republic's future depended on widespread, informed citizenship. However, instead of immediately creating the common schools--accessible, elementary education--that seemed necessary to create such a citizenry, the Federalists in power founded one of the most ubiquitous but forgotten institutions of early American life: academies, privately run but state-chartered secondary schools that offered European-style education primarily for elites. By 1800, academies had become the most widely incorporated institutions besides churches and transportation projects in nearly every state.

In this book, Mark Boonshoft shows how many Americans saw the academy as a caricature of aristocratic European education and how their political reaction against the academy led to a first era of school reform in the United States, helping transform education from a tool of elite privilege into a key component of self-government. And yet the very anti-aristocratic critique that propelled democratic education was conspicuously silent on the persistence of racial and gender inequality in public schooling. By tracing the history of academies in the revolutionary era, Boonshoft offers a new understanding of political power and the origins of public education and segregation in the United States.

Mark Boonshoft received his Ph.D. in history from Ohio State University, and then spent two years at the New York Public Library, where he worked on the Early American Manuscripts Project. Since then, he has taught at a number of universities, including SUNY-New Paltz and Norwich University. He is the author of Aristocratic Education and the Making of the American Republic, and, along with Nora Slonimsky and Ben Wright, is co-editor of American Revolutions in the Digital Age (under contract with Cornell University Press). Mark was a SHEAR fellow at the Library Company in 2014.

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, April 8, 2021.

New Books for a New Nation: Jesuit Library Building in 19th-Century Chicago

Exiled European-born Jesuits founded a network of Catholic colleges across the United States in the century following the restoration of the Society of Jesus in 1814. At the heart of these colleges were libraries. Dr Kyle Roberts will talk about a collaborative teaching and research project to reconstruct the library of one such school, St Ignatius College (precursor to Loyola University Chicago). Working at the intersection of library, urban, and religious history, Roberts will explore how these libraries reveal the centrality of print to nineteenth-century Catholicism and the transnational, hybrid identities of urban American Catholics, balancing allegiances to the state, homeland, and global Catholic Church.

Kyle Roberts is the Associate Director of Library & Museum Programming of the American Philosophical Society Library & Museum. Prior to coming to the APS, Dr. Roberts was an Associate Professor of Public History and New Media and Director of the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities at Loyola University Chicago. A prize-winning scholar and educator of Atlantic World religion, print, and library history, he is the author or editor of several books, including Evangelical Gotham: Religion and the Making of New York City, 1783-1860 (Chicago, 2016), and digital humanities projects, including the Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project (2012-present).

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, April 1, 2021.

Print culture expanded significantly in the nineteenth century due to new print technologies and more efficient distribution methods, providing literary critics, who were alternately celebrated and reviled, with an ever-increasing number of venues to publish their work. Adam Gordon embraces the multiplicity of critique in the period from 1830 to 1860 by exploring the critical forms that emerged. Prophets, Publicists, and Parasites is organized around these sometimes chaotic and often generative forms and their most famous practitioners: Edgar Allan Poe and the magazine review; Ralph Waldo Emerson and the quarterly essay; Rufus Wilmot Griswold and the literary anthology; Margaret Fuller and the newspaper book review; and Frederick Douglass’s editorial repurposing of criticism from other sources. Revealing the many and frequently competing uses of criticism beyond evaluation and aesthetics, this insightful study offers a new vision of antebellum criticism, a new model of critical history, and a powerful argument for the centrality of literary criticism to modern life.

Adam Gordon is Associate Professor of English at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA, where he teaches early and nineteenth-century American literature. He received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania and his PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. Before starting at Whitman, Adam served as the Greenfield Dissertation Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Hench Post-Dissertation Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, and held William K. Peck and Mellon Foundation fellowships at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA. His work has appeared in journals such as American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, Early American Literature, and the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review. This past year, his book, Prophets, Publicists, and Parasites: Antebellum Print Culture and the Rise of the Critic was published by the University of Massachusetts Press.

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, March 11, 2021.

In her Fireside Chat, Agnès Trouillet examined how the surveying of the city of Philadelphia and the province of Pennsylvania, notably under first Surveyor General Thomas Holme, laid out the map of governance imagined by William Penn. The use of property survey profoundly reshaped the space, ensuring land tenure but also granting proximity and access to the seats of political power.

Dr. Agnès Trouillet is an Associate Professor of British Studies at University Paris Nanterre. Her research focuses on contemporary and colonial political history, more specifically on Pennsylvania with which she has a special relationship after having taught four years at the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in the issue of division as generative of power, and her current project examines the role of William Penn’s settlement design in reshaping space and sovereignty in the Delaware Valley. She has a forthcoming article on the boundary dispute between Pennsylvania and Maryland in the volume from the American Philosophical Society Conference “The Power of Maps and the Politics of Borders.” Dr. Trouillet is currently a fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, March 4, 2021.

In the years between the American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War, as legal and cultural understandings of citizenship became more racially restrictive, black writers articulated an expansive, practice-based theory of citizenship. Grounded in political participation, mutual aid, critique and revolution, and the myriad daily interactions between people living in the same spaces, citizenship, they argued, is not defined by who one is but, rather, by what one does.

In The Practice of Citizenship, Derrick R. Spires examines the parallel development of early black print culture and legal and cultural understandings of U.S. citizenship, beginning in 1787, with the framing of the federal Constitution and the founding of the Free African Society by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, and ending in 1861, with the onset of the Civil War. Between these two points he recovers understudied figures such as William J. Wilson, whose 1859 "Afric-American Picture Gallery" appeared in seven installments in The Anglo-African Magazine, and the physician, abolitionist, and essayist James McCune Smith. He places texts such as the proceedings of black state conventions alongside considerations of canonical figures such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Frederick Douglass.

Dr. Derrick R. Spires is Associate Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University. He specializes in early African American and American print culture, citizenship studies, and African American intellectual history. His first book, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), won the MLA Prize for First Book and the Bibliographical Society/St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize. His work appears or is forthcoming in African American Review, American Literary History, and edited collections on early African American print culture, and the Colored Conventions movement. Dr. Spires was an Albert M. Greenfield Foundation Fellow in African American History at the Library Company in 2008.

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, February 25, 2021.

After the British surrender at Yorktown, the American Revolution blazed on—and as peace was negotiated in Europe, grave problems surfaced at home. The government was broke and paid its debts with loans from France. Political rivalry among the states paralyzed Congress. The army’s officers, encamped near Newburgh, New York, and restless without an enemy to fight, brooded over a civilian population indifferent to their sacrifices.

The result was the so-called Newburgh Conspiracy, a mysterious event in which Continental Army officers, disgruntled by a lack of pay and pensions, may have collaborated with nationalist-minded politicians such as Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Robert Morris to pressure Congress and the states to approve new taxes and strengthen the central government.

A Crisis of Peace tells the story of a pivotal episode of George Washington's leadership and reveals how the American Revolution really ended: with fiscal turmoil, out-of-control conspiracy thinking, and suspicions between soldiers and civilians so strong that peace almost failed to bring true independence.

David Head is associate lecturer of history at the University of Central Florida. David received his B.A. from Niagara University and his Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo. He was a Library Company/Historical Society of Pennsylvania Fellow while researching his dissertation in 2006. His most recent book, A Crisis of Peace: George Washington, the Newburgh Conspiracy, and the Fate of the American Revolution, received honorable mention for the Journal of the American Revolution’s 2020 Best Book Award. It was also a finalist for the 2020 George Washington Book Prize. In addition to his academic work, David has written for venues such as USA Today and the Orlando Sentinel on topics ranging from George Washington’s shopping habits to the musical Hamilton.

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, February 11, 2021.

A history of the book in the Americas, across deep time, would reveal the origins of a literary tradition woven rather than written. It is in what Danielle Skeehan calls material texts that a people's history and culture is preserved, in their embroidery, their needlework, and their woven cloth. In defining textiles as a form of cultural writing, The Fabric of Empire challenges long-held ideas about authorship, textuality, and the making of books.

It is impossible to separate text from textiles in the early modern Atlantic: novels, newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets were printed on paper made from household rags. Yet the untethering of text from textile served a colonial agenda to define authorship as reflected in ink and paper and the pen as an instrument wielded by learned men and women. Skeehan explains that the colonial definition of the book, and what constituted writing and authorship, left colonial regimes blind to nonalphabetic forms of media that preserved cultural knowledge, history, and lived experience. This book shifts how we look at cultural objects such as books and fabric and provides a material and literary history of resistance among the globally dispossessed.

Danielle Skeehan is Associate Professor of English and Comparative American Studies at Oberlin College. Her work has appeared in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, The Appendix, The Journal of the Early Republic, Commonplace, and Early American Studies. She is a former PEAES postdoctoral fellow, and her first book, The Fabric of Empire: Material and Literary Cultures of the Global Atlantic, 1650–1850, was recently published by Johns Hopkins University Press in the series “Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia,” edited by Cathy Matson.

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, February 4, 2021.