Talking in the Library

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

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, January 14, 2021.

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

Emily Pawley is Associate Professor of History at Dickinson College where she teaches agricultural history, food studies, environmental history, and the history of science. Her research focuses on cultivated landscapes as sources of knowledge and has been supported by grants from the NSF, the NEH, the ACLS, the Smithsonian, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. Her book The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Capitalism, and Science in the Antebellum North is newly out with Chicago in 2020. She has published on analytic tables, cattle portraiture, counterfeit apples, and aphrodisiacs for sheep, and she’s currently juggling projects on climate change pedagogy, carbon sequestration, and the history of ideas of nurture.

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, December 10, 2020.

Drawing on period texts and illustrations (travelogues, almanacs, journals, advertisements) promoting coal, this talk will consider how contemporary audiences came to understand this fossil fuel in three ways: through the lens of landscape, as a geological specimen, and as a central component of the domestic sphere. Come learn about how coal’s multiple roles in the visual economy of the early-19th-century prompted a broadening of its use in the following decades.

Rebecca Szantyr was the 2019-2020 William H. Helfand Visual Culture Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University, where her research focuses on 18th- and 19th-century print culture. Her dissertation on the Neapolitan-American artist Nicolino Calyo examines the overlap of popular culture and the fine arts in the Atlantic World. From 2015-2018, Rebecca was the Florence B. Selden Fellow in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Yale University Art Gallery, where she curated exhibitions on Jacob Lawrence and the history of caricature. Her research has been supported by the American Antiquarian Society, the Joukowsky Research Travel Fund at Brown, the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, and the Library Company.

This chat originally aired at 5:00 p.m. Thursday, December 3, 2020.

This Fireside Chat is based on a collaboration between the Visual Culture Program and Dr. Pauwels Art & Spectacle in the 19th-Century United States class. The seminar explored spectacle and the historical construction of vision as founding conditions of art reception in the United States during the long nineteenth century. This Chat will showcase students’ research experience and work with an object from the Library Company’s collection.

Led by Erin Pauwels, Assistant Professor of American Art, Temple University and Erika Piola, Curator of Graphic Arts and Director of the Visual Culture Program, Library Company of Philadelphia

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, November 19, 2020.

This Fireside Chat is based on a collaboration between the Visual Culture Program and Dr. Pauwels Art & Spectacle in the 19th-Century United States class. The seminar explored spectacle and the historical construction of vision as founding conditions of art reception in the United States during the long nineteenth century.

This Chat featured presentation by graduate students Clare Nicholls, Emily Schollenberger, and Ashley Marie Stahl. Nicholls, Schollenberger, and Stahl discussed their research experience and work with an object from the Library Company’s collection.

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, November 12, 2020.

Literary scholars have explained the rise of the Anglophone novel using a range of tools, from Ian Watt's theories to James Watt's inventions. Contrary to established narratives, When Novels Were Books reveals that the genre beloved of so many readers today was not born secular, national, middle-class, or female.

For the first three centuries of their history, novels came into readers' hands primarily as printed sheets ordered into a codex bound along one edge between boards or paper wrappers. Consequently, they shared some formal features of other codices, such as almanacs and Protestant religious books produced by the same printers. Novels are often mistakenly credited for developing a formal feature ("character") that was in fact incubated in religious books.

The novel did not emerge all at once: it had to differentiate itself from the goods with which it was in competition. Though it was written for sequential reading, the early novel's main technology for dissemination was the codex, a platform designed for random access. This peculiar circumstance led to the genre's insistence on continuous, cover-to-cover reading even as the "media platform" it used encouraged readers to dip in and out at will and read discontinuously. Jordan Alexander Stein traces this tangled history, showing how the physical format of the book shaped the stories that were fit to print.

Jordan Alexander Stein is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Fordham University. His publications include Avidly Reads Theory (New York University Press, 2019) and the volume he co-edited with Lara Langer Cohen, Early African American Print Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Dr. Stein's research has been supported by a number of agencies, including grants at the HSP and an NEH postdoctoral fellowship at the LCP. The research he conducted here eventuated in When Novels Were Books (Harvard University Press, 2020), which he discusses in this Fireside Chat.

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, November 5, 2020.

Scattered in archives and historical societies across the United States are hundreds of volumes of manuscript music, copied by hand by eighteenth-century amateurs. Often overlooked, amateur music making played a key role in the construction of gender, class, race, and nation in the post-revolution years of the United States. These early Americans, seeking ways to present themselves as genteel, erudite, and pious, saw copying music by hand and performing it in intimate social groups as a way to make themselves—and their new nation-appear culturally sophisticated.

Following a select group of amateur musicians, Cultivated by Hand makes the case that amateur music making was both consequential to American culture of the eighteenth century and aligned with other forms of self-fashioning. This interdisciplinary study explores the social and material practices of amateur music making, analyzing the materiality of manuscripts, tracing the lives of individual musicians, and uncovering their musical tastes and sensibilities. Author Glenda Goodman explores highly personal yet often denigrated experiences of musically "accomplished" female amateurs in particular, who grappled with finding a meaningful place in their lives for music. Revealing the presence of these unacknowledged subjects in music history, Cultivated by Hand reclaims the importance of such work and presents a class of musicians whose labors should be taken into account.

Dr. Glenda Goodman is an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania, where she works on the history of early American music. She publishes in musicology and history journals and her research has been supported by the ACLS, the Institute for Advanced Studies, and other fellowships, including the Library Company of Philadelphia in 2010. Dr. Goodman is currently working on a book on sacred music and colonial encounter in eighteenth-century New England, as well as a collaborative project, American Contact: Intercultural Encounter and the History of the Book, which will result in a volume and digital project. Today she'll discuss her first book, Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic (Oxford University Press, 2020).

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, October 29, 2020.

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

About the Panelists:

Carol Anderson (Author)

Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University and a Guggenheim Fellow in Constitutional Studies. She is the author of several books, including Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African-American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955, which was published by Cambridge University Press and awarded both the Gustavus Myers and Myrna Bernath Book Awards; White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, which won the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and was also a New York Times best seller and a New York Times Editor’s Pick. Her most recent book, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy, was long-listed for the National Book Award in Nonfiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Book Award in Nonfiction.

Kevin M. Kruse (Author)

Kevin M. Kruse specializes in twentieth-century American political history, with special attention to conflicts over race, religion, and rights. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his MA and PhD degrees from Cornell University. He is a professor of history at Princeton University, where he has served on the faculty since 2000. Kruse is the author of White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, and, with Julian Zelizer, Fault Lines: A History of the United States since 1974, as well as the coeditor of three essay collections. He is currently working on his next project, titled “The Division: John Doar, the Justice Department, and the Civil Rights Movement.”

Jim Downs (Editor)

Jim Downs is Gilder Lehrman NEH Chair of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College. He is the author of Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction and the coeditor of Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation (Georgia) and Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America.

This panel discussion originally aired at 6:00 p.m. Tuesday, October 27, 2020.

To learn more and purchase the book: https://ugapress.org/book/9780820357737/voter-suppression-in-u-s-elections/

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

Vincent DiGirolamo is an associate professor of history at Baruch College, where he specializes in 19th and 20th-century US history, with a focus on workers, children, immigrants, city life, and print culture. He is the author of Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys, published by Oxford University Press and winner of the 2020 Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Philip Taft Labor History Prize, Frank Luther Mott Research Award, and Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize from the American Historical Association. Originally from Monterey, California, DiGirolamo received his BA from UC Berkeley, MA from UC Santa Cruz, and PhD from Princeton University.

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, October 22, 2020.

If we learned about the battle for women's suffrage in history class, we likely didn't learn that the fight went well beyond the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. And we definitely didn't learn that many of the people fighting for voting rights were different from their peers in ways that we might now think of as queer. But LGBTQ+ history IS American history. Join us as we meet some of the folks who were key to winning and protecting women's suffrage from the 19th century through the Civil Rights Era, who were gender variant or in same-sex relationships. As we meet them, we'll talk about how we know what we know (or don't) about their private lives and whether it matters.

Megan Springate is the National Coordinator for the National Park Service 19th Amendment Centennial Commemoration, and editor of LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History (National Park Foundation and National Park Service, 2016). An historical archaeologist by training, she received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Maryland in 2017.

Sponsored by the Library Company’s Charlotte Cushman Society.

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, October 15, 2020.