Talking in the Library

Long before people identified as transgender or lesbian, there were female husbands and the women who loved them. Female husbands - people assigned female who transed gender, lived as men, and married women - were true queer pioneers. Moving deftly from the colonial era to just before the First World War, Jen Manion uncovers the riveting and very personal stories of ordinary people who lived as men despite tremendous risk, danger, violence, and threat of punishment. Female Husbands weaves the story of their lives in relation to broader social, economic, and political developments in the United States and the United Kingdom, while also exploring how attitudes towards female husbands shifted in relation to transformations in gender politics and women's rights, ultimately leading to the demise of the category of 'female husband' in the early twentieth century. Groundbreaking and influential, Female Husbands offers a dynamic, varied, and complex history of the LGBTQ past.

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

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, October 8, 2020.

Christopher N. Phillips’s The Hymnal is the first study to reconstruct the practices of reading and using hymnals, which were virtually everywhere in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Isaac Watts invented a small, words-only hymnal at the dawn of the eighteenth century. For the next two hundred years, such hymnals were their owners’ constant companions at home, school, church, and in between. They were children's first books, slaves’ treasured heirlooms, and sources of devotional reading for much of the English-speaking world. Hymnals helped many people learn to memorize poetry and to read; they provided space to record family memories, pass notes in church, and carry everything from railroad tickets to holy cards to business letters. In communities as diverse as African Methodists, Reform Jews, Presbyterians, Methodists, Roman Catholics, and Unitarians, hymnals were integral to religious and literate life. An extended historical treatment of the hymn as a read text and media form, rather than a source used solely for singing, this book traces the lives people lived with hymnals, from obscure schoolchildren to Emily Dickinson. Readers will discover a wealth of connections between reading, education, poetry, and religion in Phillips’s lively accounts of hymnals and their readers.

Chris Phillips is Professor of English at Lafayette College and a scholar of historical poetics and the history of reading. He is the author of The Hymnal: A Reading History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) and Epic in American Literature, Settlement to Reconstruction (2012), and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Renaissance (2018). He is also the PI for the Easton Library Company Database Project, which reconstructs the usage of the first subscription library in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. Dr. Phillips was a research fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia in 2016.

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, October 1, 2020.

Maria Zytaruk is Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary. She is the Principal Investigator of the Canadian Research Council-funded project, "Seeds for Tomorrow: A Material History of Eighteenth-Century Seed Exchange and Seed Collections." Her articles on material culture and book history have appeared in such journals as Victorian Studies, Studies in Romanticism, Museum History Journal, and the Journal of British Studies. In 2019, she curated the exhibition, "Nature on the Page: The Print and Manuscript Culture of Victorian Natural History," for the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto and is author of the catalogue by the same name. Dr. Zytaruk was a research fellow at the Library Company in 2003 and 2015.

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, September 17, 2020.

Ariel Ron is the Glenn M. Linden Assistant Professor of the US Civil War Era at Southern Methodist University. He focuses on the interplay of politics and economics in nineteenth-century America. Dr. Ron has published several articles in scholarly venues such as the Journal of American History and his book, Grassroots Leviathan: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic, forthcoming from the Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company of Philadelphia from Johns Hopkins University Press in November 2020. His research has been supported by the Yale Center for the Study of Representative Institutions, the Cornell Society for the Humanities, and the Library of Congress’s Kluge Center. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Ron was a PEAES Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia in 2008 and 2012.

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

Biographer and Penn faculty member Stephen Fried will discuss new access to Rush’s writings, the nascent Rush Papers Project by Penn Libraries and the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Penn Libraries’ evolving Benjamin Rush Portal. Fried will describe how the Portal has blossomed thanks to the work of Yen Ho, a library science intern at the Penn Libraries Biomedical Library working under his guidance. Hear about the abundance of Rush papers, lecture notes, and journals that are now united and easily accessible, ranging from Rush’s medical training and teachings to his writings about the 1793 Yellow Fever pandemic to race and abolition. The Portal pulls together resources from numerous institutions, including Penn Libraries and the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Many of the materials presented on the Benjamin Rush portal were digitized as part of a multi-institution project organized by the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries, “For the Health of the New Nation: Philadelphia as the Center of American Medical Education, 1746-1868.” This project was generously funded by a grant from the Digitizing Hidden Collections initiative of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The Hidden Collections initiative in turn is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

This event was co-sponsored by Penn Libraries and was recorded on September 8, 2020.

Carole Adrienne is the Writer/Producer of a four-part documentary series-in-production, "Civil War Medicine." The series is drawn from primary source materials including letters, diaries, periodicals and memorabilia from more than 40 American libraries, archives, museums and private collections. Her fiscal sponsor is the Greater Philadelphia Film Office. Carole is the host of "Student Docs," an interview program presenting social issue and social justice documentaries by students from schools including Villanova University and Rowan University. It airs on MLTV-Main Line Network, and will also be airing on PhillyCAM this fall. She is a frequent lecturer at libraries and museums, presenting a multi-media program called "Civil War Medicine: What Went Right." Carole is also currently working on a book proposal about the topic with a literary agent in New York.

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, September 3, 2020.

Pandemic Reading is a series of eight blog posts that take readers inside the Library Company of Philadelphia’s collections of contagion and confinement, epidemics and quarantines. The author of the series, Librarian James Green, was interviewed by the Director of Research and Public Programs Will Fenton.

https://librarycompany.org/pandemic-reading/

Fireside Chat: William Penn’s Letter to the King of the Lenape: A Choral Work

Jeff Thomas is a musician, composer, teacher and producer working in the Philadelphia area. He worked in London while signed to EMI Records, composed music for theater and television, and toured Europe performing his original piano compositions. A life-long resident of Pennsylvania, raised in the countryside of Wellsboro in the north-central part of the state, Thomas has been an avid enthusiast of colonial American history since he found in an arrowhead lodged in a rock while riding his horse Sundance through the heart of the Pennsylvania wilds as a mere youth. His Stride10Nine Recordings Studio is located in Havertown, PA where he records and produces jazz bands and World Music direct to analog tape.

Thomas and Fenton were also joined by Andrew R. Murphy, Professor of Political Science and Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of William Penn: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2018).

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, August 27, 2020.

Arwin D. Smallwood is Professor and Chair of the Department of History and Political Science at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro. He is the author of several books including The Atlas of African American History and Politics: From the Slave Trade to Modern Times and Bertie County: An Eastern North Carolina History. His research focuses on the relationships between African-Americans, Native-Americans and Europeans in Eastern North Carolina.

He has been an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow for the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, held the American Philosophical Society’s, Library Resident Research Fellowship and the recipient of their Franklin Research Grant, a Fellow for the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, an Archie K. Davis Fellow of the North Caroliniana Society, a Joel Williamson Visiting Scholar of the Southern Historical Collection and a Gilder Lehrman Fellow.

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, August 20, 2020.

Cameron Seglias is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Studies at the Graduate School of North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. Recent and forthcoming publications have appeared/will appear in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography and H-Soz-Kult.

Research and archival work for his dissertation, tentatively entitled “Paradoxes of Liberty: Antislavery, Print, and Colonial Power in Crisis, 1729-1793,” has been generously supported by fellowships from the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. His teaching interests include slavery and antislavery in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, the history of pacifism in America, as well as modern and contemporary poetry and poetics. Seglias was a Barra Foundation International Fellow at the Library Company in 2019.

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, August 13, 2020.