Talking in the Library

Kayla Anthony serves as Executive Director of the Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks (PhilaLandmarks), currently in her second year. For eighty-nine years PhilaLandmarks has played a significant role in the historic preservation movement in Philadelphia by restoring, furnishing and presenting to the public its distinguished house museums: the Powel House, Grumblethorpe, Hill-Physick House and Historic Waynesborough. Previous to this position, Ms. Anthony served as PhilaLandmarks' Development and Programs Manager where she honed her vision to focus the organization on programmatic community engagement and contributed revenue development. She also served as the Resident Site Manager of the Hill-Physick House. Graduating summa cum laude with a B.A. in French and a B.A. in Theatre Arts from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, she brings a diverse, creative background to the organization, along with a keen understanding of strategic partnerships and networking.

Samantha Snyder is the Reference Librarian at the Washington Library at George Washington's Mount Vernon. She has an upcoming chapter on Elizabeth Powel in the edited volume, Women in the World of Washington, set to be published by the University of Virginia Press in early 2021. She is also currently working on a longer biography of Elizabeth Powel. She earned her Master's of Library and Information Studies, and B.A. in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, and is currently pursuing a Master's in History at George Mason University, with a focus on Early American Women's History.

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, July 30, 2020.

Fireside Chat: America's First Celebrity Preacher and How He Perfected the Protestant Art of Talking about Yourself

Dr. Seth Perry is Associate Professor of Religion in America at Princeton University. His first book, Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States (Princeton University Press, 2018) explores the performative, rhetorical, and material aspects of bible-based authority in early-national America. His work has appeared in Church History, Early American Studies, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Scholarly Publishing, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Sightings, and the LA Review of Books. Current projects include; an article on "scriptural failure"; a project on animals in early American religious history; and a biography of Lorenzo Dow, the early-national period's most famous itinerant preacher. Dr. Perry was a McNeil Center for Early American Studies Fellow at the Library Company in 2011.

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, July 23, 2020.

Dr. Steven C. Bullock is Professor of History at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His books include Tea Sets and Tyranny: The Politics of Politeness in Early America and Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730-1840. Winner of WPI’s award for Outstanding Research and Creative Scholarship, he has served as a Fulbright Lecturer in Japan. He also been published in Newsday and the Wall Street Journal, and appeared on ABC, CNN, NPR, and in documentaries that have aired on PBS, the History Channel, and elsewhere. Dr. Bullock was the Reese Fellow in American Bibliography at the Library Company of Philadelphia in 2017.

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, July 16, 2020.

Dr. Lucas A. Dietrich is Adjunct Professor of Humanities at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is a council member and former president of the New England American Studies Association and the recipient of a Northeast Modern Language Association Fellowship at the Newberry Library and a Directors' Scholarship at Rare Book School. Dr. Dietrich has published articles in Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS), Book History, and Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (PBSA). His book, Writing Across the Color Line: U.S. Print Culture and the Rise of Ethnic Literature, has just been released by the University of Massachusetts Press. Dr. Dietrich was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia in 2016.

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m. Thursday, July 9, 2020.

Dr. Sally Hadden is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Western Michigan University. Hadden writes about and researches law and history in early America. She is the author of Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Harvard University Press, 2001) and coeditor of three books: Signposts: New Directions in Southern Legal History (University of Georgia Press, 2013); A Companion to American Legal History (Wiley Blackwell, 2013); and Traveling the Beaten Path: Charles Tait’s Charges to Federal Grand Juries, 1822-1825 (University of Alabama School of Law/University of Alabama Press, 2013). Dr. Hadden is currently working on a study of the earliest U.S. Supreme Court (under contract with Cambridge University Press) and a monograph on eighteenth-century lawyers in colonial American cities, the subject of this talk. She has been a research fellow at the Library Company on three occasions (2003, 2005, and 2016).

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m., Thursday, July 2, 2020.

Dr. Tyson Reeder is an expert in early U.S. foreign relations and state building. He is an assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia where he serves as an editor with the Papers of James Madison. He is the author of Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution and the editor of the Routledge History of U.S. Foreign Relations. He is currently writing a book called Foreign Intrigues: James Madison, Party Politics, and Foreign Meddling in Early America. Dr. Reeder was a Program in Early American Economy and Society Fellow at the Library Company in 2013.

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m., Thursday, June 25, 2020.

Unfreedom: The Limits of the Fourteenth Amendment Under Reconstruction discusses race in the twentieth century as a specific form of ideological technology. Focusing on the events and voices between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. Walter Greason lead a discussion about the economic, political, social, and cultural foundations of white supremacy as products of an emerging industrial order. From the regimentation of the plantation in the early nineteenth century through the rigidity of commodity and financial markets at the start of the Cold War, this talk illuminates the networks that led to entrenched inequality for more than a century.

Dr. Walter D. Greason is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Educational Counseling and Leadership at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. Dr. Greason’s research focuses on the comparative, economic analysis of slavery, industrialization, and suburbanization. With a variety of co-editors, Dr. Greason has published Planning Future Cities(2017) – an innovative look at architecture, urbanism, and municipal design; The American Economy (2016) – a provocative examination of race, property, and wealth in the United States since 1750; and the Afrofuturist design textbook, Cities Imagined. His scholarly monograph, Suburban Erasure, won the Best Work of Non-Fiction award from the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance in 2014. He also won grants from the Mellon Foundation (2011) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (2016). He is also the creator of the #WakandaSyllabus. The subsequent series of essays can be found on the award-winning website, Black Perspectives.

This event originally aired at 5:00 p.m., Thursday, June 18, 2020.

Dr. Michael Goode is Associate Professor of History and Political Science at Utah Valley University, where he specializes in early America and the British Atlantic with a focus on religion, political culture, and the history of peace and violence. He is the editor of The Specter of Peace: Rethinking Violence and Power in the Colonial Atlantic (Brill, 2018) and he will contribute an article to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Peace History. His book project, "A Colonizing Peace: The Struggle for Order in Early America," examines the role of peace as a language and practice of government in colonial Pennsylvania. Michael was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at the Library Company in 2009.

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m., Thursday, June 11, 2020.

David J. Kent is a lifelong Abraham Lincoln researcher, career scientist, Vice President of the Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia, and board member of the Abraham Lincoln Institute. His most recent book is Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America, and he has also written on Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. Kent writes a regular book review column in the Lincolnian, publishes many articles and reviews, and gives regular public talks. David’s next book project focuses on Lincoln's interest in technology.

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m., Thursday, June 4, 2020.

Dr. Allison K. Lange is Associate Professor of History at the Wentworth Institute of Technology. She received her Ph.D. in History from Brandeis University. The subject of this Fireside Chat, is her book Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women's Suffrage Movement, published in May 2020 by the University of Chicago Press. Dr. Lange's book focuses on the ways that women's rights activists and their opponents used images to define gender and power during the suffrage movement. Numerous institutions have supported her work, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Library of Congress, and American Antiquarian Society. Dr. Lange was the William H. Helfand Fellowship in American Visual Culture at the Library Company in 2012.

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m., Thursday, May 28, 2020.