Talking in the Library

Dr. Scott C. Miller is the International Center for Finance postdoctoral fellow in Economic and Business History at the Yale School of Management. He earned his Ph.D from the University of Virginia in 2018, specializing in the transformation of the American economy after independence from Great Britain. His work explores the effect of economic, political, and social turmoil on commercial networks, domestic markets, trade systems, and business practices in the post-Revolutionary United States and early 19th-Century Europe. Dr. Miller was a Library Company PEAES Research Fellow in 2017.

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m., Thursday, May 21, 2020.

Dr. Lauren F. Klein is an Associate Professor of English and Quantitative Theory & Methods at Emory University, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. Klein is the author of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and, with Catherine D’Ignazio, Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020). With Matthew K. Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities, a hybrid print-digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge. Klein was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at the Library Company in Spring 2014.

This chat originally aired at 7:00 p.m., Thursday, May 14, 2020.

Dr. Adam Laats is Professor of Education and History at Binghamton University (State University of New York). He completed his PhD at the University of Wisconsin—Madison in 2007. He is the author of several books, including Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education (Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education (Harvard University Press, 2015). Prof. Laats was a short-term McNeil Fellow at the Library Company during the month of June 2019.

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

"Protestant Images of Other Religions in the Eighteenth Century"

Mark Valeri, Reverend Priscilla Wood Neaves Distinguished Professor of Religion and Politics in the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in Saint Louis

Mark Valeri is the Reverend Priscilla Wood Neaves Distinguished Professor of Religion and Politics in the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in Saint Louis. Dr. Valeri has written about religion and the American Revolution and religion and commerce in colonial New England. His most recent book is Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America. He currently is working on conceptions of conversion, descriptions of other religions, and politics in Anglo-America from the English civil war through the American Revolution. Dr. Valeri was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at the Library Company in 1994.

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

"Mediterranean Quarantine: Perspectives of a Person of Privilege"

Etta Madden, Assistant Department Head & Professor of English at Missouri State University

Etta Madden is Assistant Department Head & Professor of English at Missouri State University. Dr. Madden has served in various administrative capacities and taught courses in American literature, women's literature & gender studies, utopian literature & culture, and research methods. Her publications include books and articles on religious communities (Puritans, Shakers, Quakers, & earth-centered New Age groups in Italy), women writers (including Philadelphia cookbook author Eliza Leslie), and the history of science. She is the recipient of two LCP fellowships: first in 2000, when she researched Benjamin Rush and temperance, and more recently in 2013, when she researched Anne Hampton Brewster – the subject of tonight's fireside chat, "Mediterranean Quarantine: Perspectives of a Person of Privilege."

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

"African Voices from the Transatlantic Slave Trade"

Aaron Fogleman, Presidential Research Professor of History, Northern Illinois University

Aaron Spencer Fogleman is a Distinguished Research Professor in the History Department at Northern Illinois University. His research and teaching interests include forced and free transatlantic migrations, revolution, slavery, religion, and gender in the Atlantic World and Early America. He previously taught at the University of South Alabama and has been a Guggenheim Fellow, Distinguished Fulbright Chair at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen, a McNeil Center Fellow, and a Research Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia in the second year of the fellowship program (1988).

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

On April 7, the Library Company of Philadelphia hosted a candid conversation about lessons learned in the making of Ghost River: Fall and Rise of the Conestoga, the Library Company’s first graphic novel. This web-based symposium featured an invocation by Curtis Zunigha (Delaware Tribe of Indians); a panel discussion with project advisors, Ron Nash, Curtis Zunigha, and Daniel Richter; a conversation with author Lee Francis IV (Laguna Pueblo), artist Weshoyot Alvitre (Tongva), and editor Will Fenton, moderated by Bill Adair; and an overview of the Ghost River digital edition (GhostRiver.org) with creators Nicole Scalessa, Ann McShane, and Will Fenton. In this month’s episode of Talking in the Library, Fenton shares some highlights from the afternoon.

https://librarycompany.org/2020/04/24/redrawing-history-symposium/

Dr. Richard Bell (Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland) is one of a handful of scholars who has received multiple research fellowships from the Library Company – first as a doctoral candidate at Harvard in 2003 and 2004, and later as a faculty member at the University of Maryland in 2012 and 2013. In 2013, Dr. Bell began work on the project matured into the remarkable new volume Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and their Astonishing Odyssey Home (Simon & Schuster, 2020).

Stolen shines a light on what Dr. Bell terms the "Reverse Underground Railroad," a black market network of human traffickers and slave traders who stole away thousands of legally-free African Americans from families in free, northern cities, including Philadelphia. Deeply researched yet written in an accessible, direct voice, Stolen reveals the precarity of freedom through a microhistory of five boys kidnapped and transported to slaveholding states. Dr. Jill Lepore has called it a "heartbreaking and searing account of their stories that chronicles not only the agonies and atrocities of slavery, but the fragility of freedom, and the dauntlessness of resistance."

[K stands for kidnapper.] New York, 1864.

https://digital.librarycompany.org/islandora/object/Islandora%3A2816

In this special episode of Talking in the Library, Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens, Director of the Program in African American History, speaks with Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson about her powerful new book, Force & Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Force and Freedom provides the first historical analysis exclusively focused on the tactical use of violence among antebellum black activists. Carter Jackson argues that through tactical violence black abolitionist leaders accomplished what white nonviolent abolitionists could not: creating the conditions that necessitated the Civil War.

Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson is the Knafel Assistant Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. Her research focuses on slavery and the abolitionists, violence as a political discourse, historical film, and black women’s history.

David Walker, Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America. Boston, 1829. https://librarycompany.org/negropasts/section5.html#images-3

https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15965.html

At the 288th Annual Dinner, the Library Company of Philadelphia launched the First Biennial Innovation Award to recognize a project whose urgency renews disciplinary engagements with broader social issues, chafes against disciplinary boundaries, and whose content or forms might not be legible as scholarship within the university rewards structures.

In this month's episode, Dr. Will Fenton spoke with co-recipients of First Biennial Innovation Award, Dr. Sari Altschuler and Dr. David Weimer. Sari Altschuler is Associate Professor of English, Associate Director of the Humanities Center, and Founding Director of Health, Humanities, and Society at Northeastern University. David Weimer earned his Ph.D. in English from Harvard University and has been the Librarian for Cartographic Collections and Learning at the Harvard Map Collection since 2016.

Dr. Sari Altschuler and Dr. David Weimer's Touch This Page! Making Sense of the Ways We Read embodies work that critically and creatively expands the possibilities of humanistic scholarship. Touch This Page not only enlivens issues of disability history through the widely shared experience of reading, but also illustrates how and why digital humanities projects must expand beyond visual forms. Notably, this project draws inspiration from the Library Company's collections and 2016 Common Touch exhibition.

The conversation begins with Samuel Gridley Howe, Specimen of Medium Type. Boston, 1841. 11865.F (Zinman). https://digital.librarycompany.org/islandora/object/digitool%3A118667

https://www.touchthispage.com/