Liberty Displaying the Arts & Sciences: Abolition and Empire in the Post-Revolution Atlantic World Emily Casey, Art Historian and Educator

The first half of the 19th century was an era of upheaval. The United States nearly lost the War of 1812. Partisanship became endemic during violent clashes regarding States’ Rights and the abolition of slavery. The battle between Andrew Jackson and Nicholas Biddle over the Second Bank of the United States epitomized a nation in turmoil: Biddle, the erudite aristocrat versus Jackson, the plain-spoken warrior. The conflict altered America’s political arena. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson vowed to kill the Central Bank, setting in motion the infamous Bank War that almost bankrupted the nation. Under Biddle’s guidance, the Second Bank of the United States had become the most stable financial institution in the world. Biddle fought Jackson with tenacity and vigor; so did members of Congress not under the sway of “Old Hickory.” Jackson accused Biddle of treason; Biddle declared that the president promoted anarchy. The fight riveted the nation. The United States is experiencing a reappearance of deep schisms within our population. They hearken back to the earliest debates about the federal government’s role regarding fiduciary responsibility and social welfare. The ideological descendants of Nicholas Biddle and Andrew Jackson are as polarized today as they were during the nineteenth century. With this book, author Cordelia Frances Biddle documents the epic fight between Nicholas Biddle and Andrew Jackson over the fate of the Second Bank of the United States, shedding new light with previously undiscovered documents while bringing the story to life in a compelling biography of political intrigue.

For all that is known about the depth and breadth of African American history, we still understand surprisingly little about the lives of African American children, particularly those affected by northern emancipation. But hidden in institutional records, school primers and penmanship books, biographical sketches, and unpublished documents is a rich archive that reveals the social and affective worlds of northern Black children. Drawing evidence from the urban centers of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, Crystal Webster's innovative research yields a powerful new history of African American childhood before the Civil War. Webster argues that young African Americans were frequently left outside the nineteenth century's emerging constructions of both race and childhood. They were marginalized in the development of schooling, ignored in debates over child labor, and presumed to lack the inherent innocence ascribed to white children. But Webster shows that Black children nevertheless carved out physical and social space for play, for learning, and for their own aspirations. Reading her sources against the grain, Webster reveals a complex reality for antebellum Black children. Lacking societal status, they nevertheless found meaningful agency as historical actors, making the most of the limited freedoms and possibilities they enjoyed.

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.