Talking In The Library

To celebrate the publication of the Library Company of Philadelphia's first graphic novel, Ghost River: The Fall and Rise of the Conestoga, editor Dr. Will Fenton invited the artist, Weshoyot Alvitre, and the author, Dr. Lee Francis IV, onto Talking in the Library to discuss the collaborative process that enabled the volume. Weshoyot Alvitre is the illustrator of numerous award-winning comics, graphic novels, and even video games. Dr. Lee Francis IV is the founder of Indigenous Comic Con and the owner of Red Planet Books & Comics, the premier publisher for Native American comics and popular art. Listeners can explore the entire graphic novel at ghostriver.org or visit the exhibition at the Library Company of Philadelphia until April 10, 2020 to see the original artwork, watch a behind-the-scenes documentary, or pick up a first edition of the graphic novel.

A self-professed “artist with natural philosophy tendencies,” Rebecca Kamen has worked on collaborative projects at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University, the Kavli Institute at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rochester Institute of Technology, and at the National Institutes of Health. Currently, Professor Kamen serves as artist in residence in The Computational Neuroscience Initiative and the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania. On July 16, 2019, the Library Company welcomed her into our reading room discuss her most recent art project, entitled PLOT. Inspired by the celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Mission, PLOT sheds new light on our relationship to the moon prior well before the advent of the camera. Will and Rebecca begin their conversation by examining Johann Hevelius, Selenographia as well as Nasmyth & Carpenter, The Moon: Considered as a Planet, A World, and a Satellite (1874). Link to PLOT: https://rebeccakamen.com/gallery/plo

Dr. Will Fenton speaks with Dr. Sarah Knott, Professor of History at Indiana University. Dr. Knott wears many hats. She’s been the editor of the American Historical Review, the author of Sensibility and the American Revolution (2009), as well as a Library Company fellow (1999). Dr. Knott is also a mother, a role to which she’s brought her skills as a trained historian. In a new book entitled Mother is a Verb: An Unconventional History (2019), she entwines memoir and history in an extraordinary, transnational account of maternity that spans the seventeenth century and the late-twentieth century. Fenton and Knott began their conversation by examining the first several pages of William Cadogan’s An Essay upon Nursing (London, 1757).

Dr. Will Fenton speaks with Dr. Scott Heerman, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Miami. During his NEH postdoctoral fellowship (2018-19), Dr. Heerman made use of the African American history collections to pursue his interest in slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic. In this episode, Dr. Heerman discusses his first book, The Alchemy of Slavery: Human Bondage and Emancipation in the Illinois Country, 1730-1865 (2018), which traces how slavery in French, Spanish, and Native North America shaped the legal processes of emancipation in the nineteenth century United States. By focusing on the nation’s interior—Illinois, specifically—Dr. Heerman tells a nuanced story about the resilience of servitude far from the eastern seaboard, where other scholars tend to focus their studies. Fenton and Heerman began their conversation by examining this map contained in the Case of the Vigilante, a Ship Employed in the Slave-trade (London, 1823).

In a special summer edition of Talking in the Library, Edwin Wolf 2nd Director Dr. Michael Barsanti speaks with the Director of the Program in African American History, Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens about the powerful new exhibition, From Negro Pasts to Afro-Futures: Black Creative Re-Imaginings, which opened at the Library Company of May 24. From Negro Pasts to Afro-Futures draws upon fragments of early Black Americans’ past from their drawings, love letters, poems, songs, speeches, and protests to help visitors grapple with the place of black creative genius in the quest for a people’s liberation. In this bonus episode, Dr. Barsanti and Dr. Owens discuss the experience of shaping this extraordinary exhibition with five graduate students from Queens College at the City University of New York.

Dr. Will Fenton speaks with Dr. Walter D. Greason, Associate Professor at Monmouth University, where he specializes in the comparative, economic analysis of slavery, industrialization, and suburbanization. Dr. Greason is a prolific scholar in field of economic history. He is the author of Suburban Erasure: How the Suburbs Ended the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey (2012) as well as the co-editor of The American Economy (2015); Planning Future Cities (2017); and Cities Imagined: The African Diaspora in Media and History (2018). In addition to creating the #WakandaSyllabus, the web-based Racial Violence Syllabus, and the award-winning website, Black Perspectives, Dr. Greason led Designing Afrofuturism: Imagining Black Futures through Art, History, and Literature, a spring 2019 seminar that traced how historical African American leaders envisioned the future using the Library Company’s prodigious African American History collections. Fenton and Greason began their conversation by examining several images fro

Dr. Will Fenton speaks with Dr. Carla J. Mulford, Professor of English at Penn State University and the Founding President of the Society of Early Americanists. Dr. Mulford has published widely in the field of early American studies; however, Benjamin Franklin has been her preoccupation for over 25 years. In fact, she has published over 20 articles and book chapters on Franklin, in addition to The Cambridge Companion to Benjamin Franklin (2008) and Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2015). In spring 2019, Dr. Mulford led the Library Company seminar “Benjamin Franklin and Immigration,” which considered how Franklin’s ideas about immigrants and immigration evolved as his career moved from being a colonial leader in Philadelphia to a citizen of the world. Fenton and Mulford began their conversation by examining the Franklin-Folger gulfstream map contained in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia, 1786).

Dr. Will Fenton speaks with Dr. Zara Anishanslin, associate professor of history and art history at the University of Delaware. A self-professed “historian with a thing for things,” Anishanslin specializes in eighteenth-century material culture. In this episode, Anishanslin discusses her first book, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World, which was recently awarded the Library Company’s first biennial book prize. Fenton and Anishanslin began their conversation by examining several fabric swatches contained John F. Watson’s Annals of Philadelphia Extra-Illustrated Manuscript in the Print Department at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

In this introductory episode, Dr. Michael Barsanti, the Edwin Wolf 2nd Director of the Library Company of Philadelphia, discusses the values that animate and the aspirations that drive this podcast.

In our first episode, we'll hear from Dr. Michael Goode an assistant professor of early American history at Utah Valley University. Michael is no stranger to the Library Company: in fact, his book project, “A Colonizing Peace: The Quaker Struggle for Gospel Order in Early America,” emerged during his time here as a Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow. In a new co-edited volume published by Brill, The Specter of Peace: Rethinking Violence and Power in the Colonial Atlantic (Brill, 2018), Michael offers a window into his thinking about the role of peace-making in colonial America. Here's a link to the digital copy of the map we discuss at the top of the episode: https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3300.ct000232/?r=-1.049,-0.05,3.099,1.766,0