Talking in the Library

The Library Company of Philadelphia
  • 5.0 (7)
  • EDUCATION
Talking in the Library

“Talking in the Library” is an audio platform for scholars to share the projects they’re pursuing using the rich collections at America’s oldest cultural institution, the Library Company of Philadelphia. This podcast is hosted by Director of Research and Public Programs, Will Fenton, produced by Ann McShane, and recorded at Indy Hall in Philadelphia. Logo design by Nicole Graham. Theme music by Krestovsky ("Terrible Art").

  1. Fireside Chat: Liberty Displaying the Arts & Sciences (Emily Casey)

    08/16/2021

    Fireside Chat: Liberty Displaying the Arts & Sciences (Emily Casey)

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

    1 hr
  2. Fireside Chat: Biddle, Jackson, and a Nation in Turmoil (Cordelia Frances Biddle)

    08/09/2021

    Fireside Chat: Biddle, Jackson, and a Nation in Turmoil (Cordelia Frances Biddle)

    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.

    55 min
  3. Fireside Chat: Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood (Crystal Lynn Webster)

    08/02/2021

    Fireside Chat: Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood (Crystal Lynn Webster)

    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.

    53 min
  4. Fireside Chat: Merchants of Medicines (Zachary Dorner)

    07/05/2021

    Fireside Chat: Merchants of Medicines (Zachary Dorner)

    The period from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century—the so-called long eighteenth century of English history—was a time of profound global change, marked by the expansion of intercontinental empires, long-distance trade, and human enslavement. It was also the moment when medicines, previously produced locally and in small batches, became global products. As greater numbers of British subjects struggled to survive overseas, more medicines than ever were manufactured and exported to help them. Most historical accounts, however, obscure the medicine trade’s dependence on slave labor, plantation agriculture, and colonial warfare. In Merchants of Medicines, Zachary Dorner follows the earliest industrial pharmaceuticals from their manufacture in the United Kingdom, across trade routes, and to the edges of empire, telling a story of what medicines were, what they did, and what they meant. He brings to life business, medical, and government records to evoke a vibrant early modern world of London laboratories, Caribbean estates, South Asian factories, New England timber camps, and ships at sea. In these settings, medicines were produced, distributed, and consumed in new ways to help confront challenges of distance, labor, and authority in colonial territories. Merchants of Medicines offers a new history of economic and medical development across early America, Britain, and South Asia, revealing the unsettlingly close ties among medicine, finance, warfare, and slavery that changed people’s expectations of their health and their bodies.

    1 hr
  5. Fireside Chat: Occupied America (Donald Johnson)

    06/14/2021

    Fireside Chat: Occupied America (Donald Johnson)

    In Occupied America, Donald F. Johnson chronicles the everyday experience of ordinary people living under military occupation during the American Revolution. Focusing on day-to-day life in port cities held by the British Army, Johnson recounts how men and women from a variety of backgrounds navigated harsh conditions, mitigated threats to their families and livelihoods, took advantage of new opportunities, and balanced precariously between revolutionary and royal attempts to secure their allegiance. Between 1775 and 1783, every large port city along the Eastern seaboard fell under British rule at one time or another. As centers of population and commerce, these cities—Boston, New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Savannah, Charleston—should have been bastions from which the empire could restore order and inspire loyalty. Military rule's exceptional social atmosphere initially did provide opportunities for many people—especially women and the enslaved, but also free men both rich and poor—to reinvent their lives, and while these opportunities came with risks, the hope of social betterment inspired thousands to embrace military rule. Nevertheless, as Johnson demonstrates, occupation failed to bring about a restoration of imperial authority, as harsh material circumstances forced even the most loyal subjects to turn to illicit means to feed and shelter themselves, while many maintained ties to rebel camps for the same reasons. As occupations dragged on, most residents no longer viewed restored royal rule as a viable option. Don Johnson is associate professor of early American history at North Dakota State University, where his research focuses on popular politics and everyday experience during the American Revolution. His first book, Occupied America: British Military Rule and the Experience of Revolution, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2020, and other writings have appeared in the Journal of American History, The Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History, and the William and Mary Quarterly, among other venues. Johnson earned his PhD in American History from Northwestern University and also holds an MA from the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in American Material Culture.

    1h 6m
  6. Fireside Chat: Creative Confluence in a Peak Poetry World (Orchid Tierney, Jena Osman, Andrea Krupp)

    06/07/2021

    Fireside Chat: Creative Confluence in a Peak Poetry World (Orchid Tierney, Jena Osman, Andrea Krupp)

    A conversation with Orchid Tierney, author of A Year of Misreading the Wildcats; Jena Osman, author of Motion Studies; and Andrea Krupp, curator of Seeing Coal.

    58 min
  7. Fireside Chat: Liberty and Insanity in the Age of the American Revolution (Sarah L. Swedberg)

    05/31/2021

    Fireside Chat: Liberty and Insanity in the Age of the American Revolution (Sarah L. Swedberg)

    In Liberty and Insanity in the Age of the American Revolution, Sarah L. Swedberg examines how conceptions of mental illness intersected with American society, law, and politics during the early American Republic. Swedberg illustrates how concerns about insanity raised difficult questions about the nature of governance. Revolutionaries built the American government based on rational principles, but could not protect it from irrational actors that they feared could cause the body politic to grow mentally or physically ill. This book is recommended for students and scholars of history, political science, legal studies, sociology, literature, psychology, and public health. Sarah Swedberg is a Professor of History at Colorado Mesa University where she has taught since 1999. She is a regular writer for Nursing Clio. Her book, Liberty and Insanity in the Age of the American Revolution (Lexington, 2020) began with a 2011 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College and University Professors on the problem of governance in the early American Republic houses at the Library Company.

    44 min
  8. Fireside Chat: Double Feature(Patricia Miller & Julie Miller)

    05/24/2021

    Fireside Chat: Double Feature(Patricia Miller & Julie Miller)

    In Cry of Murder on Broadway, Julie Miller shows how a woman's desperate attempt at murder came to momentarily embody the anger and anxiety felt by many people at a time of economic and social upheaval and expanding expectations for equal rights. Julie Miller earned her doctorate in United States history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2003. She taught in the history department at Hunter College, City University of New York, before moving to Washington DC. Her first book was Abandoned: Foundlings in Nineteenth-Century New York City (NYU Press, 2008). Her second book, Cry of Murder on Broadway: A Woman’s Ruin and Revenge in Old New York, was published by the Three Hills Imprint of Cornell University Press in October, 2020. It was begun with a Bernard and Irene Schwartz postdoctoral fellowship from the New-York Historical Society in 2006-2007. She is the curator of early American Manuscripts at the Library of Congress. Her chapter, “British Beginnings,” in The Two Georges: Parallel Lives in an Age of Revolution (Washington DC: Library of Congress), is forthcoming. Cry of Murder was written entirely outside of her responsibilities at the Library of Congress and does not reflect the Library’s views. In Bringing Down the Colonel, the journalist Patricia Miller tells the story of Madeline Pollard, an unlikely nineteenth-century women’s rights crusader. After an affair with a prominent politician left her “ruined,” Pollard brought the man—and the hypocrisy of America’s control of women’s sexuality—to trial. And, surprisingly, she won. Patricia Miller is an award-winning author and journalist whose fascination with the untold stories of women led her on a 10-year journey to unearth the story of the Breckinridge–Pollard scandal. Her work on the interplay of politics and sexual morality has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Salon, The Nation, Huffington Post, and Ms. Magazine. She received a master’s degree in journalism from New York University and is the editor of Encyclopedia Virginia.

    58 min
See All (70)

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
7 Ratings

About

“Talking in the Library” is an audio platform for scholars to share the projects they’re pursuing using the rich collections at America’s oldest cultural institution, the Library Company of Philadelphia. This podcast is hosted by Director of Research and Public Programs, Will Fenton, produced by Ann McShane, and recorded at Indy Hall in Philadelphia. Logo design by Nicole Graham. Theme music by Krestovsky ("Terrible Art").

Information

  • Creator
    The Library Company of Philadelphia
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2021
  • Episodes
    70
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © All rights reserved
  • Show Website
    Talking in the Library

To listen to explicit episodes, sign in.

Stay up to date with this show

Sign in or sign up to follow shows, save episodes, and get the latest updates.
Select a country or region

Africa, Middle East, and India

Asia Pacific

Europe

Latin America and the Caribbean

The United States and Canada