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November
12nov5:30 pm9:00 pm295th Annual Dinner Featuring Dr. William Woys WeaverFundraiser
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295th Annual Dinner Featuring Dr. William Woys Weaver November 12, 2026 The Down Town Club 600 Chestnut St. | Philadelphia, PA For nearly 300 years,
Event Details
295th Annual Dinner Featuring Dr. William Woys Weaver
November 12, 2026
The Down Town Club
600 Chestnut St. | Philadelphia, PA
For nearly 300 years, the Library Company has gathered annually to celebrate our steadfast commitment to learning. We are excited to invite you to join us at this celebration of history, scholarship, and education.
Join us at the Library Company’s 295th Annual Dinner! This year’s featured speaker is Dr. William Woys Weaver, culinary historian and author. Dr. Weaver will be in conversation with journalist Justin Kramon about his new book Pepperpot City: Philadelphia and the Foundation of American Cuisine, An Illustrated History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026).
17nov7:00 pm8:00 pmWomen, Law, and Disability in Early AmericaFree
Event Details
Fireside Chat: Women, Law, and Disability in Early
Event Details
Fireside Chat: Women, Law, and Disability in Early America
with Jennifer Reiss
Tuesday, November 17th, 2026 | 7:00 PM EST
Virtual Event | Free
What can the Library Company’s collections teach us about the intersections of women’s lives, disability, and the law? Dr. Jennifer Reiss, the 2025–2026 Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch Dissertation Fellow, will share materials she explored during her fellowship to uncover how women experienced and navigated legal and social systems in early America. This program will highlight the power of everyday documents as “keys” to understanding the past, in this case revealing histories of gender, disability, and lived experience.
Jennifer Reiss is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania working on the North Atlantic in the long eighteenth century. Jennifer is particularly interested in women and gender, early modern medicine and disability, and British and early American legal history. Her dissertation project, provisionally titled Undone Bodies: Gender and the Making of Disability in Early America, reconsiders how disability as a social category was constructed and experienced before burgeoning clinical understandings of bodily difference in the antebellum era.
December
01dec7:00 pm8:00 pmWhen The Declaration of Independence Was NewsFree
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Fireside Chat: When The Declaration of Independence Was
Event Details
Tuesday, December 1st, 2026 | 7:00 PM EST
Published for the 250th anniversary of the United States, When the Declaration of Independence Was News focuses on the nation’s founding document at the moment of its creation in 1776, before anyone knew what the legacy of the Declaration would be or if the United States would win the war against Great Britain. It explores how the Declaration was communicated to people in the new nation and around the Atlantic world and reveals the stories of the many people involved in the process of declaring independence, from printers to soldiers to diplomats to translators.
Dr. Emily Sneff is an early American historian and leading expert on the Declaration of Independence. She earned her Ph.D. in History from William & Mary. She is a consulting curator for exhibitions marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration at the Museum of the American Revolution and Historic Trappe.
Sponsored by the Program in Early American Economy and Society
04dec11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR
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Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour Friday, December 4th at 11:00 AM In-Person Event Join us for a
Event Details
Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour
Friday, December 4th at 11:00 AM
In-Person Event
Join us for a guided tour of the Library Company’s first-floor exhibition galleries. Learn more about the history of the de facto first Library of Congress and oldest colonial cultural institution in the United States. Guests will also learn more about art and artifacts on display in the Logan Room, as well as hear about the collection materials showcased in our rotating exhibition space.
Space is limited, so please sign up for only one tour time per person. Tickets are available for all First Fridays from November 6th through February 5th, 2027.
Event Details
Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession of the
Event Details
Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession of the United States
with Emilie Connolly
Tuesday, December 8th, 2026 | 5:30 pm | Free
In-Person | 1314 Locust St, Philadelphia, 19107
Please join us for a book talk with Emilie Connolly, author of Vested Interests (Princeton University Press, 2025), winner of the 2026 Bancroft Prize
Shortly after the United States’ founding, the federal government decided to pay for Native land rather than attempt to take it by military force alone. And therein hangs a tale. Hundreds of treaties transferred Indigenous homelands to the United States in exchange for annual payments, called annuities. With increasing frequency over the course of the nineteenth century, the government funded annuities with investment accounts held in trust for Native nations, purchasing a portfolio of bonds on their behalf. What followed was a system of fiduciary colonialism, in which the federal government gained administrative control over Native wealth to take Native land and, at once, finance the very debt-funded infrastructure – canals, banks, and railroads – that facilitated westward expansion. In short, if land was the “why” of U.S. settler colonialism, money was the “how.” Yet Indigenous peoples were not passive subjects of this system. Native leaders strategically navigated their financial ties to the federal government to safeguard their nations’ futures and insisted on their view of trusteeship as a sacred, reciprocal obligation. Through stories of treaty negotiations, bond market crashes, and the crisis of the Civil War, this talk recounts how the management of Native money became a central site of both imperial dispossession and Indigenous resilience.
19dec11:00 am1:00 pm52 Weeks of Firsts Saturday Firstival CelebrationOpen House | Free
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52 Weeks of Firsts Saturday Firstival Celebration
Event Details
52 Weeks of Firsts Saturday Firstival Celebration
Saturday, December 19th, 2026 | 10:30 am – 1 pm | Free
In-Person | The Library Company of Philadelphia
Please join us in celebrating our “Firstival” as part of 52 Weeks of Firsts. 52 Weeks of Firsts is a year-long initiative highlighting Philadelphia’s pioneering spirit and 250 years of firsts in freedom, innovation, and fun. The Philadelphia Historic District 250th Committee created 52 Weeks of Firsts for the 2026 semiquincentennial year, taking place across the City of Philadelphia in over a dozen neighborhoods.
Doors will open at 10:30 am, and we’ll have a brief ceremony and remarks about our milestone at 11 am, including a Once Upon A Nation storyteller sharing the true story behind this First. The festival will continue until 1 pm, with family-friendly activities and a chance to see our newest exhibition, Serious Fun.
*Registration is encouraged but not required for this event
More upcoming events here.
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