Juneteenth Event: Featuring Richard Newman (June 19, 2008)

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Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers by Richard S. Newman is a long-overdue biography of Richard Allen (1760–1831), founder of the first major African American church and the leading black activist in the age of Washington and Jefferson. A tireless minister, abolitionist, and reformer, Allen inaugurated some of the most important institutions in African American history and influenced nearly every Black leader of the 19th century, from Frederick Douglass to W.E.B. Dubois. The book restores Allen to his rightful place in history as one of America’s “Black Founders.”

 

2008 LCP Annual Dinner: Dr. Richard J. Blackett (May 5, 2008)

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Richard J. Blackett is a historian of the abolitionist movement in the U.S.
and particularly its transatlantic connections and the roles African Americans played in it. He is the author of Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830-1860 (1983); Beating Against the Barriers: Biographical Essays in Nineteenth-Century Afro-American History (1986); Thomas Morris Chester: Black Civil War Correspondent (1989); and Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War (2001).

At present he is working on a study of the ways communities on both sides of
the divide organized to support or resist enforcement of the 1850 Fugitive Slave
Law, and the ways that slaves, by escaping, influenced the politics of slavery.
Blackett has taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Indiana University, and the
University of Houston, where he was the John & Rebecca Moores Professor of
History and African American Studies. He has been Associate Editor of the Journal of American History and is also past president of the Association of Caribbean Historians.

 

Talking Prints: a Conversation With Donald Cresswell & Christopher Lane

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The Library Company’s Visual Culture Program got off to a rousing start with our April 3rd program, “Talking Prints: A Conversation with Donald Cresswell and Christopher Lane.” Seventy-five people spent the evening at the Library Company enjoying food and drink and the company of others who share an interest in historical prints. Don and Chris, owners of the Philadelphia Print Shop in the Chestnut Hill section of the city, provided lively commentary about their quarter-century in the print business and their experiences as experts on the Antiques Roadshow program on PBS, and each spoke eloquently about his favorite historical American print. Don described the significance of “The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation before the Cabinet,” a large engraving executed in 1864, while Chris captured the audience’s attention with his discussion of John Hill’s 1808 “Plan of the City of Philadelphia and Environs.” Questions and comments from audience members enlivened the conversation. The success of the Visual Culture Program’s inaugural event has set a high standard for our future programs to meet.

 

2007 LCP Annual Dinner: Dr. Francois Furstenberg

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Former Library Company Fellow François Furstenberg speaks about his book, In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation, released in paperback by The Penguin Press.

François Furstenberg grew up in Boston and Washington, D.C. After graduating from Columbia University, he worked for several years in Paris before earning a Ph.D. at The Johns Hopkins University. He was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in U.S. history at Cambridge University for one year, after which he moved to Montreal, where he is currently assistant professor of history at the Université de Montréal.

In the Name of the Father is Professor Furstenberg’s first book. It draws on the research he conducted at the Library Company and on many images from the collections of the print department and examines how the young American nation was bound together by the words, image, and myth of George Washington. It immerses us in the rich, riotous world of “civic texts,” the patriotic words and images circulating throughout the country in newspapers, almanacs, books and primers, paintings, and even the homeliest domestic ornaments.
In the Name of the Father teems with vivid stories of American print culture, including a consideration of Parson Weems, the hack biographer-cum-bookseller who authored the first blockbuster Washington biography. Professor Furstenberg shows us how the civic texts of the early republic infused Americans with national spirit and how they created what Abraham Lincoln so famously called “the mystic chords of memory.” But he also examines the darker side of the process of nation-creation: how early American nationalism ultimately reconciled itself with slavery, with consequences that haunt us still.

 

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