PAST CONFERENCES, PROGRAMS, and EXHIBITIONS

Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves
April 3, 2013

Master of the Mountain presents the controversial idea that during the 1790s Thomas Jefferson became so convinced of the economic value of slavery he abandoned his youthful antislavery sentiments. Independent scholar Henry Wiencek is the author of several other books, including The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1999, and An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America.

Sponsored jointly by the Library Company and the American Philosophical Society, this talk will take place at Benjamin Franklin Hall, 427 Chestnut Street.

Juneteenth 2013: "African American Women in the Era of Emancipation" 

The Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia will host its annual Juneteenth Freedom seminar on Friday, June 21, 2013. This year's theme, "African American Women in the Era of Emancipation," explores the Civil War experiences of free and enslaved black women as they challenged slavery and defined freedom on the front lines.

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Emancipation Procalmation: One Step Toward Freedom

Online Exhibition: click here

Juneteenth 2012

Making Freedom in the Atlantic World
Saturday, June 16

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A one-day conference exploring the process and impact of emancipation across the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries. The conference celebrates Juneteenth, commemorating the news that slavery had ended. The program will include a panel discussion featuring Gary Nash, Roseanne Adderley, Jasmine Cobb, and Edna Medford; a roundtable discussion on collecting Afro-Americana; and a keynote address by James Stewart of Macalester College.

Early African American Print Culture in Theory and Practice
March 18-20, 2010
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The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries mark both the inauguration of an African American literary tradition and the consolidation of American print culture. Yet these two most vibrant areas for American Studies scholarship are rarely considered in relation to one another. To the extent that scholars understand African American print culture at all, we do so with a dependence on critical models that assume that print is a stabilizing technology that underwrites the establishment of African American identity. But while the technology of print fixes impressions, print culture designates a world in which print both integrates with other practices and assumes a life of its own. 

Black Founders: The Free Black Community in the Early Republic

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Gallery Exhibition: March -October 2008

Black Founders examines the activities of newly-freed African Americans in the North as they struggled to forge organizations and institutions to promote their burgeoning communities and to attain equal rights in the face of slavery and racism. Leaders emerged—many of them former slaves—who worked to organize independent churches, schools, and fraternal and educational associations, and to champion blacks’ inclusion as equal citizens in the American landscape. Deeply spiritual people, they held close the tenets of egalitarian Christianity and the affirmation in the Declaration of Independence of the unalienable right to liberty. They were the most consistent voices for multiracial democracy in the new republic, and their words and deeds helped inspire a vigorous American antislavery movement.

Atlantic Emancipations
10-12 April 2008
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The year 2008 marked the bicentennial of two important events in the history of slavery and freedom in the Atlantic World: the official end of the overseas slave trade in the United States (following the passage of statutes in the U.S. and Great Britain the previous year) and the maturation of Pennsylvania's gradual abolition law -- the world's first emancipation statute. These two events offer an exciting opportunity for reflection on the broader theme of black freedom struggles in the Atlantic world during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.