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Current Month

June

23jun12:00 pm1:30 pmClaiming Land, Claiming WaterFree

July

07jul11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions Free Tuesday ToursFree

08jul7:00 pm8:00 pmMoney and the Making of the American Revolution with Andrew EdwardsFree

Event Details

July Fireside Chat

Money and the Making of the American Revolution with Andrew Edwards

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Wednesday, July 8th, 2026, at 7 PM ET

American money and American democracy have always been in tension, pitting political equality against economic inequality. In Money and the Making of the American Revolution, Andrew David Edwards shows how this struggle emerged in America’s founding era. Everyone knows that the founders waged a revolt against taxation without representation. Edwards shows that the dispute over taxes was really a dispute over money: what it was, who could make it, and how to keep it from being used at the expense of the colonists in North America. The colonial rebels refocused their resistance on democratic, local control—defending the power they had used to make money for themselves.

Edwards’s narrative spans four continents, linking the problems of money and revolt in early America to the transatlantic slave trade, the disastrous mismanagement of the East India Company in India, and violence against Native Americans. His analysis emerges from the story itself, through the lives of individuals ranging from John Blackwell, Oliver Cromwell’s one-time war treasurer, to Thomas Paine, the impassioned pamphleteer of the American Revolution. Edwards argues that as the republican vision of an agrarian, independent monetary system faded, the leaders of the Revolution tied the nation to capitalism and imperialism at its founding. The colonists may have won the battle for representation, but the money that underpinned the European empire had established a stronghold in the new republic. Money and the Making of the American Revolution offers both an ambitious new interpretation of the Revolution and a fascinating story about the power of economic ideas.

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Time

July 8, 2026 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT-04:00)

10jul11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR

14jul11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions Free Tuesday ToursFree

August

07aug11:00 am12:00 pmLibrary Company History & Exhibitions TourTOUR

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Library Company Announces Plans for Semiquincentennial

The Library Company of Philadelphia, founded in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin, opened its collections to the delegates to the First Continental Congress in September 1774. At the time, its collections held virtually every significant work of political theory, history, law, and statecraft to be found in the American colonies. That privilege was extended to delegates to subsequent Congresses, the Constitutional Convention, and the early Federal Congresses while Philadelphia was the national capital until 1800. This heritage as the first, though unofficial, Library of Congress places the Library Company in a unique position to shed light on the Revolutionary era. Plans for the Semiquincentennial center on two exhibitions.

Appointments are now required to access the Scheide reading room and the Graphic Arts Department reading room.

For text materials (Scheide reading room), appointments are required. Click here to learn more.

For visual materials (Graphic Arts Department reading room), appointments are required. Click here to learn how to make an appointment.

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Current Exhibitions

Current Month

June

18may(may 18)5:30 pm09oct(oct 9)7:00 pmPhiladelphia's Radical Revolution: From the Stamp Act to the Federal ConstitutionFree Exhibition

Event Details

Philadelphia’s Radical Revolution: From the Stamp Act to the Federal Constitution

On view at The Library Company of Philadelphia from May 18th – October 9th

In Philadelphia, artisans and tradesmen drove the Revolution more forcefully than in any other colony. Early in the Revolution, the city’s political and economic elites, many of whom rejected the spirit of rebellion, had been pushed aside by working men who seized political power, reshaped Pennsylvania’s wartime government, and wrote a new state constitution that proved to be the most radically democratic constitution of the entire Revolution.

These ardent patriots, backed by the militia, demanded absolute loyalty to the American cause. Before and after the occupation of Philadelphia by the British army in 1777-1778, they forced citizens to choose: swear an oath of allegiance to Pennsylvania or risk imprisonment, confiscation of property, or even death.

After the war was won, the radicals retained much of their power, but in the early 1780s, Philadelphia’s long tradition of political moderation slowly re-emerged. Many now feared that revolutionary excess could be as dangerous as elite rule had been before. When the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in 1787, the city’s delegates brought this spirit of moderation to its deliberations and were influential in designing a federal government that balanced popular power with checks and restraints.

This exhibition does not attempt to tell the whole story of the Revolution. It focuses on what happened in Philadelphia and the dramatic shifts its citizens endured—from disaffection, to radicalism, to moderation—through broadsides, pamphlets, newspapers, and prints collected in the city during the Revolution itself. It is shaped by the unique perspectives of two avid contemporaries: the Swiss emigrant, Pierre Eugène Du Simitière, who collected and preserved many items that others disregarded, and John Dickinson, the famously moderate “penman of the Revolution” at the center of Revolutionary politics. Together they preserve one of the richest records of Philadelphia’s radical experiment in democracy.

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support for the exhibition and related programming provided by the Philadelphia Funder Collaborative for the Semiquincentennial, the Embassy of Switzerland in the United States of America, and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.

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Time

May 18, 2026 5:30 pm - October 9, 2026 7:00 pm(GMT-04:00)