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Wednesday, March 4th, 2026 at 5:30 PM ET

When we think of the American Revolution, we often picture a parochial drama: thirteen colonies squaring off against the British Crown in a spirited bid for independence. But this version of the story is only half the truth—and perhaps not even the most interesting half. In this riveting program, historian and author Richard Bell invites audiences to rediscover the Revolution as a world war that unleashed chaos, opportunity, and transformation across six continents. From the sugar fields of the Caribbean to the court of the King of Mysore, from refugee camps on the Canadian frontier to political uprisings in Sierra Leone and Peru, the war that gave birth to the United States was never simply America’s own. It was a seismic global event that redrew maps, toppled hierarchies, catalyzed migration, and accelerated new movements for liberty—and for empire.

In this program, Bell traces the far-flung reverberations of the war through the lives of the people it displaced, empowered, or destroyed. Participants will encounter a Native matriarch struggling to preserve a transatlantic military alliance, a Prussian officer reinventing himself in a foreign army, and a Boston schoolteacher shipwrecked thousands of miles from home. Along the way, Bell explores how the Revolution stirred a transoceanic refugee crisis, ignited antislavery activism, and inspired uprisings from Ireland to India. The program offers a bold new framework for understanding the Revolutionary War not as a tidy founding moment but as a sprawling, high-stakes struggle fought on land and sea, shaped by commerce, diplomacy, propaganda, and contingency. This is the American Revolution as you’ve never seen it before: complex, global, and astonishingly relevant to the modern world.

Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, March 6th 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, and 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 in November 2025 through April 2026.

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“Not a Poor, but a Very Importunate Widow” Sarah Kennedy and the American Revolution in Pennsylvania with Camille Kaszubowski, Ph.D.

2026 Women’s History Month Lecture

March 11th, 2026 at 5:30 PM

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Wednesday, March 18th, 2026, at 7 PM ET

Join us for an exciting conversation with the editors and two contributors to The Gendered Republic: Reimagining Identity in the New Nation (University of Virginia, 2025).

What does it mean to study early American history through gender?  The authors of the new collection, The Gendered Republic, bring together women’s history with masculinity studies to showcase the transformative impact of gender history on our understanding of the early American republic. Collectively, the contributors showcase the vibrancy of gender history as a frame of inquiry, revealing how shifting notions of women’s and men’s roles shaped the lives of people in the early American republic—White, Black, and Indigenous—and how those people, in turn, experienced and redefined gender and, with it, their communities, cultures, laws, families, and nations.

Rachel Hope Cleves is Professor of History at the University of Victoria and a contributor to The Gendered Republic

Lorri Glover is Professor of History at Saint Louis University and co-editor of The Gendered Republic

Kenneth E. Marshall is Professor of History at SUNY Oswego and a contributor to The Gendered Republic

Craig Thompson Friend is Professor of History and Public History at North Carolina State University and co-editor of The Gendered Republic

Sponsored by the Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch Program in Women’s History at the Library Company of Philadelphia

Library Company History & Exhibitions Tour

Friday, April 3rd 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, and 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 in November 2025 through April 2026.

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Wednesday, April 15, 2026 at 5:00 PM ET

Please join the Library Company of Philadelphia on April 15th for a talk with Jessica Lepler about her new book Canal Dreamers (UNC Press, 2025)

Jessica M. Lepler tells the captivating story of this global journey in her new book, Canal Dreamers. Although the idea of literally changing the world by connecting the oceans proved too revolutionary for the Age of Revolutions, the quest itself changed history. Canal dreams prompted political transformations, financial crisis, recognition of new countries, concern about climate change, and more. Full of adventure, corruption, far-reaching consequences, and present-day parallels, Lepler’s absorbing narrative cuts through two centuries, revealing that dreams do not need to come true to make history.

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Tuesday, April 21st, 2026 at 7 PM ET

Join us to discuss Alec Zuercher Reichardt’s new book, Roads to Power, Roads to Crisis: The War for the American Interior and the Infrastructural Routes of Revolution (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025).

The construction of imperial communications infrastructure led to British victory in the Seven Years’ War, yet it was also the empire’s undoing, laying the roads to Revolution.

Centering on the eighteenth-century struggle for the greater Ohio Valley, this book uncovers a much larger imperial competition, one for control over Atlantic and North American information and transportation networks. By the height of the Seven Years’ War, this contest had propelled Britain to construct imperial infrastructure that outpaced the efforts of France, its primary European rival, and that successfully co-opted Indigenous ally channels. However, the rise of the British North American infrastructure state was also the empire’s downfall. The same roads, printing presses, and postal networks constructed and funded by the War Office and imperial treasury quickly also became the primary routes for those revolutionaries who sought to oppose the British state.

Alec Reichardt is Associate Professor of History and Kinder Institute Associate Professor of Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri. He received his BA from Duke and his PhD from Yale University. A historian of early North America and the Atlantic World, he’s published essays and articles on the global eighteenth-century British Empire, French military infrastructure, Indigenous textual translation, as well as a co-edited collection, Inlands: Empires, Contested Interiors, and the Connection of the World (Columbia University Press, 2024).

Hosted by the Program in Early American Economy and Society