Library Company of Philadelphia
Agitate, educate, organize! These are the words of Frances Willard (1839-1898), a leader in the late 19th-century temperance movement who advocated woman suffrage. After her death, her words became a rallying cry in the early 20th century, and remain powerful today. The poet John Greenleaf Whittier noted the importance of love in Willard’s activism: “LOVE was stronger still.” These lines are also relevant today. As Willard said, “Alone we can do little, … but aggregated we become batteries of power.”
-Lydia Shaw, Franklin & Marshall Class of 2022
This item and more will be featured in the exhibition Women Get Things Done, opening soon at the Library Company of Philadelphia!
Horizontorium prints were optical illusion games which were meant to be viewed through a paper tab with a pinhole. Viewing the prints in this way was meant to make the image look normal.
This horizontorium depicts the Bank of Philadelphia at the southwest corner of Fourth and Chestnut Streets. It is the only recognized American horizontorium image.
J.J. Barker, Horizontorium from the original drawing by William Mason, ca. 1832. Lithograph.
#OnThisDay in 1847, General Winfield Scott led American troops to Mexico City, where the U.S. flag was raised over the Hall of Montezuma.
The Mexican-American War was waged after the United States annexed the Republic of Texas and set off a conflict with Mexico. The war also sparked internal political divisions because Texas would likely be accepted into the union as a slave state.
This etching is a reproduction of “War News from Mexico,” a popular painting by American artist Richard Caton Woodville. The painting depicts a group of townspeople gathering to read a news report from the battlefront. Such reports marked the first time a U.S. war was covered by mass media. The reproduction of the painting as prints like this one is further evidence of the growing reach of print culture.
Some marbled beauties for you on this #ForeEdgeFriday! These edges are from a seven volume set of Harper’s Story Books, published by Harper & Brothers circa 1857.
We love the gold stamp used on the cover of this edition of Wonderful Characters. Comprised of vignettes compiled and illustrated by James Caulfield and Henry Wilson, the book aimed to celebrate eccentricity and individuality at a time when “all people and all places seem now to be alike."
Henry Wilson and James Caulfield. The Book of Wonderful Characters: Memoirs and Anecdotes of Remarkable and Eccentric Persons in All Ages and Countries. London: J.C. Hotten, [1869].
Have you signed any petitions recently? This blank petition was created and distributed by the Women’s Loyal National League, founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in 1863. The petition, which calls for the “earliest practicable” emancipation of enslaved African Americans, shows that women’s groups addressed the rights of other oppressed groups. Activist women primarily resided in Northern states, and their privileged backgrounds shaped their activism. After the 1869 split in the women’s rights movement over black male suffrage, Stanton and Anthony lost allies as they argued that men of various ethnic minority groups did not deserve the vote before white women. Today their emphasis on their own superiority feels particularly problematic, as we address the issue of systemic racism.
-Lydia Shaw, Franklin & Marshall Class of 2022
This item and more will be featured in the exhibition Women Get Things Done, opening soon at the Library Company of Philadelphia!
Petition for the Women’s Loyal National League’s 1863 campaign to collect women’s signatures in support of the abolition of slavery.(New York: s.n., 1863?)
Just a few blocks south of our building on Locust Street was an antique shop owned by James Eham, an African American businessman who was born in Virginia in 1842 and died in Philadelphia in 1930. Posters promoting a production of “Our Colored Boys Over There” at the Royal Theater cover the building adjacent to Eham’s elaborately decorated shop, showcasing the cultural vibrancy of Philadelphia’s Black community in the early twentieth century.
Alfred Hand, Junk shop at 13th & Pine, ca. 1920. Film negative.
Happy Labor Day! This postcard documents a 1908 trolley strike in Chester, Pennsylvania. In response to falling revenue, the Chester Traction Company slashed pay rates. This decrease in pay prompted the Amalgamated Association of Street Railway Employees to shut down public trolleys from Philadelphia to Wilmington.
Trolley Strike postcard (Philadelphia: Keystone Post Card Company, ca. 1910). Photolithograph. From the Brightbill Postcard Collection.
Please excuse us while we swoon over these gold printed #endoftheweekendpapers and keep swooning right on into the weekend.
Printed advertisement endpapers from The Lady’s Almanac for 1854. By Damrell & Moore & G. Coolidge. Boston: John P. Jewett & Co., [1853].
Somehow, it’s September 3 already. Anyone else feel like time has stopped making sense this year? But hey, it could be worse - in 1752 there was no September 3 in Britain and the American colonies.
Yes, you read that right.
1752 was the year Britain switched to the Gregorian calendar, so the day after September 2 was September 14 and the eleven days in between just… disappeared.
Actually, that doesn’t sound so bad…
An Act to amend an Act made in the last session of Parliament, (intitled, An Act for regulating the commencement of the year, and for correcting the calendar now in use.) [London: Thomas Baskett, 1752]
From the collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, on deposit at LCP.