NEH Fellowships at the Library Company of Philadelphia

FAIN: RA-50020-04

Library Company of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA 19107-5679)
John C. Van Horne (Project Director: September 2003 to January 2009)

One fellowship in the humanities for each of three years.

The Library Company of Philadelphia seeks a grant of $138,000 to fund up to 12 post-doctoral fellowship months for each of three years. In 1987 the Library Company established a fellowship program, which now has 285 "alumni." Fellowship opportunities include short-term grants as well as long-term post-doctoral and dissertation fellowships. The proposed Library Company/NEH fellowships would complement these existing opportunities. Our recent renovation of a historic townhouse as a residential research center provides for the first time the kinds of facilities and amenities needed to support long-term NEH fellows and sustain a community of scholars, and we are taking the first opportunity to begin offering such fellowships.

Associated Products

Immigrant and Entrepreneur: The Transatlantic World of Caspar Wistar. (Book)
Title: Immigrant and Entrepreneur: The Transatlantic World of Caspar Wistar.
Author: Beiler, Rosalind J.
Abstract: Immigrant and Entrepreneur examines the life of German immigrant and successful businessman Caspar Wistar. Wistar arrived in Philadelphia in 1717 with nearly no money; at the time of his death in 1752, his wealth outstripped that of the contemporary elite more than threefold. Through this in-depth look at an immigrant’s path to achieving the American Dream, Beiler reevaluates the modern understanding of the entrepreneurial ideal and the immigrant experience in the colonial era. The book follows Wistar’s life from his family’s German influences to the potential reasons behind his desire to emigrate and the networks he used to establish himself as a wealthy entrepreneur once he reached his adopted home. Beiler draws from Wistar’s compelling story to examine the greater processes at work in the Atlantic world of the eighteenth century. Wistar’s success exemplifies how European influence, patterns of adaptation, and an innovative cultivation of networks helped integrate immigrants into colonial America and the Atlantic world.
Year: 2008
Publisher: University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0-271-0337

Rogue Performance: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theatre Culture. (Book)
Title: Rogue Performance: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theatre Culture.
Author: Peter Reed
Abstract: Rogue Performances recovers eighteenth and nineteenth-century American culture’s fascination with outcast and rebellious characters. Highwaymen, thieves, beggars, rioting mobs, rebellious slaves, and mutineers dominated the stage in the period’s most popular plays. Peter Reed also explores ways these characters helped to popularize theatrical forms such as ballad opera, patriotic spectacle, blackface minstrelsy, and melodrama. Reed shows how both on and offstage, these paradoxically powerful, persistent, and troubling figures reveal the contradictions of class and the force of the disempowered in the American theatrical imagination. Through analysis of both well known and lesser known plays and extensive archival research, this book challenges scholars to re-think their assumptions about the role of class in antebellum American drama.
Year: 2009
Publisher: New York Palgrave McMillan
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 0230607926

Mere Equals: The Paradox of Educated Women in the Early American Republic (Book)
Title: Mere Equals: The Paradox of Educated Women in the Early American Republic
Author: Lucia McMahon
Abstract: The author narrates a story about how a generation of young women who enjoyed access to new educational opportunities made sense of of their individual and social identities in an American nation marked by stark political inequality between the sexes. The archival research into the private documents of middling and well-to-do Americans in northern states illuminates educated women's experiences with particular life stages and relationship arcs: friendship, family, courtship, marriage, and motherhood.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/mere-equals-the-paradox-of-educated-women-in-the-early-american-republic/oclc/783861914&referer=brief_results
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780801450525

The Middle Colonies (Book Section)
Title: The Middle Colonies
Author: Wayne Bodle
Editor: Louise A. Breen
Abstract: Soon after the restoration of the Stuart Monarchy in 1660, English forces seized New Netherland from the Dutch, and carved it into a series of sovereign deputy sub-enterprises (colonies) on the "Proprietary" colonial model. As the Stuart regime wobbled and then toppled in the 1680s, its policy-makers reconsidered the strategy of fragmenting the old Dutch hearth, which they were having great difficulty "Anglicizing." But rather than reassembling sovereign structures across a jumble of new colonies, they turned to a different model of regional cohesion, associated with the intervention of William Penn after 1681, which focused on creating and fostering informal and often private networks of interest groups, proprietary, imperial, and private. These webs of interest comprised a trans-Atlantic extension of Penn's almost uncanny ability in England itself to move comfortably between communities of dissent and state suppression; between the established Anglican and his own nearly outlawed Quaker church; and, at a formal political level, between the emergent and antagonistic "Whig"and "Tory" factions of the Parliamentary system. Penn's physical health and fiscal strength faded rapidly after 1700, but the networks he had created either persevered or threw off practices, habits, and customs that became "ligaments" of a new regional order.
Year: 2012
Publisher: Routledge
Book Title: Converging Worlds: Communities and Cultures in Colonial America
ISBN: 0415964989

South Carolina's Grand Jury Presentments: The Eighteenth-Century Experience (Book Section)
Title: South Carolina's Grand Jury Presentments: The Eighteenth-Century Experience
Author: Sally Hadden
Editor: Patricia Minter
Editor: Sally Hadden
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2013
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Book Title: Signposts: New Directions in Southern Legal History

Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807 (Book)
Title: Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807
Author: Gregory O'Malley
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2014
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Prizes

Morris D. Forkosch book prize
Date: 1/15/2015
Organization: American Historical Associatiion
Abstract: In recognition of the best book in the field of British, British imperial, or British Commonwealth history since 1485.

Information Networks and the Dynamics of Migration: Swiss Anabaptist Exiles and Their Host Communities (Book Section)
Title: Information Networks and the Dynamics of Migration: Swiss Anabaptist Exiles and Their Host Communities
Author: Rosalind Beiler
Editor: Susanne Lachenicht
Abstract: abstract not available
Year: 2007
Publisher: Munster: Lit. Verlag
Book Title: Religious Refugees in Europe, Asia and North America (6th - 21st Centuries)

Migration and Loss of Spiritual Community: The Case of Daniel Falckner and Anna Maria Schubart (Book Section)
Title: Migration and Loss of Spiritual Community: The Case of Daniel Falckner and Anna Maria Schubart
Author: Rosalind Beiler
Editor: Lynne Tatlock
Abstract: abstract not available
Year: 2010
Publisher: Leiden: Brill
Book Title: Enduring Loss in Early Modern Germany

Slave Trading Etrepots and Their Hinterlands: Continued Forced Migrations after the Middle Passage to North America (Book Section)
Title: Slave Trading Etrepots and Their Hinterlands: Continued Forced Migrations after the Middle Passage to North America
Author: Gregory O'Malley
Editor: Simon Lewis
Editor: David T. Gleeson
Abstract: abstract not available
Year: 2012
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Book Title: Ambiguous Anniversary: The Bicentennial of the International Slave Trade Bans

Hand Piety: or, Operating a Book in Early New England (Book Section)
Title: Hand Piety: or, Operating a Book in Early New England
Author: Matthew P. Brown
Editor: Caroline F. Sloat
Editor: Sandra M. Gustafson
Abstract: abstract not available
Year: 2010
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Book Title: Cultural Narratives: Textuality and Performance in American Culture before 1900

Incarcerated Innocents: Inmates, Conditions, & Survival Strategies in Philadelphia's Almshouse and Workhouse (Book Section)
Title: Incarcerated Innocents: Inmates, Conditions, & Survival Strategies in Philadelphia's Almshouse and Workhouse
Author: Simon Newman
Author: Billy Gordon Smith
Editor: Michele Lise Tartar
Editor: Richard Bell
Abstract: abstract not available
Year: 2012
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Book Title: Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America

The Mid-Atlantic and the American Revolution (Article)
Title: The Mid-Atlantic and the American Revolution
Author: Wayne Bodle
Abstract: abstract not available
Year: 2015
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Pennsylvania History 82:3

Beyond the Middle Passage: Slave Migration from the Caribbean to North America, 1619-1807 (Article)
Title: Beyond the Middle Passage: Slave Migration from the Caribbean to North America, 1619-1807
Author: Gregory O'Malley
Abstract: abstract not available
Year: 2009
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: William & Mary Quarterly

Prizes

Lester J. Cappon Award
Date: 12/12/2009
Organization: William & Mary Quarterly
Abstract: for best article of the year in the William & Mary Quarterly

Douglas Adair Memorial Award
Date: 12/12/2012
Organization: William & Mary Quarterly
Abstract: given biennially to the best article published in the William & Mary Quarterly during the preceding six years

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