NEH Post-Doctoral Fellowships at the Library Company of Philadelphia

FAIN: RA-50129-13

Library Company of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA 19107-5679)
John C. Van Horne (Project Director: August 2012 to April 2015)
Richard S. Newman (Project Director: April 2015 to June 2021)
Emily Guthrie (Project Director: June 2021 to September 2021)

Fourteen months of stipend support (2 to 3 fellowships) per year for three years and a contribution to defray costs associated with the selection of fellows.

The Library Company of Philadelphia seeks a grant of $249,300 to fund up to 18 post-doctoral fellowship months each of three years. In 1987 the Library Company established a fellowship program, which now has more than 600 "alumni." Fellowship opportunities each year include about three dozen one-month grants; several long-term post-doctoral and dissertation fellowships through the Library Company's Program in Early American Economy and Society; long-term dissertation fellowships endowed by a local foundation; and several long-term post-doctoral fellowships funded by a FPIRI grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Our residential research center in a renovated historic townhouse adjacent to our main building provides the kinds of facilities and amenities needed to support long-term NEH fellows and sustain a community of scholars. Our very positive experience with the previous NEH Fellows encourages us to apply for continued funding of this invaluable program.

Associated Products

The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation (Book)
Title: The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation
Author: Benjamin Fagan
Abstract: "The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation" shows how antebellum African Americans used the newspaper as a means for translating their belief in black “chosenness” into plans and programs for black liberation. During the decades leading up to the Civil War, the idea that God had marked black Americans as his chosen people on earth became a central article of faith in northern black communities, with black newspaper editors articulating it in their journals. Benjamin Fagan shows how the early black press helped shape the relationship between black chosenness and the struggles for black freedom and equality in America, in the process transforming the very notion of a chosen American nation. Exploring how cultures of print helped antebellum black Americans apply their faith to struggles grand and small, this work uses the vast and neglected archive of the early black press to shed new light on many of the central figures and questions of African American studies
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/black-newspaper-and-the-chosen-nation/oclc/951505566&referer=brief_results
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780820349404
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Painting the 'Baronial Castle': Thomas Cole at Featherston Park (Article)
Title: Painting the 'Baronial Castle': Thomas Cole at Featherston Park
Author: William L. Coleman
Abstract: Thomas Cole's paintings of the country house of the antebellum agriculturalist and geologist George William Featherstonhaugh have fallen into undeserved obscurity. The mere fact that Cole made "house portraits" goes against received wisdom about his rejection of topographic view painting in favor of a rigorously intellectual and poetic art of landscape. Moreover, the reception history of the three surviving canvases in this series has been clouded by the political disputes period commentators had with the patron. Reexamining existing sources alongside new archival discoveries, William L. Coleman interprets the Featherston Park paintings as early evidence of Cole's abiding concern with the inhabited landscape across media.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: http://www.academia.edu/35437175/Painting_the_Baronial_Castle_Thomas_Cole_at_Featherston_Park
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Huntington Library Quarterly

Prizes

Essay Prize of the Landscape History Chapter
Date: 4/18/2018
Organization: Society of Architectural Historians
Abstract: Awarded for a "thoughtful and engaging study that sheds new light on a familiar topic, argues rigorously for a reconsideration of established historiographic assumptions, and astutely expands the terms with which we approach the relationship between landscape and property in nineteenth-century America."

Men Is Cheap: Exposing the Frauds of Free Labor in Civil War America (Book)
Title: Men Is Cheap: Exposing the Frauds of Free Labor in Civil War America
Author: Brian Luskey
Abstract: When a Civil War substitute broker told business associates that "Men is cheep here to Day," he exposed an unsettling contradiction at the heart of the Union's war effort. Despite Northerners' devotion to the principles of free labor, the war produced rampant speculation and coercive labor arrangements that many Americans labeled fraudulent. Debates about this contradiction focused on employment agencies called "intelligence offices," institutions of dubious character that nevertheless served the military and domestic necessities of the Union army and Northern households. Northerners condemned labor agents for pocketing fees above and beyond contracts for wages between employers and employees. Yet the transactions these middlemen brokered with vulnerable Irish immigrants, Union soldiers and veterans, former slaves, and Confederate deserters defined the limits of independence in the wage labor economy and clarified who could prosper in it. Men Is Cheap shows that in the process of winning the war, Northerners were forced to grapple with the frauds of free labor. Labor brokers, by helping to staff the Union military and Yankee households, did indispensable work that helped the Northern state and Northern employers emerge victorious. They also gave rise to an economic and political system that enriched the managerial class at the expense of laborers--a reality that resonates to this day.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://uncpress.org/book/9781469654324/men-is-cheap/
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-1-4696-543

The Driver’s Story: Labor and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Book)
Title: The Driver’s Story: Labor and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery
Author: Randy Browne
Abstract: The story of the driver is the story of Atlantic slavery. Starting in the seventeenth-century Caribbean, enslavers developed the driving system to solve their fundamental problem: how to extract labor from captive workers who had every reason to resist. In this system, enslaved Black drivers were tasked with supervising and punishing other enslaved laborers. In "The Driver’s Story", Randy M. Browne illuminates the predicament and harrowing struggles of these men—and sometimes women—at the heart of the plantation world. What, Browne asks, did it mean to be trapped between the insatiable labor demands of white plantation authorities and the constant resistance of one’s fellow enslaved laborers? In this insightful and unsettling account of slavery and racial capitalism, Browne shows that on plantations across the Americas, drivers were at the center of enslaved people’s working lives, social relationships, and struggles against slavery. Drivers enforced labor discipline and confronted the resistance of their fellow enslaved laborers, aiming to maintain a position that helped them survive in a world where enslaved people were treated as disposable. Drivers also protected the people they supervised, negotiating workloads and customary rights to essentials like food and rest with white authorities. Within the slave community, drivers helped other enslaved people create a sense of belonging, as husbands and fathers, as Big Men, and as leaders of diasporic African “nations.” Sometimes, drivers even organized rebellions, sabotaging the very system they were appointed to support.
Year: 2024
Primary URL: https://www.pennpress.org/9781512825862/the-drivers-story/
Primary URL Description: publisher's website
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781512825862

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