291st Annual Dinner - Featuring Award Winning Author and Scholar Jim Downs

For almost 300 years, the Library Company has gathered annually to celebrate our steadfast commitment to learning. We are excited to invite you to join us at this celebration of history, scholarship, and education. We plan to host the event in-person at the Union League of Philadelphia, and guests can watch the presentation virtually as well. Thanks to our sponsors, we are almost at 85% of our $125,000 goal! Your support will help ensure that the Library Company can continue to recover and retell the stories of our past to ensure an educated citizenry and a better future. We'll be mailing out the formal event invitations soon -- we hope we can add your name as a sponsor! About Our Speaker Dr. Jim Downs is one of the country’s foremost young historians, as well as a former Library Company fellow. He is the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College, and a 2022-2023 fellow in residence at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. He is the author and editor of seven books, and has published articles and essays in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Slate, Vice, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. He is the co-series-editor with Catherine Clinton of History in the Headlines, at the University of Georgia Press. About The Book Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine is an eye-opening work that re-examines the foundations of modern medicine, showing how advances in the study of infectious diseases relied on nonconsenting subjects such as conscripted soldiers, enslaved people, and others. Interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities? Please contact Raechel Hammer, Chief Development Officer, at rhammer@librarycompany.org or 215-546-3181 x143.