Join us Thursday, 30 May 2024, from 4-5 p.m. ET for a Fellow's Forum with John Van Horne, Director Emeritus of the Library Company of Philadelphia.
Held in the Berkeley Conference Room of the Jefferson Library this research forum will consist of a presentation by Dr. Van Horne, followed by an opportunity to ask questions and discuss with the group.
Preregistration is not required to attend.
About the Presentation
British-born architect and engineer Latrobe (1764-1820) filled sketchbooks and journals with watercolors, drawings, and keen observations as he crossed the Atlantic and traversed the young republic. His fourteen extant sketchbooks constitute the most important graphic representations of Jeffersonian America by a trained artist in existence. Almost forty years ago, about 140 selected images were published in a volume of the Latrobe Papers, now long out of print and hard to come by. But many more have never been published. The project -- a collaboration with the Maryland Center for History and Culture, the repository of most of Latrobe’s surviving work -- is to digitize all of the sketchbooks; utilize the accompanying descriptive text from the book; and research and describe the unpublished images for what will be a comprehensive website. This digital humanities project will make accessible to all a unique visual record of Jeffersonian America.
About John Van Horne
John Van Horne is Director Emeritus of the Library Company of Philadelphia. He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia. His publications include many volumes of the The Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe and other edited works including Religious Philanthropy and Colonial Slavery: The American Correspondence of the Associates of Dr. Bray, 1717-1777 (1985); The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women's Political Culture in Antebellum America (1994; with Jean Fagan Yellin); and America's Curious Botanist: A Tercentennial Reappraisal of John Bartram (1699-1777) (2004; with Nancy Hoffmann), as well as numerous articles in scholarly journals. Van Horne has also created two websites: Thomas Jefferson’s “3. volumes bound in Marbled Paper” (jefferson3volumes.org), in collaboration with The Papers of Thomas Jefferson; and America’s Earliest Museums, a virtual reconstruction of the contents of the museums of Pierre Eugène Du Simitière and Charles Willson Peale (philadelphia-museums.washingtonpapers.org), to be hosted by the American Philosophical Society.