Come with us as we visit Stenton House, a Radical Americana exhibition partner featuring curator Laura Keim and artists Belle Pillar Fleming, Bri Murphy & Dennis Ritter. Stenton is one of the earliest, best-preserved, and most authentic historic houses in Philadelphia. It was completed in 1730 as a country-seat plantation house for James Logan, a Quaker merchant, politician, justice, scientist, scholar, and secretary to William Penn. Stenton was home to six generations of Logans and a diverse community of enslaved, indentured, and free laborers, including Dinah, who lived and labored at Stenton for over 50 years. Furnished with 18th- and 19th-century Logan family objects, and remaining in little-altered condition, a visit to Stenton offers an unparalleled experience of early Pennsylvania. For the Semiquincentennial, The Clay Studio is leading Radical Americana, a series of exhibitions organized by a consortium of Philadelphia’s arts and cultural institutions. Each celebrates how artists today are continuing the city’s robust legacy as a center for art, skill, and civic engagement. The 45 artists researched and were inspired by the art and history of Philadelphia in 1776, and the subsequent commemorations in 1876, 1926, and 1976. The artists' new work will add their voices to current dialogue about our nation’s present and future, inspire civil dialogue, celebrate Philadelphia's diversity, and continue the rich tradition of creativity in our city.

Join us for a talk with Laura Keim, Curator at Stenton, along with Bri Murphy and Belle-Pilar Fleming, artists of Sadware, a Radical Americana project now on view at Stenton Historic House. See full exhibition here: https://www.theclaystudio.org/exhibit... Interested in supporting The Clay Studio further? See here: https://www.theclaystudio.org/support

This "Wrestling with Justice: Quakers and Northern Slavery" lecture by William Fernandez Hardin was recorded on July 22, 2026. Before dawn on November 5, 1784, a young man named Jack White, as he called himself, stepped out of a windowless slave cabin, put on a new pair of shoes, and headed east: toward the James River and a place called Curles. It was a place where he was known by name, where a legal promise had been made, and broken, five years before he took that first step toward the rising sun. The promise had been signed in Philadelphia: Charles and Mary Logan, on their wedding day at the High Street Meeting House, pledged to free the slaves she had inherited as soon as the law allowed. The law changed. They refused. And so people like Jack White took action, absenting himself from Logan's plantation while Robert Pleasants, a Quaker antislavery activist in Virginia, pursued moral suasion and eventually litigation in the Virginia Court of Appeals as Pleasants v. Pleasants (1799). The story begins, in a sense, at Stenton, in James Logan's house, before it begins on that Virginia plantation. Charles Logan was his grandson. "Without Any Shadow of Claim": The Enslaved People Who Litigated Pleasants v. Pleasants is the working title for William Fernandez Hardin's manuscript. It argues that the enslaved people at the heart of the case knew they had a legal right to freedom and actively campaigned, individually and collectively, to get that right recognized. Well before the case reached a lawyer or a judge, it had been actively litigated as a matter of private law, through legal norms, precedents, and gestures, in the years between the promise and the verdict. "Without Any Shadow of Claim" builds on previous research. Litigating the Lash, Hardin's dissertation, focused on Robert Pleasants, an eighteenth-century Quaker antislavery activist who sued his family and won freedom for over four hundred enslaved people in a major court case argued by John Marshall, future Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and ultimately decided by his republican antagonist Spencer Roane of the Virginia Court of Appeals. "This Unpleasant Business," Hardin's article in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, focused on the slaveholding members of the Pleasants family, many of them former Quakers, who opposed Robert Pleasants in the litigation before the case went to trial. "Without Any Shadow of Claim" tells it from a third angle, the one that has not yet been told: the enslaved people themselves. Pleasants v. Pleasants is usually told as a story about Quaker antislavery principle and the frustrating limits of antislavery law in the post-Revolutionary era. The culmination of a research program that has already produced a dissertation focused on Robert Pleasants and a published article on the slaveholding family members who opposed him, this manuscript reclaims the case for the people at its center: the men, women, and children who understood what had been promised, who acted on that understanding long before any court gave them leave to do so, and whose names the historical record has too long left in the margins. About the speaker: William Fernandez Hardin is a historian of early America whose work centers the legal experiences of enslaved people in the Revolutionary and early national periods. His article 'This Unpleasant Business': Slavery, Law, and the Pleasants Family in Post-Revolutionary Virginia appeared in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. He received his Ph.D. in History from Vanderbilt University and J.D. from American University in Washington, D.C. He teaches history at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville, Tennessee. "Wrestling with Justice: Quakers and Northern Slavery" has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

Recorded program from February 10, 2025. Presentation by Jim Fussell, Scholar in Residence at Pendle Hill Quaker Center, Wallingford, PA In a time when Philadelphia’s historical exhibits are being dismantled, this talk highlights how enslaved Black people in Pennsylvania challenged colonial-era Quaker enslavers through escape, arson, confrontation, and self-advocacy. Their actions, spanning 1725 to 1781, reshaped Quaker and Pennsylvania history from the ground up. Centering Stenton as a site of lived struggle, the presentation invites participants to reconsider familiar narratives about Quakers. Close readings of runaway notices, court records, and other documents reveal the persistent acts of Black agency and resistance. This program is part of Stenton's 'Wrestling With Justice: Quakers and Northern Slavery Project,' supported by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.

In this Facebook Live event, Stenton Museum curator Laura Keim visits HSP's vaults. She discusses key archival finds that allowed Stenton to reconstruct the life of Dinah, a once enslaved woman who saved the house from intended burning by British soldiers in 1777. This research fed into realizing a new Dinah memorial space at Stenton, to be publicly unveiled on April 20, 2024. This event is part of HSP's Soul of America seri

This Zoom was recorded on February 22, 2024. Adrienne Whaley, Director of Education and Community Engagement at the Museum of the American Revolution, constructs Philadelphia through the eyes of Dinah, a formerly enslaved woman who lived and labored at Stenton. Stories about Revolutionary War era in our city abound, but rarely from the point of view of Philadelphia’s Black residents. Whaley discusses the daily lives of free and enslaved populations, luminaries like the Forten family, and the origins of the community and culture found in our city today.

Recording of Stenton's Facebook LIVE from August 11, 2023. This is a close-up, spe-SHELL progress report on the Decorative Arts Trust funded cleaning, stabilization, and repair of Anne Reckless Emlen’s 1757 grotto box with Objects Conservator Lara Kaplan and Colonial Dames Chapter II Curatorial Assistant Kaila Temple.

Facebook LIVE program, recorded on March 3, 2023 - Curatorial Assistant Kaila Temple discusses Dame and dress scholar Elisabeth McClellan, author of "Historic Dress in America 1607-1800", and how she used objects from Stenton’s early collection to illustrate her 1904 book. This is a special opportunity to see rarely-displayed objects from Stenton’s textiles collection up close and hear how these objects played a role in McClellan’s creation of one of the earliest publications on early American dress.

In this webinar, recorded on 12/16/2022, Tom Price, a University of Delaware Art History PhD candidate, considered and discussed Stenton’s recently arrived Sarah Logan Norris portrait. Nineteenth-century Logan family tradition attributed the portrait to the English painter Sir Godfrey Kneller; however, Tom’s study of the portrait, including comparisons with other portraits at Stenton and elsewhere and archival research in Logan and Norris family papers at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, points toward the Swedish immigrant painter, Gustavus Hesselius, as the creator of Sarah’s likeness. Speaker Bio: Thomas Price is a third-year PhD student at the University of Delaware studying nineteenth-century American art, where he has focused on landscape representation, the environment, extraction, and queer art. He received his BA in Art History from Drew University in 2015 and his MA from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art in 2017. Before starting at UD, he was the Curatorial Assistant for American Art at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, where he co-curated the exhibition This Land: American Engagements with the Natural World. More recently, he was a curatorial intern at the Biggs Museum of Art and a Research Fellow for Stenton during summer 2022.