Eastern State is stepping into 2026 with the style of ambitious programming Philadelphia does best—history-forward, community-rooted, and designed to make you feel the present more sharply. A Time for Liberty—formally titled A Time for Liberty: Our Shared History, Our Shared Future—is a yearlong slate of free, inclusive public programs created in honor of the United States’ 250th birthday. And because Eastern State’s own origin story is tied to America’s earliest experiments in criminal justice reform, the setting couldn’t be more fitting for a project that explores the evolving meanings of liberty, justice, and civic responsibility.
There’s real intentionality behind A Time for Liberty. The initiative is built to invite reflection, dialogue, and civic engagement through family-friendly festivals, panel discussions that blend scholarship with lived experience, pop-up exhibitions drawn from Eastern State’s archives, and new online learning resources meant to extend the work into classrooms nationwide. A Time for Liberty positions Eastern State as a living forum for the big questions Philadelphia has always been willing to wrestle with.
Eastern State’s beginnings are part of the story here. In the early days of the nation, the idea for the penitentiary emerged as a bold, reform-minded initiative—built on a then-radical belief in human dignity and the capacity for change. As America’s first penitentiary, Eastern State became a symbol of evolving ideas about liberty, justice, and rehabilitation, and A Time for Liberty uses that legacy to help us ask what accountability looks like now—especially in a city that’s about to sit at the center of the Semiquincentennial spotlight.
As Dr. Kerry Sautner, President & CEO of Eastern State, puts it: “In 2026, Eastern State is creating opportunities for people of all ages to engage with complex questions about liberty, justice, and accountability in accessible and meaningful ways. As the nation marks its Semiquincentennial, A Time for Liberty invites the public to reflect on where we’ve been and consider how we shape a more just future together.”
A Time for Liberty Highlights the Stories We Don’t Usually Hear
The calendar of A Time for Liberty is designed to keep pulling you back—because it isn’t one signature weekend, it’s a year’s worth of reasons to return. One of the biggest early moments is The Great Escape: Stories of Resistance and Creativity at Eastern State, a weeklong series running March 27 through April 5. I love that Eastern State is framing this through resilience and creativity, not just confinement, inviting visitors to discover stories of resistance within one of America’s most influential prisons—and to reflect on what those stories mean for our communities today.
The Great Escape will include Speakeasy and Tunnel Escape Mini Tours, pop-up talks on Al Capone and policing in Prohibition-era America, and a sitewide, interactive secret letter delivery activity. That last detail is especially smart: A Time for Liberty offers visitors ways to learn, participate, and move through the space differently, allowing them to experience history as something active rather than static.
In May 2026, the program Philly Saves: Adaptive Reuse of Sites of Memory and Trauma will examine how people steward the physical legacy of democracy—prisons, churches, burial grounds, schools, and factories—and how those sites can be reclaimed as spaces of civic dialogue, healing, and community. It’s a powerful theme for Philadelphia, where historic buildings aren’t just postcard backdrops; they’re places where real lives played out, and where the meaning of “public memory” is constantly up for negotiation. A Time for Liberty fortifies the sentiment that the way we preserve places can either freeze the past or help us repair the future.
Then on May 27, Eastern State kicks off its annual Wednesday Nights series with an interfaith dialogue on faith, reentry, and prison reform. The conversation will bring together Jewish, Christian, and Muslim leaders to examine how religious traditions have shaped American approaches to rehabilitation, moral responsibility, and reintegration since the nation’s founding. Different communities in the same room, disagreeing respectfully, and still searching for something shared… There’s nothing more Philly than that.
A Time for Liberty Connects Faith, Freedom, and Civic Action
One of the most compelling moments on the horizon arrives on July 2, when A Time for Liberty celebrates the opening of Freedom through Faith: Judaism at Eastern State and Beyond. The exhibit will explore how religious freedom—framed as “unalienable rights”—was a foundational promise of the Declaration that was represented and practiced inside America’s first penitentiary, especially among its Jewish population.
The focus on how faith sustained dignity, community, and moral agency inside confinement feels both historically specific and emotionally universal. It’s also a reminder that “liberty of conscience” isn’t an abstract concept—it’s something people have insisted on even in the most restrictive conditions.
Throughout the year, A Time for Liberty will also feature Justice 101 conversations centered on liberty and justice, including a June event with Professor Hasan Jeffries on the history of Juneteenth and its meaning today. That’s a crucial inclusion for a Semiquincentennial year, because any honest exploration of American freedom has to include the stories of those who had to fight hardest to claim it.
And because 2026 in Philadelphia will be crowded with milestone programming, A Time for Liberty smartly plugs into the broader citywide narrative. Eastern State will participate in 52 Weeks of Firsts on October 3 in partnership with the Philadelphia Historic District, spotlighting its legacy as the nation’s first penitentiary. In a year when everyone will be talking about “firsts,” Eastern State’s “first” comes with complicated weight—and A Time for Liberty doesn’t shy away from that.
Across the full year, A Time for Liberty programming includes five family-friendly festivals designed to connect people of all ages with history, culture, and civic dialogue. It includes nine panel discussions featuring scholars and systems-impacted leaders, two pop-up exhibitions drawn from Eastern State’s extraordinary archives, and new online learning resources intended to bring A Time for Liberty into classrooms nationwide.
A Time for Liberty is a yearlong invitation to show up again and again, to listen harder, and to leave with better questions than the ones you arrived with.
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