A Time for Liberty: Our Shared History, Our Shared Future

Eastern State Penitentiary is running a yearlong series called A Time for Liberty: Our Shared History, Our Shared Future, which opened on Monday, May 25, 2026, and runs through Thursday, December 31, 2026. It's a slate of free, inclusive programming that the site is putting on to mark the 250th anniversary of American independence.

The whole thing is built around the history of the place. Eastern State opened in 1787, just eleven years after the Declaration of Independence, as the country's first true penitentiary. It started as a radical experiment in criminal justice, based on the belief in human dignity and the capacity for change. That founding vision soon collided with the reality of total isolation and the birth of modern solitary confinement, and the site became a symbol of how the country's ideas about liberty, justice, and rehabilitation have shifted over time. A Time for Liberty takes that history and asks visitors to wrestle with what liberty and justice mean today.

Because it's a yearlong series rather than a single show, you've got plenty of time to fit it in. The programming is free, and it's made possible with support from a long list of civic and cultural partners: the City of Philadelphia, America250PA, Campus250, the Philadelphia Funder Collaborative for the Semiquincentennial, the Philadelphia City Fund's 2026 Milestone Grant Fund (supported by PECO), the National Trust Preservation Fund, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. It's all happening at the Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site in Philadelphia, running from May 25 through December 31, 2026, and admission is free.