The History Book Club discussion
AMERICAN HISTORY
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BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
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Edmund S. Morgan
I thought I would add the link to the book that awakened my interest in history. My sister minored in history and recommended it. What a terrific book. Brought tears to my eyes at one point - and it was not his death! It made Franklin real for me. He still feels like a friend. OK, I think I've raved long enough!
Walter Isaacson
Any discussion of books about Benjamin Franklin must at least mention his autobiography. I found it a great read.
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Benjamin Franklin
I've never read Isaacson's book (his recent work on Einstein is on my Kindle waiting to be read) although I do want to recommend HW Brands'
The First American The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, which came out about the same time as Isaacson's work. I believe Brands' work was a finalist for the Pulitzer that year in history (he's been a finalist twice for that award). He is one of our most prolific history authors working today and an unbelievable lecturer if anyone has an opportunity to hear him. I read The First American a few years ago (one of about a dozen Brands books I've read) and now include Franklin among one of my favorite American figures.
Craig, you are getting the hang of the postings, almost there! Book cover, author photo (when available) and author link. Like this:
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H.W. BrandsIf you need any help you can ask any of the moderators. Once you get it down it's a snap.
Sounds like a terrific book!
Craig wrote: "I've never read Isaacson's book (his recent work on Einstein is on my Kindle waiting to be read) although I do want to recommend HW Brands' The First American The First A..."
That is a winner!
That's a good proper post Peter. You have caught on quickly. :-)
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Stacy SchiffSynopsis:
In this dazzling work of history, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author follows Benjamin Franklin to France for the crowning achievement of his career
In December of 1776 a small boat delivered an old man to France." So begins an enthralling narrative account of how Benjamin Franklin-seventy years old, without any diplomatic training, and possessed of the most rudimentary French-convinced France, an absolute monarchy, to underwrite America's experiment in democracy.
When Franklin stepped onto French soil, he well understood he was embarking on the greatest gamble of his career. By virtue of fame, charisma, and ingenuity, Franklin outmaneuvered British spies, French informers, and hostile colleagues; engineered the Franco-American alliance of l778; and helped to negotiate the peace of l783. The eight-year French mission stands not only as Franklin's most vital service to his country but as the most revealing of the man.
In A Great Improvisation, Stacy Schiff draws from new and little-known sources to illuminate the least-explored part of Franklin's life. Here is an unfamiliar, unforgettable chapter of the Revolution, a rousing tale of American infighting, and the treacherous backroom dealings at Versailles that would propel George Washington from near decimation at Valley Forge to victory at Yorktown. From these pages emerge a particularly human and yet fiercely determined Founding Father, as well as a profound sense of how fragile, improvisational, and international was our country's bid for independence.
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by David Waldstreicher (no image)Synopsis:
Scientist, abolitionist, revolutionary: that is the Benjamin Franklin we know and celebrate. To this description, the talented young historian David Waldstreicher shows we must add runaway, slave master, and empire builder. But Runaway America does much more than revise our image of a beloved founding father. Finding slavery at the center of Franklin's life, Waldstreicher proves it was likewise central to the Revolution, America's founding, and the very notion of freedom we associate with both.
Franklin was the sole Founding Father who was once owned by someone else and was among the few to derive his fortune from slavery. As an indentured servant, Franklin fled his master before his term was complete; as a struggling printer, he built a financial empire selling newspapers that not only advertised the goods of a slave economy (not to mention slaves) but also ran the notices that led to the recapture of runaway servants. Perhaps Waldstreicher's greatest achievement is in showing that this was not an ironic outcome but a calculated one. America's freedom, no less than Franklin's, demanded that others forgo liberty.
Through the life of Franklin, Runaway America provides an original explanation to the paradox of American slavery and freedom.
I am reading an interesting book about Ben's youngest sister Jane Fraklin Meacon. This book talked about how people used to save Ben's letters and pass them around to people they knew.Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin Jill Lepore
Interesting, Kathy. Thank you for sharing.Oh, if you have a book cover, you don't need a title link :-)
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Jill Lepore
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Jonathan LyonsSynopsis:
Benjamin Franklin and his contemporaries brought the Enlightenment to America--an intellectual revolution that laid the foundation for the political one that followed. With the "first Drudgery" of settling the American colonies now well and truly past, Franklin announced in 1743, it was high time that the colonists set about improving the lot of humankind through collaborative inquiry. From Franklin's idea emerged the American Philosophical Society, an association hosted in Philadelphia and dedicated to the harnessing of man's intellectual and creative powers for the common good. The animus behind the Society was and is a disarmingly simple one-that the value of knowledge is directly proportional to its utility. This straightforward idea has left a profound mark on American society and culture and on the very idea of America itself-and through America, on the world as a whole.
From celebrated historian of knowledge Jonathan Lyons comes The Society for Useful Knowledge, telling the story of America's coming-of-age through its historic love affair with practical invention, applied science, and self-reliance. Offering fresh, original portraits of figures like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, and the inimitable, endlessly inventive Franklin, Lyons gives us vital new perspective on the American founding. He illustrates how the movement for useful knowledge is key to understanding the flow of American society and culture from colonial times to our digital present.
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by Jack Fruchtman Jr. (no photo)Synopsis:
Ben Franklin was at the heart of the Enlightenment. He drew to him some of the greatest minds of that time, people who remain among the most intriguing in history—Americans, Englishmen, and Frenchmen whose ideas continue to shape how we live to this day. Through engaging anecdotes and short histories, Atlantic Cousins: Benjamin Franklin and His Visionary Friends includes intimate portraits of Franklin and Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, Voltaire, the Marquis de Condorcet, Georges-Jacques Danton, Camille Desmoulins—and their arch-enemy, William Cobbett, an unrelenting monarchist and anglophile. Plenty of illustrations and maps complement the material. Aside from the colorful personalities, author Jack Fruchtman documents developments from Thomas Paine's smokeless candles to the founding of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Virginia; the debate that led to the Declaration of Independence; the abolitionist movement both in America and abroad; and Paine's Rights of Man. Atlantic Cousins shows just how Ben Franklin and his circle of friends shaped this unique and remarkable period in history.
Jerome wrote: "Atlantic Cousins: Benjamin Franklin and His Visionary Friends by Jack Fruchtman Jr. (no photo)Sy..."
One of my favorites of the founders. And the enlightenment is very interesting stuff too.
The Letters of Benjamin Franklin and Jane Mecom
Surviving correspondence between Franklin and his longest-lived sibling.
Good effort on the citation, Averin. This is how it should look like:
(no image) The Letters of Benjamin Franklin & Jane Mecom by
Benjamin Franklin
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by Willard Sterne Randall (no photo)Synopsis:
Almost everyone is familiar with the accomplishments of Benjamin Franklin, but few know that he had an illegitimate son named William, an intelligent young man who first served his father as a military adviser, legal counsel, and pamphleteer, eventually rising to be Royal Governor of New Jersey, only to become his father's implacable enemy. A Little Revenge is the untold story of the tortured relationship between these two extraordinary men. Benjamin hoped that through William he could found a political dynasty that would rival that of the Adams family.
But when the American Revolution broke out and William refused to follow his father and remained loyal to the British Crown, an enmity developed that was frightening in its ferocity. When William was captured by the rebels, his father made sure he was confined to a notorious prison and intervened in Washington's attempt to free William through an exchange of prisoners. Once William did secure his freedom, he became deeply involved in the illegal execution of rebel prisoners. William was exiled to Britain, and he and Benjamin lived out their lives without ever forgiving the other. In fact, after the Revolution, they spoke only once to each other.
A Little Revenge reveals a whole other aspect to the American mythology of Benjamin Franklin and is a brand-new portrait of his fascinating son.
I did know he had an illegitimate son who became a royalist and that they didn't get along, but I didn't know the details.
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by Philip Dray (no photo)Synopsis:
Stealing God’s Thunder is a concise, richly detailed biography of Benjamin Franklin viewed through the lens of his scientific inquiry and its ramifications for American democracy. Today we think of Benjamin Franklin as a founder of American independence who also dabbled in science. But in Franklin’s day it was otherwise. Long before he was an eminent statesman, he was famous for his revolutionary scientific work, especially his experiments with lightning and electricity.
Pulitzer Prize finalist Philip Dray uses the evolution of Franklin’s scientific curiosity and empirical thinking as a metaphor for America’s struggle to establish its fundamental values. Set against the backdrop of the Enlightenment and America’s pursuit of political equality for all, Stealing God’s Thunder recounts how Franklin unlocked one of the greatest natural mysteries of his day, the seemingly unknowable powers of electricity and lightning. Rich in historic detail and based on numerous primary sources, Stealing God’s Thunder is a fascinating original look at one of our most beloved and complex founding fathers.
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by Tom Tucker (no photo)Synopsis:
Every schoolchild in America knows that Benjamin Franklin flew a kite during a thunderstorm in the summer of 1752. Electricity from the clouds above traveled down the kite's twine and threw a spark from a key that Franklin had attached to the string. He thereby proved that lightning and electricity were one.
What many of us do not realize is that Franklin used this breakthrough in his day's intensely competitive field of electrical science to embarrass his French and English rivals. His kite experiment was an international event and the Franklin that it presented to the world—a homespun, rural philosopher-scientist performing an immensely important and dangerous experiment with a child's toy—became the Franklin of myth. In fact, this sly presentation on Franklin's part so charmed the French that he became an irresistible celebrity when he traveled there during the American Revolution. The crowds and the journalists, and the ladies, cajoled the French powers into joining us in our fight against the British.
What no one has successfully proven until now—and what few have suggested—is that Franklin never flew the kite at all. Benjamin Franklin was an enthusiastic hoaxer. And with the electric kite, he performed his greatest hoax. As Tucker shows, it was this trick that may have won the American Revolution.
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by Francis Jennings (no photo)Synopsis:
A distinguished historian of early America sees Franklin's influence on the course of the revolutionary movement in a new light. Benjamin Franklin was a man of genius and enormous ego, smart enough not to flaunt his superiority but to let others proclaim it. To understand him and his role in great events, one must realize the omnipresence of this ego, and the extent to which he mirrored the feelings of other colonial Pennsylvanians. With this in mind, Francis Jennings sets forth some new ideas about Franklin as the "first American." In so doing, he provides a new view of the beginnings of the American Revolution in Franklin's struggle against William Penn. By striving against Penn's feudal lordship (and therefore against King George) Franklin became master of the Pennsylvania assembly. It was in this role that he suggested a meeting of the Continental Congress which, as Jennings notes, flies in the face of historical opinion which suggests that Boston patriots had to drag Pennsylvanians into the revolution. Franklin's autobiography omits discussion of his heroic struggle against Penn and, in so doing, robs history of his true role in the making of the new country. It is through an accurate accounting of what Franklin did, not what he said he did in his autobiography (which Jennings likens to a campaign speech), that we understand the author's use of the term "first American."
I know little about Franklin other than his politics and creativity. This book should definitely give me an interesting insight into the 'man'.
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Release date: September 10, 2015
American in Europe: The Radicalising of Benjamin Franklin
by Robert Lawson-Peebles (no photo)Synopsis:
Benjamin Franklin's lifetime was marked by great change. His birth in 1706 took place the year before the Union of Scottish and English Parliaments. Cotton Mather's "Magnalia Christi Americana "had been published four years earlier. The sons and daughters of the Pilgrim Fathers could still be seen in Boston streets. When Franklin died in 1790 Burke published his "Reflections on the Revolution in France," and Blake published "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell." Philadelphia had become the nation's capital, and would remain so until 1800. In 1791 the Bill of Rights was ratified and the First Bank of the United States incorporated. In 1792 the cornerstone of the White House was laid, the New York Stock Exchange opened, and Kentucky admitted as the fifteenth State of the Union. The America into which Franklin was born had a fragmented colonial structure. When he died the United States had an embryonic modern economy, and uneasy relations with Great Britain.
Franklin played a large part in the transformation of both nations, and he did so by responding flexibly, often using the weapons of irony and parody, to changing times. If he deserves to be known as a prototypical American, it is as a trickster. This brilliant and original biography of Franklin will re examine his life as that of a transatlantic figure. Examining his time in London its effect on his views of America and its Independence, illustrating the themes of his life in science, the arts and his political development it will shed new light on one of the most remarkable figures in American history.
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Release date: June 9, 2015
The Printer and the Preacher: Ben Franklin, George Whitefield, and the Surprising Friendship That Invented America
by Randy Petersen (no photo)Synopsis:
A groundbreaking look at the strange friendship between George Whitefield and Benjamin Franklin, who together defined what it means to be an American.
They were the most famous men in America. They came from separate countries, followed different philosophies, and led dissimilar lives. But they were fast friends. No two people did more to shape America in the mid-1700s.
Benjamin Franklin was the American prototype: hard-working, inventive, practical, funny, with humble manners and lofty dreams. George Whitefield was the most popular preacher in an era of great piety, whose outdoor preaching across the colonies was heard by thousands, all of whom were told, "You must be born again." People became excited about God. They began reading the Bible and supporting charities. When Whitefield died in 1770, on a preaching tour in New Hampshire, he had built a spiritual foundation for a new nation--just as his surviving friend, Ben Franklin, had built its social foundation. Together these two men helped establish a new nation founded on liberty. This is the story of their amazing friendship.
Just started reading a biography on Benjamin Franklin. Although there is truth in much of what is said about him, some not very complimentary, I find him to be a fascinating historical figure. The book I am reading is The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin
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H.W. Brands.
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I never knew Franklin had an illegitimate son. Another book on my to read list. Good shout.
I just finished Isaacson's biography of Franklin, which I thought was balanced and very readable. Isaacson's theme is that Franklin both represented and championed the emerging "American" ethos. I've not read Brand's book yet, but I'd like to get his take on Franklin.
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Walter Isaacson
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H.W. Brands
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Release date: July 1, 2015
Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire
by Carla J. Mulford (no photo)Synopsis:
Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire provides a painstaking study of the Founding Father's stances on government, imperialism, and fiscal policy, ultimately emphasizing how his opinions on these matters evolved over the course of his lifetime.
Carla Mulford uses Franklin's prodigious literary output-which includes letters, pamphlets, newspaper articles, journal entries, and drafted speeches-to demonstrate how his views shifted, with special attention to the role played by Great Britain in his decision-making process before, during, and after the Revolution. The book begins with Franklin's progressive early writings on mercantilism, freedom of conscience, and freedom of the press, considering how they were shaped by his English-born parents and their decision to leave their tumultuous homeland in the seventeenth century. Franklin's young adult and middle years, when he became heavily involved with Pennsylvania politics, see a sharply conservative shift in his attitudes toward empire and monetary policy. Mulford draws on letters and issues of Poor Richard's Almanack from these years to reveal the beginnings of a conservative turn in his thought, highlighting his surprising support for the politics of imperialism.
Franklin's mature years as the colonies' chief representative and cultural ambassador in Britain and Europe form the content of the next two chapters, which elucidate Franklin's disenchantment with the British colonial administrations overseeing the Thirteen Colonies. Mining Franklin's autobiography, the book's last chapters cover Franklin's ultimate rejection of Great Britain and his condemnation of imperialism, especially with regard to Ireland and India. Overall, Mulford's monograph offers fresh, nuanced interpretations of the central issues that preoccupied Franklin throughout his life.
R.M.F wrote: "I never knew Franklin had an illegitimate son. Another book on my to read list. Good shout."Interesting part about Franklin's illegitimate son, William, was that they were on opposite sides during the American Revolution.
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Release date: February 11, 2016
Benjamin Franklin in London: The British Life of America's Founding Father
by George Goodwin (no photo)Synopsis:
For the great majority of his long life, Benjamin Franklin was a loyal British royalist. In 1757, having made his fortune in Philadelphia and established his fame as a renowned experimental scientist, he crossed the Atlantic to live as a gentleman in the heaving metropolis of London. With just a brief interlude, a house in Craven Street was to be his home until 1775.
From there he mixed with both the brilliant and the powerful, whether in London coffee house clubs, at the Royal Society, or on his summer travels around the British Isles and continental Europe. He counted David Hume, Matthew Boulton, Joseph Priestley, Edmund Burke and Erasmus Darwin among his friends, and as an American colonial representative he had access to successive Prime Ministers and even the King.
The early 1760s saw Britain's elevation to global superpower status with victory in the Seven Years War and the succession of the young, active George III. These two events brought a sharp new edge to political competition in London and redefined the relationship between Britain and its colonies. They would profoundly affect Franklin himself, eventually placing him in opposition with his ambitious son William.
Though Franklin long sought to prevent the break with Great Britain, his own actions would finally help cause that very event. On the eve of the American War of Independence, Franklin fled arrest and escaped by sea. He would never return to London.
With his unique focus on the fullness of Benjamin Franklin's life in London, George Goodwin has created an enthralling portrait of the man, the city and the age.
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The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin
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Gordon S. WoodSynopsis:
From the most respected chronicler of the early days of the Republic—and winner of both the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes—comes a landmark work that rescues Benjamin Franklin from a mythology that has blinded generations of Americans to the man he really was and makes sense of aspects of his life and career that would have otherwise remained mysterious. In place of the genial polymath, self-improver, and quintessential American, Gordon S. Wood reveals a figure much more ambiguous and complex—and much more interesting. Charting the passage of Franklin’s life and reputation from relative popular indifference (his death, while the occasion for mass mourning in France, was widely ignored in America) to posthumous glory, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin sheds invaluable light on the emergence of our country’s idea of itself.
Franklin: A Life of Brilliance
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Alexander KennedySynopsis:
Benjamin Franklin was named "The First American". He was a founding father of the United States, revolutionized our understanding of electricity, and personifies American culture throughout the world. Enjoy the surprising and entertaining true story of Benjamin Franklin and rediscover one of history's most prolific figures.
Benjamin Franklin: The First Civilized American
by Phillips Russell (no photo)Synopsis:
[A]t the age of 24, Benjamin becomes the head of his own business, without having saved any money, without having worked unusually hard, without having omitted any of the pleasures beloved by imaginative youth, and without having lived up to any of the maxims for which he is later to become renowned. -from "Chapter XI: Philadelphia's Youngest Master-Printer" It's with equal measures of unstinting respect and gentle reproach that renowned biographer Phillips Russell tackles the life of one of the legendary figures of colonial America and the Revolution, a figure he deems "mirthful, generous, open-minded, learned, tolerant, and humor-loving...the first American man of the world." A delight to read, this is a cheerful, warmly admiring recounting of the story of the printer and the politician, the debaucher and the diplomat, a man whose "chief weakness" was a lack of aptitude for mathematics, who was "not above looking to the church to do police duty over his womenfolk," who was "midwife at the birth of the world's first great republic." Profusely illustrated and bursting with the author's enthusiasm as well as its subject's abundant personality, this is a classic of American historical literature.
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Release date: May 23, 2017
Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father
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Thomas S. KiddSynopsis:
Renowned as a printer, scientist, and diplomat, Benjamin Franklin also published more works on religious topics than any other eighteenth-century American layperson. Born to Boston Puritans, by his teenage years Franklin had abandoned the exclusive Christian faith of his family and embraced deism. But Franklin, as a man of faith, was far more complex than the “thorough deist” who emerges in his autobiography. As Thomas Kidd reveals, deist writers influenced Franklin’s beliefs, to be sure, but devout Christians in his life—including George Whitefield, the era’s greatest evangelical preacher; his parents; and his beloved sister Jane—kept him tethered to the Calvinist creed of his Puritan upbringing. Based on rigorous research into Franklin’s voluminous correspondence, essays, and almanacs, this fresh assessment of a well-known figure unpacks the contradictions and conundrums faith presented in Franklin’s life.
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Release date: June 6, 2017
The Loyal Son: The War in Ben Franklin's House
by Daniel Mark Epstein (no photo)Synopsis:
Ben Franklin is the most lovable of America’s founding fathers. His wit, his charm, his inventiveness—even his grandfatherly appearance—are legendary. But this image obscures the scandals that dogged him throughout his life. In The Loyal Son, award-winning historian Daniel Mark Epstein throws the spotlight on one of the darker episodes in Franklin’s biography: his complex and confounding relationship with his illegitimate son William.
When he was twenty-four, Franklin fathered a child with a woman who was not his wife. He adopted the boy, raised him, and educated him to be his aide. Ben and William became inseparable. After the famous kite-in-a-thunderstorm experiment, it was William who proved that the electrical charge in a lightning bolt travels from the ground up, not from the clouds down. On a diplomatic mission to London, it was William who charmed London society. He was invited to walk in the procession of the coronation of George III; Ben was not.
The outbreak of the American Revolution caused a devastating split between father and son. By then, William was Royal Governor of New Jersey, while Ben was one of the foremost champions of American independence. In 1776, the Continental Congress imprisoned William for treason. George Washington made efforts to win William’s release, while his father, to the world’s astonishment, appeared to have abandoned him to his fate.
A fresh take on the combustible politics of the age of independence, The Loyal Son is a gripping account of how the agony of the American Revolution devastated one of America’s most distinguished families. Like Nathaniel Philbrick and David McCullough, Epstein is a storyteller first and foremost, a historian who weaves together fascinating incidents discovered in long-neglected documents to draw us into the private world of the men and women who made America.
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Release date: January 16, 2018
Stirring the Pot with Benjamin Franklin: A Founding Father's Culinary Adventures
by Rae Katherine Eighmey (no photo)Synopsis:
In this remarkable culinary biography, Rae Katherine Eighmey presents Benjamin Franklin's experimentation with food throughout his life. At age sixteen, he began dabbling in vegetarianism. In his early twenties, citing the health benefits of water over alcohol, he convinced his printing press colleagues to abandon their traditional breakfast of beer and bread for "water gruel," a kind of porridge he enjoyed.
Franklin is known for his scientific discoveries, including electricity and the lightning rod, and his curiosity and logical mind extended to the kitchen: he even conducted an electrical experiment to try to cook a turkey. Later in life, on his diplomatic missions--he lived fifteen years in England and nine in France--Franklin ate like a local. Eighmey discovers the meals served at his London home-away-from-home and analyzes his account books from Passy, France, for tips to his diet there. Yet he also longed for American foods; his wife Deborah sent over some favorites including cranberries, which amazed the London kitchen staff. He saw food as key to the developing culture of the United States, penning two essays presenting maize as the defining grain of America.
Eighmey revives and re-creates recipes from each chapter in his life. Stirring the Pot with Benjamin Franklin conveys all of Franklin's culinary adventures, demonstrating how Franklin's love of food shaped not only his life, but also the character of the young nation he helped build.
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Release date: September 18, 2018
Young Benjamin Franklin: The Birth of Ingenuity
by Nick Bunker (no photo)Synopsis:
From his early career as a printer and journalist, to his scientific work and his role as a founder of a new republic, Benjamin Franklin has always seemed the inevitable embodiment of American ingenuity. But in his youth he had to make his way through a harsh colonial world where he fought many battles: with his rivals, but also with his wayward emotions. Taking Franklin to the age of forty-one, when he made his first electrical discoveries, Bunker goes behind the legend to reveal the sources of his passion for knowledge. Always trying to balance virtue against ambition, Franklin emerges as a brilliant but flawed human being, made from the conflicts of an age of slavery as well as reason. With archival material from both sides of the Atlantic, we see Franklin in Boston, London, and Philadelphia, as he develops his formula for greatness. A tale of science, politics, war, and religion, this is also a story about Franklin's forebears: the talented family of English craftsmen who produced America's favorite genius.
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Release date: February 11, 2020
Franklin & Washington: The Founding Partnership
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Edward J. LarsonSynopsis:
In Franklin & Washington, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Edward J. Larson delivers a masterful, overdue joint biography of our two most legendary Founding Fathers. As Larson relates, Franklin and Washington, though divided by a 26-year age gap and vastly different life experiences, underwent a similarly dramatic transformation from loyal British colonists to American nationalists, and found a shared purpose in their efforts to prepare the United States for independence.
Though the two men are acknowledged as towering figures of the Revolutionary Era, historians have tended to overlook the crucial importance of their unusual friendship. Larson makes a persuasive case that neither one could have succeeded without the other. During the Revolutionary War, Washington could not have thrived on the battlefield without the diplomacy that Franklin was conducting in France and Franklin could not have achieved his diplomatic coups without Washington’s actions on the battlefield. For these efforts, Franklin has been hailed as America’s greatest diplomat and Washington as its greatest general, yet each knowingly relied on the other. Beyond this, Franklin played a key role at the Second Continental Congress in securing and supporting Washington as the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army. 12 years later, when Washington arrived in Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention, he dined first with Franklin. Both men knew they needed the other to pull off the supreme act of unifying the states under a single Constitution.
In an enlightening and dramatic account of these two men’s intertwined lives, Larson takes readers from the French and Indian War, through the Revolution and Constitutional Convention, and finally concluding with their final encounter when, near death, Franklin forced the issue of slavery before the new republic’s first Congress. In this fascinating new window into the Revolutionary Era, Larson shines a new light on Franklin and Washington’s heroic deeds and mutual purpose.
The History Book Club
Books mentioned in this topic
The Greatest American: Benjamin Franklin, The World's Most Versatile Genius (other topics)He Did Not Conquer: Benjamin Franklin's Failure to Annex Canada (other topics)
Undaunted Mind: The Intellectual Life of Benjamin Franklin (other topics)
The Franklin Stove: An Unintended American Revolution (other topics)
Ingenious: A Biography of Benjamin Franklin, Scientist (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Mark Skousen (other topics)Madelaine Drohan (other topics)
Kevin J. Hayes (other topics)
Joyce E. Chaplin (other topics)
Richard Munson (other topics)
More...
The site Archiving Early America has a short film on Benjamin Franklin (two parts). It is very basic but comprehensive for those of you interested.
http://www.earlyamerica.com/ben-movie...