Download or read book The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin written by Gordon S. Wood and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-05-31 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I cannot remember ever reading a work of history and biography that is quite so fluent, so perfectly composed and balanced . . .” —The New York Sun “Exceptionally rich perspective on one of the most accomplished, complex, and unpredictable Americans of his own time or any other.” —The Washington Post Book World 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.
Download or read book Franklin of Philadelphia written by Esmond Wright and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a biography analyzing Franklin's many-faceted public career, his ingenious inventions, prose style, and personality.
Download or read book A Companion to Benjamin Franklin written by David Waldstreicher and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-06-13 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This companion provides a comprehensive survey of the life, work and legacy of Benjamin Franklin - the oldest, most distinctive, and multifaceted of the founders. Includes contributions from across a range of academic disciplines Combines traditional and cutting-edge scholarship, from accomplished and emerging experts in the field Pays special attention to the American Revolution, the Enlightenment, journalism, colonial American society, and themes of race, class, and gender Places Franklin in the context of recent work in political theory, American Studies, American literature, material culture studies, popular culture, and international relations
Download or read book Benjamin Franklin written by Edwin S. Gaustad and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-02-06 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tenth and youngest son of a poor Boston soapmaker, Benjamin Franklin would rise to become, in Thomas Jefferson's words, "the greatest man and ornament of his age." In this short, engaging biography, historian Edwin S. Gaustad offers a marvelous portrait of this towering colonial figure, illuminating Franklin's character and personality. Here is truly one of the most extraordinary lives imaginable, a man who, with only two years of formal education, became a printer, publisher, postmaster, philosopher, world-class scientist and inventor, statesman, musician, and abolitionist. Gaustad presents a chronological account of all these accomplishments, delightfully spiced with quotations from Franklin's own extensive writings. The book describes how the hardworking Franklin became at age 24 the most successful printer in Pennsylvania and how by 42, with the help of Poor Richard's Almanack, he had amassed enough wealth to retire from business. We then follow Franklin's next brilliant career, as an inventor and scientist, examining his pioneering work on electricity and his inventions of the Franklin Stove, the lightning rod, and bifocals, as well as his mapping of the Gulf Stream, a major contribution to navigation. Lastly, the book covers Franklin's role as America's leading statesman, ranging from his years in England before the Revolutionary War to his time in France thereafter, highlighting his many contributions to the cause of liberty. Along the way, Gaustad sheds light on Franklin's personal life, including his troubled relationship with his illegitimate son William, who remained a Loyalist during the Revolution, and Franklin's thoughts on such topics as religion and morality. Written by a leading authority on colonial America, this compact biography captures in a remarkably small space one of the most protean lives in our nation's history.
Download or read book The Papers of Benjamin Franklin written by Benjamin Franklin and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The forty-second volume of the collected writings and correspondences of the American statesman, ambassador, and Founding Father Benjamin Franklin In the spring of 1784, Franklin, John Jay, and British negotiator David Hartley exchanged ratifications of the definitive British-American peace treaty. Hoping for permission from Congress to return home, Franklin settled his accounts, negotiated a French consular convention, headed a royal commission to investigate animal magnetism, wrote several scientific theories, and published his well-known satire about rising with the sun. As the volume ends, Thomas Jefferson brings news of a diplomatic assignment that would keep Franklin in France for another year.
Download or read book Benjamin Franklin s Science written by I. Bernard Cohen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the scientific work of Benjamin Franklin in fields ranging from heat to astronomy ; provides accounts of the theoretical backgroung of his science, the experiments he performed, and their influence throughout Europe and the U.S.
Download or read book The Expanding Blaze written by Jonathan Israel and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-22 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major intellectual history of the American Revolution and its influence on later revolutions in Europe and the Americas The Expanding Blaze is a sweeping history of how the American Revolution inspired revolutions throughout Europe and the Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jonathan Israel, one of the world’s leading historians of the Enlightenment, shows how the radical ideas of American founders such as Paine, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and Monroe set the pattern for democratic revolutions, movements, and constitutions in France, Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Greece, Canada, Haiti, Brazil, and Spanish America. The Expanding Blaze reminds us that the American Revolution was an astonishingly radical event—and that it didn’t end with the transformation and independence of America. Rather, the Revolution continued to reverberate in Europe and the Americas for the next three-quarters of a century. This comprehensive history of the Revolution’s international influence traces how American efforts to implement Radical Enlightenment ideas—including the destruction of the old regime and the promotion of democratic republicanism, self-government, and liberty—helped drive revolutions abroad, as foreign leaders explicitly followed the American example and espoused American democratic values. The first major new intellectual history of the age of democratic revolution in decades, The Expanding Blaze returns the American Revolution to its global context.
Download or read book Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire written by Carla J. Mulford and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-01 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing from Benjamin Franklin's published and unpublished papers, including letters, notes, and marginalia, Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire examines how the early modern liberalism of Franklin's youthful intellectual life helped foster his vision of independence from Britain that became his hallmark achievement. In the early chapters, Carla Mulford explores the impact of Franklin's family history - especially their difficult times during the English Civil War - on Franklin's intellectual life and his personal and political goals. The book's middle chapters show how Franklin's fascination with British imperial strategy grew from his own analyses of the financial, environmental, and commercial potential of North America. Franklin's involvement in Pennsylvania's politics led him to devise strategies for monetary stability, intercolonial trade, Indian affairs, and imperial defense that would have assisted the British Empire in its effort to take over the world. When Franklin realized that the goals of British ministers were to subordinate colonists in a system that assisted the lives of Britons in England but undermined the wellbeing of North Americans, he began to criticize the goals of British imperialism. Mulford argues that Franklin's turn away from the British Empire began in the 1750s - not the 1770s, as most historians have suggested - and occurred as a result of Franklin's perceptive analyses of what the British Empire was doing not just in the American colonies but in Ireland and India. In the last chapters, Mulford reveals how Franklin ultimately grew restive, formed alliances with French intellectuals and the court of France, and condemned the actions of the British Empire and imperial politicians. As a whole, Mulford's book provides a fresh reading of a much-admired founding father, suggesting how Franklin's conception of the freedoms espoused in England's ages old Magna Carta could be realized in the political life of the new American nation.
Download or read book Semiotics and Communication written by Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 1993-08-01 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Communication is, among other things, about the study of meaning -- how people convey ideas for themselves and to one another in their daily lives. Designed to close the gap between what we are able to do as social actors and what we are able to describe as social analysts, this book introduces the language of semiotics -- a language that provides
Download or read book The Netherland Leatherlin Legacy written by Gena Ayers Walls and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Descendants are to be found in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and elsewhere.
Download or read book The Minute Man written by and published by . This book was released on 1923 with total page 832 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Inheriting the Revolution written by Joyce Appleby and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2001-09-15 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Details the experiences of the first generation of Americans who inherited the independent country, discussing the lives, businesses, and religious freedoms that transformed the country in its early years.
Download or read book Benjamin Franklin written by Thomas S. Kidd and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-23 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major new biography, illuminating the great mystery of Benjamin Franklin’s faith 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.
Download or read book Adopting America written by Carol J. Singley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American literature abounds with orphans who experience adoption or placements that resemble adoption. These stories do more than recount adventures of children living away from home. They tell an American story of family and national identity. In narratives from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, adoption functions as narrative event and trope that describes the American migratory experience, the impact of Calvinist faith, and the growth of democratic individualism. The roots of literary adoption appear in the discourse of Puritan settlers, who ambivalently took leave of their birth parent country and portrayed themselves as abandoned children. Believing they were chosen children of God, they also prayed for spiritual adoption and emulated God's grace by extending adoption to others. Nineteenth-century adoption literature develops from this notion of adoption as salvation and from simultaneous attachments to the Old World and the New. In domestic fiction of the mid-nineteenth century, adoption also reflects a focus on nurture in childrearing, increased mobility in the nation, and middle-class concerns over immigration and urbanization, assuaged when the orphan finds a proper, loving home. Adoption signals fresh starts and the opportunity for success without genealogical constraints, especially for white males, but inflected by gender and racial biases, it often entails dependency for girls and children of color. A complex signifier of difference, adoption gives voice to sometimes contradictory calls to origins and fresh beginning; to feelings of worthiness and unworthiness. In writings from Cotton Mather to Edith Wharton, it both replicates and offers an alternative to the genealogical norm, evoking ambivalence as it shapes national mythologies.
Download or read book Manuscript Holdings of the Military History Research Collection written by Richard J. Sommers and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Benjamin Franklin Unmasked written by Jerry Weinberger and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2005-09-07 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moral paragon, public servant, founding father; scoundrel, opportunist, womanizing phony: There are many Benjamin Franklins. Now, as we celebrate the tercentenary of Franklin's birth, Jerry Weinberger reveals the Franklin behind the many masks and shows that the real Franklin was far more remarkable than anyone has yet discovered. Taking the Autobiography as the key to Franklin's thought, Weinberger argues that previous assessments have not yet probed to the bottom of Ben's famous irony and elusiveness. While others take the self-portrait as an elder statesman's relaxed and playful retrospection, Weinberger unveils it as the window to Franklin's deepest reflections on God, virtue, justice, equality, natural rights, love, the good life, the modern technological project, and the place and limits of reason in politics and human experience. Along the way, Weinberger explores Franklin's ribald humor, usually ignored or toned down by historians and critics, and shows it to be charming-and philosophic. Following Franklin's rhetorical twists and turns, Weinberger discovers a serious thinker who was profoundly critical of religion, moral virtue, and political ideals and whose grasp of human folly constrained his hopes for enlightenment and political reform. This close and amusing reading of Franklin portrays a scrupulous dialectical philosopher, humane and wise, but more provocative and disturbing than even the most hardboiled interpreters have taken Franklin to be-a freethinking critic of Enlightenment freethinking, who played his moral and theological cards very close to the vest. Written for general readers who want to delve more deeply into the mind of a great man and great American, Benjamin Franklin Unmasked shows us a massively powerful intellect lurking behind the leather-apron countenance. This lively, witty, and revelatory book is indispensable for those who want to meet the real Franklin.
Download or read book The SAR Magazine written by Sons of the American Revolution and published by . This book was released on 1923 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
