Ben Franklin's World

Culture is important. It impacts how we think and act as members of families, local communities, states, and nations. So who sets the unwritten social rules and ideas we adopt and live by? Joyce Goodfriend, author of Who Should Rule at Home? Confronting the Elite in British New York City, helps us investigate this question by taking us through the history of early New York City and how its culture evolved between 1664 and 1776.

Early North America was a place rife with violent conflict. Between the 17th and 19th centuries we see a lot of conflict between Native American peoples, colonists, and American settlers. David J. Silverman, author of Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America, takes us through some of the causes of this conflict by looking specifically at Native America and the ways Native Americans used guns to shape their lives and the course of North American and indigenous history.

George Washington served as the Commander in Chief of the Continental Army, the President of the Constitutional Convention, and as the first President of the United States. In addition to these important public roles, Washington also served as a farmer and agricultural innovator. Douglas Bradburn, the CEO and President of George Washington’s Mount Vernon, joins us to explore the history of Mount Vernon and all that Washington's storied estate has to offer us as a historic site.

The 1740s and 1750s proved to be an extraordinary time for many ordinary New Englanders. It was a period when itinerant preachers swept through the region and asked its people to question the fundamental assumptions of their religion. Douglas Winiarski, author of the Bancroft prize-winning book, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England, helps us explore the religious landscape of New England during the period known as the Great Awakening.

Why did early Americans choose to become patriots or loyalists during the American Revolution? How did they make the decision to either stand with or against their neighbors? In this episode, we explore answers to these questions about how and why Americans chose to support the sides they did during the American Revolution with Virginia DeJohn Anderson, author of The Martyr and the Traitor: Nathan Hale, Moses Dunbar, and the American Revolution.

The legacy of Alexander Hamilton tells us that he was Thomas Jefferson’s political rival, a man who fought to secure strong powers for the national government, and the first Secretary of the Treasury. What Hamilton’s legacy doesn’t tell us is that he also fought for states rights and championed civil liberties for all Americans. Kate Elizabeth Brown, author of Alexander Hamilton and the Development of American Law, joins us to explore more about Alexander Hamilton's contributions to American la

Douglas Winiarski answers your questions about religion in early New England with details from his book, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light. Darkness Falls on the Land of Light is the story of how ordinary New Englanders living through extraordinary times ended up giving birth to today’s evangelical movement. Doug performed a close reading of letters, diaries, and testimonies to write this book and his outstanding scholarship in this book was recognized with a 2018 Bancroft Prize.

Between 1781 and 1789, the Confederation Congress established by the Articles of Confederation had to deal with war, economic depression, infighting between the states, trouble in the west, foreign meddling, and domestic insurrection. George William Van Cleve, author of We Have Not A Government: The Articles of Confederation and the Road to the Constitution, takes us into the Confederation period so we can discover more about the Confederation Congress and the problems it confronted.

The jurisdiction of New Spain included areas of upper and lower California and large areas of the American southwest and southeast, including Florida. Karoline Cook, author of Forbidden Passages: Muslims and Moriscos in Colonial Spanish America, helps us explore some of the political, cultural, and religious history of New Spain. Specifically, how Spaniards used ideas about Muslims and a group of “new Christian” converts called Moriscos to define who could and should be able to settle in North Americ

Did you know that maps have social lives? Maps facilitate a lot of different social and political relationships between people and nations. And they did a lot of this work for Americans throughout the early American past. Martin Brückner, a Professor of English at the University of Delaware, joins us to discuss early American maps and early American mapmaking with details from his book The Social Life of Maps in America.

What did it mean to be a person and to also be a commodity in early America? Daina Ramey Berry, author of The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation, takes us behind the scenes of her research so we can explore how early Americans valued and commodified enslaved men, women, and children.

Just how personal was the American Revolution? What could the event and war mean for individual people and families? Daniel Mark Epstein, author of The Loyal Son: The War in Ben Franklin’s House, guides as as we explore what the Revolution meant for Benjamin Franklin and his family and how the Revolution caused a major rift between Franklin and his beloved son, William.

Doctors have declared 2018's seasonal flu epidemic to be one of the worst to hit the United States in over a decade. Yet this flu epidemic is nothing compared to the yellow fever epidemics that struck the early American republic during the 1790s and early 1800s. So what happened when epidemic diseases took hold in early America? How did early Americans deal with disease and illness? Historian Thomas Apel has some answers for us.

The histories of early North America and the Caribbean are intertwined. The same European empires we encounter in our study of early America also appear in the Caribbean. The colonies of these respective empires often traded goods, people, and ideas between each other. Marisa Fuentes, author of Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, joins us to explore some of the connections mainland North America and the British Caribbean shared in their practices of slavery in port towns.

Intelligence gathering plays an important role in the foreign policies of many modern-day nation states, including the United States. Which raises the questions: How and when did the United States establish its foreign intelligence service?
 Our guide Kenneth Daigler, author of Spies, Patriots, and Traitors: American Intelligence in the Revolutionary War, will facilitate our time travel back to the American Revolution so we can explore this topic.