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7 books match the query 'Franklin, Benjamin'

cover of Benjamin Franklin and His Gods

Benjamin Franklin and His Gods

Kerry S. Walters

University of Illinois Press, 1999

      Against the religious backdrop of pre- and postcolonial America stands
        the towering figure--and mind--of Benjamin Franklin. A Renaissance man
        in a Revolutionary time, Franklin had interests and knowledge not only
        in religion but in literature, philosophy, politics, publishing, history,
        and scientific inquiry, among many other disciplines.
      Kerry S. Walters examines Franklin's search for the Divine using a similar,
        multifaceted approach--and in so doing has created the first extended
        treatment of Franklin's religious thought in thirty years. Walters brings
        the same intellectual range and depth to the understanding of Franklin's
        beliefs that Franklin brought to his own quest. What emerges from this
        pilgrimage into the soul of one of America's greatest figures is a very
        human Benjamin Franklin who grew with the accumulation of knowledge to
        arrive at a "theistic perspectivism," which provided him with
        a philosophical explanation for the diversity of religious faiths--and
        a justification for the liberty of conscience he advocated throughout
        his life.
      Benjamin Franklin and His Gods is an original and beautifully
        challenging spiritual and intellectual biography. Destined to be a classic.
 
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cover of Benjamin Franklin's Printing Network: Disseminating Virtue in Early America

Benjamin Franklin's Printing Network

Disseminating Virtue in Early America

Ralph Frasca

University of Missouri Press, 2005

In Benjamin Franklin’s Printing Network, Ralph Frasca explores Franklin’s partnerships and business relationships with printers and their impact on the early American press. Besides analyzing the structure of the network, Frasca addresses two equally important questions: How did Franklin establish this informal group? What were his motivations for doing so?
This network grew to be the most prominent and geographically extensive of the early­ American printing organizations, lasting from the 1720s until the 1790s. Stretching from New England to the West Indies, it comprised more than two dozen members, including such memorable characters as the Job-like James Parker, the cunning Francis Childs, the malcontent Benjamin Mecom, the vengeful Benjamin Franklin Bache, the steadfast David Hall, and the deranged Anthony Armbruster.
Franklin’s network altered practices in both the European and the American colonial printing trades by providing capital and political influence to set up workers as partners and associates. As an economic entity and source of mutual support, the network was integral to the success of many eighteenth-century printers, as well as to the development of American journalism.
Frasca argues that one of Franklin’s principal motivations in establishing the network was his altruistic desire to assist Americans in their efforts to be virtuous. Using a variety of sources, Frasca shows that Franklin viewed virtue as a path to personal happiness and social utility. Franklin intended for his network of printers to teach virtue and encourage its adoption. The network would disseminate his moral truths to a mass audience, and this would in turn further his own political, economic, and moral ambitions.
By exploring Franklin’s printing network and addressing these questions, this work fills a substantial void in the historical treatment of Franklin’s life. Amateur historians and professional scholars alike will welcome Frasca’s clear and capable treatment of this subject.
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cover of Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania, and the First Nations: The Treaties of 1736-62

Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania, and the First Nations

The Treaties of 1736-62

Edited by Susan Kalter

University of Illinois Press, 2006

British colonial relations with the native peoples of eastern North America This is an annotated edition of the treaties between the British colonies and Indian nations, originally printed and sold by Benjamin Franklin. Last published in 1938, Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania, and the First Nations makes these important treaties available once again, featuring a simpler, easier-to-read format, extensive explanatory notes, and maps. A detailed introduction by Susan Kalter puts the treaties in their proper historical and cultural context. This carefully researched edition shows these treaties to be complex intercultural documents, and provides significant insight into the British colonists’ relationship with native peoples of North America. They also reveal the complexity of Benjamin Franklin’s perceptions of Native Americans, showing him in some negotiations as a promoter of the Indian word against the colonial one. Finally, the treaties offer an enormous wealth of linguistic, aesthetic, and cultural information about the Iroquois, the Delawares, and their allies and neighbors.
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cover of Franklin in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

Franklin in His Own Time

A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

Kevin J. Hayes

University of Iowa Press, 2011

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In his time Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) was the most famous American in the world. Even those personally unacquainted with the man knew him as the author of Poor Richard’s Almanack, as a pioneer in the study of electricity and a major figure in the American Enlightenment, as the creator of such life-changing innovations as the lightning rod and America’s first circulating library, and as a leader of the American Revolution. His friends also knew him as a brilliant conversationalist, a great wit, an intellectual filled with curiosity, and most of all a master anecdotist whose vast store of knowledge complemented his conversational skills. In Franklin in His Own Time, by reprinting the original documents in which those anecdotes occur, Kevin Hayes and Isabelle Bour restore those oft-told stories to their cultural contexts to create a comprehensive narrative of his life and work.

The thirty-five recollections gathered in Franklin in His Own Time form an animated, collaborative biography designed to provide a multitude of perspectives on the “First American.” Opening with an account by botanist Peter Kalm showing that Franklin was doing all he could to encourage the development of science in North America, it includes on-the-spot impressions from Daniel Fisher’s diary, the earliest surviving interview with Franklin, recollections from James Madison and Abigail Adams, Manasseh Cutler’s detailed description of the library at Franklin Court, and extracts from Alexander Hamilton’s unvarnished Minutes of the Tuesday Club. Franklin’s political missions to Great Britain and France, where he took full advantage of rich social and intellectual opportunities, are a source of many reminiscences, some published here in new translations. Genuine memories from such old friends as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, as opposed to memories influenced by the Autobiography, clarify Franklin’s reputation. Robert Carr may have been the last remaining person who knew Franklin personally, and thus his recollections are particularly signific

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cover of Franklin's Thrift: The Lost History of an American Virtue

Franklin's Thrift

The Lost History of an American Virtue

David Blankenhorn

Templeton Press, 2009

Americans today often think of thrift as a negative value—a miserly hoarding of resources and a denial of pleasure. Even more telling, many Americans don’t even think of thrift at all anymore. Franklin’s Thrift challenges this state of mind by recovering the rich history of thrift as a quintessentially American virtue.

The contributors to this volume trace how the idea and practice of thrift have been a vital part of the American vision of economic freedom and social abundance. For Benjamin Franklin, who personified and promoted the idea, thrift meant working productively, consuming wisely, saving proportionally, and giving generously. Franklin’s thrift became the cornerstone of a new kind of secular faith in the ordinary person’s capacity to shape his lot and fortune in life. Later chapters document how thrift moved into new domains in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It became the animating idea behind social movements to promote children’s school savings, create mutual savings banks and credit unions for working men and women, establish a federal savings bond program, and galvanize the nation to conserve resources during two world wars.

Historians, enthusiasts of Americana or traditional American virtues, and anyone interested in resolving our society’s current financial woes will find much to treasure in this diverse collection, with topics ranging from the inspirational lessons we can learn from the film It’s a Wonderful Life to a history of the roles played by mutual savings banks, credit unions, and thrift stores in America’s national thrift movement. It also includes actual policy recommendations for our present situation.

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cover of Playing the Fool: Subversive Laughter in Troubled Times

Playing the Fool

Subversive Laughter in Troubled Times

Ralph Lerner

University of Chicago Press, 2009

The role of the fool is to provoke the powerful to question their convictions, preferably while avoiding a beating. Fools accomplish this not by hectoring their audience, but by broaching sensitive topics indirectly, often disguising their message in a joke or a tale. Writers and thinkers throughout history have adopted the fool’s approach, and here Ralph Lerner turns to six of them—Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Robert Burton, Pierre Bayle, Benjamin Franklin, and Edward Gibbon—to elucidate the strategies these men employed to persuade the heedless, the zealous, and the overly confident to pause and reconsider.

As Playing the Fool makes plain, all these men lived through periods marked by fanaticism, particularly with regard to religion and its relation to the state. In such a troubled context, advocating on behalf of skepticism and against tyranny could easily lead to censure, or even, as in More’s case, execution. And so, Lerner reveals, these serious thinkers relied on humor to move their readers toward a more reasoned understanding of the world and our place in it. At once erudite and entertaining, Playing the Fool is an eloquently thought-provoking look at the lives and writings of these masterly authors.

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cover of We Have All Gone Away

We Have All Gone Away

Curtis Harnack

University of Iowa Press, 1973

In We Have All Gone Away, his emotionally moving memoir, Curtis Harnack tells of growing up during the Great Depression on an Iowa farm among six siblings and an extended family of relatives. With a directness and a beauty that recall Thoreau, Harnack balances a child’s impressions with the knowledge of an adult looking back to produce what Publishers Weekly called “a country plum of a book, written with genuine affection and vivid recall.”
 
In a community related by blood and harvest, rural life could be bountiful even when hard economic times threatened. The adults urged children to become educated and to keep an eye on tomorrow. “We were all taught to lean enthusiastically into the future,” Harnack recalls, which would likely be elsewhere, in distant cities. At the same time, the children were cultivating a resiliency that would serve them well in the unknown world of the second half of the twentieth century.
 
Inevitably, the Midwest’s small, diversified family farm gave way to large-scale agriculture, which soon changed the former intimate way of life. “Our generation, using the mulched dead matter of agrarian life like projectile fuel for our thrust into the future, became part of that enormous vitality springing out of rural America,” notes Harnack. Both funny and elegiac, We Have All Gone Away is a masterful memoir of the joys and sorrows of Iowa farm life at mid-century, a world now gone “by way of learning, wars, and marriage” but still a lasting part of America’s heritage.

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