The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

Author: Gordon S. Wood
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101200901
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
“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.

The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

Author: Gordon S. Wood
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9781594200199
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Book Description
Wood scrutinizes the less typically American traits possessed by Franklin--such as his longtime loyalty to the Crown--and why he still became one of the Revolution's necessary men.

The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

Author: Gordon S. Wood
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143035282
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Benjamin Franklin

Author: Edmund Sears Morgan
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300101621
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Book Description
Draws on Franklin's extensive writings to provide a portrait of the statesman, inventor, and Founding Father.

Benjamin Franklin

Author: Arthur Bernon Tourtellot
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 510

Book Description
An examination of the formative years of Benjamin Franklin and of the atmosphere of Boston in the early 18th century which influenced Franklin's development.

Benjamin Franklin Unmasked

Author: Jerry Weinberger
Publisher: American Political Thought
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
"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.".

Revolutionary Characters

Author: Gordon S. Wood
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101201665
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description
In this brilliantly illuminating group portrait of the men who came to be known as the Founding Fathers, the incomparable Gordon Wood has written a book that seriously asks, "What made these men great?" and shows us, among many other things, just how much character did in fact matter. The life of each—Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Paine—is presented individually as well as collectively, but the thread that binds these portraits together is the idea of character as a lived reality. They were members of the first generation in history that was self-consciously self-made men who understood that the arc of lives, as of nations, is one of moral progress.

The Radicalism of the American Revolution

Author: Gordon S. Wood
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 472

Book Description
"Senior co-administrator of the Norcoast Salmon Research Facility, Dr. Mackenzie Connor - Mac to her friends and colleagues - was a biologist who had wanted nothing more out of life than to study the spawning habits of salmon. But that was before she met Brymn, the first member of the Dhryn race ever to set foot on Earth. And it was before Base was attacked, and Mac's friend and fellow scientist Dr. Emily Mamani was kidnapped by the mysterious race known as the Ro." "From that moment on everything changed for Mac, for Emily, for Brymn, for the human race, and for all the many member races of the Interspecies Union." "Now, with the alien Dhryn following an instinct-driven migratory path through the inhabited spaceways - bringing about the annihilation of sentient races who have the misfortune to lie along the star trail they are following - time is running out not only for the human race but for all life forms." "And only Mac and her disparate band of researchers - drawn from many of the races that are members of the Interspecies Union - stand any chance of solving the deadly puzzle of the Dhryn and the equally enigmatic Ro."--BOOK JACKET.

Information to Those who Would Remove to America

Author: Benjamin Franklin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 24

Book Description

Runaway America

Author: David Waldstreicher
Publisher: Hill and Wang
ISBN: 1466821523
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
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.