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"Franklin, Benjamin"
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Ben Franklin of old Philadelphia
A biography of the American who became known for his work as a printer, author, inventor, and statesman.
Book
Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement
This fascinating book explores Benjamin Franklin's social and political thought. Although Franklin is often considered \"the first American,\" his intellectual world was cosmopolitan. An active participant in eighteenth-century Atlantic debates over the modern commercial republic, Franklin combined abstract analyses with practical proposals. Houston treats Franklin as shrewd, creative, and engaged-a lively thinker who joined both learned controversies and political conflicts at home and abroad.
Drawing on meticulous archival research, Houston examines such tantalizing themes as trade and commerce, voluntary associations and civic militias, population growth and immigration policy, political union and electoral institutions, freedom and slavery. In each case, he shows how Franklin urged the improvement of self and society.
Engagingly written and richly illustrated, this book provides a compelling portrait of Franklin, a fresh perspective on American identity, and a vital account of what it means to be practical.
eBook
What's the big idea, Ben Franklin?
A brief biography of the eighteenth-century printer, inventor, and statesman who played an influential role in the early history of the United States.
Book
A Moderate Proposal: Jonathan Dickinson and Benjamin Franklin Debate Freedom, Conscience, and Consensus
In matters of twenty-first century public policy, age-old questions surrounding freedom of conscience and both personal and civic liberties remain in perennial tension with the necessary demands for civic conformity, custom, and consensus. These questions were also of critical importance in early eighteenth-century colonial America. In the first half of the eighteenth century, a hotbed of religious, intellectual, and cultural diversity was fomenting considerable conflict in Philadelphia, setting the stage for a vital debate over the nature and parameters of religious liberty and freedom of conscience in the colonies. Within this context of the eighteenth-century religious and cultural landscape of colonial Philadelphia, this article will examine a debate between Jonathan Dickinson and Benjamin Franklin whereby two distinctly different interpretations of religious liberty and freedom of conscience were established. Left to themselves, these two interpretations lead to sharply divergent trajectories. Nonetheless, by considering these two viewpoints in dialogue with one another, the Franklin–Dickinson pamphlet debate can serve as a useful tool for conceptualizing twenty-first century public policy issues related to freedom of conscience: policies that preserve the essential aspects of what constitutes each person’s humanity while simultaneously respecting the broader exigencies for public order and responsible policy in the aggregate.
Journal Article
Benjamin Franklin Wealth and Wisdom
An early and influential advocate of the idea that any of us can create in ourselves the greatness to which we aspire, Franklin speaks across the centuries to readers as clearly and practically as ever in two classics of the American Spirit in one volume.
eBook
Benjamin Franklin and the Poetics of the New Diplomacy
This essay interprets the literary means Benjamin Franklin used in establishing a novel style of diplomatic representation. This style dispensed with much, but not all, of the ritual of what was then regarded as the old, European diplomacy in which diplomatic actors performed the dual role of representation, being both representative and representational; that is, as both spokespeople for, and emblems of, their national cause. Through them one is able to detect the interweaving of existing diplomatic standards and protocols in a self-consciously New World vocation with its own demands for recognition from the imperial center.
Journal Article
Two Chips off the Same Block: Benjamin Franklin's Library Company and Philosophical Society and the Saga of Their 275-Year Relationship 1
One frequently hears the phrase sister institutions used to refer to a pair or group of institutions that share many attributes. Colleges of a certain type can be sister institutions; the Seven Sisters come readily to mind. Likewise, libraries of a certain type can be sister institutions; both the American Philosophical Society (APS) and the Library Company of Philadelphia (LCP) are members of the Independent Research Libraries Association (IRLA), and we consider all of the 19 member libraries to be our sister institutions. This paper will therefore be about the dual histories (one might even say the dueling histories) of these two Franklin-founded institutions, and about their sisterly affection and occasional sibling rivalry. The Library Company was the outgrowth of Benjamin Franklin's Junto, which he formed in 1727 at the age of 21 for the mutual improvement of its members, who were for the most part aspiring artisans and mechanics and tradesmen like Franklin himself.
Journal Article