Ben Franklin's World

Did you know that imagination once played a key role in the way Americans understood and practiced medicine? Sari Altschuler, an Assistant Professor of English at Northeastern University and author of The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States, joins us to investigate the ways early American doctors used imagination in their practice and learning of medicine. Show No...

History is an important tool when it comes to understanding American law. History is what the justices of the United States Supreme Court use when they want to ascertain what the framers meant when they drafted the Constitution of 1787 and its first ten amendments in 1789. History is also the tool we use when we want to know how and why the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution and it...

The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution doesn’t always make headlines, but it’s an amendment that undergirds foundational rights. It’s also an amendment that can show us a lot about the intertwined nature between history and American law.  
 In this 3rd episode of our 4th Doing History series, we explore the early American origins of the Fourth Amendment with Thomas Clancy, a Profes...

How and why did Congress draft the First Ten Amendments to the Constitution? In the United States, we use the Constitution and Bill of Rights to understand and define ourselves culturally. Americans are a people with laws and rights that are protected by the Constitution because they are defined in the Constitution. And the place where the Constitution defines and outlines our rights is within its...

Law is all around us. And the basis of American Law comes not only from our early American past, but from our founding documents. This episode begins our 4th Doing History series. Over the next four episodes, we’ll explore the early American origins of the Bill of Rights as well as the history of the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment will serve as our case study so we can see where our rights...

The Second Continental Congress voted for independence on July 2, 1776 with 12 colonies and one abstention. The delegation from New York abstained from the vote. And Pennsylvania voted in favor of independence because two of its delegates were persuaded not to attend the vote given their opposition. John Dickinson was one of the two delegates who absented himself from the vote. Later, he would ref...

What was it like to live as a woman of faith in early republic America? What was it like to live as a Catholic in the early United States? Catherine O’Donnell, an Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University and author of Elizabeth Seton: American Saint, helps us investigate answers to these questions by taking us through the life of the United States’ first saint: Elizabeth Ann Seto...

How do empires come to be? How are empires made and who makes them? What role do maps play in making empires? Christian Koot is a Professor of History at Towson University and the author of A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman’s Chesapeake. Christian has researched and written two books about the seventeenth-century Anglo-Dutch World to better understand empires and how they are made....

Who gets to be a citizen of the United States? How does the United States define who belongs to the nation? Early Americans asked and grappled with these questions during the earliest days of the early republic. Martha S. Jones is a Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University and a former public interest litigator. Using details from her book, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights...

We read and hear a lot about money. We read and hear about fluctuations in the value of the Dollar, Pound, and Euro, interest rates and who can and can’t get access to credit, and we also read and hear about new virtual currencies like Bitcoin and Facebook’s Libra. We talk a lot about money. But where did the idea of money come from? Did early Americans think about money a lot too? Jeffrey Sklansk...

What can a family history tell us about revolutionary and early republic America? What can the letters of a wife and mother tell us about life in the Caribbean during the Age of Revolutions? These are questions Susan Clair Imbarrato, a Professor of English at Minnesota State University Moorhead, set out to answer as she explored an amazing trove of letters to and from a woman named Sarah Gray Cary...

Much of early American history comprises stories of empire and how different Native, European, and Euro-American nations vied for control of North American territory, resources, and people. 
 In this episode, Matthew P. Dziennick, an Assistant Professor of History at the United States Naval Academy and author The Fatal Land: War, Empire, and the Highland Soldier, presents us with one of these impe...

What did early Americans think about science? And how did they pursue and develop their knowledge of it? Cameron Strang, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Reno and author of Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500-1850, joins us to investigate the early American world of science and how early Americans developed their...

2019 marks the 400th anniversary of two important events in American History: The creation of the first representative assembly in English North America and the arrival of the first African people in English North America. Why were these Virginia-based events significant and how have they impacted American history? Cassandra Newby-Alexander, a scholar of African American and American History and t...

Between 1789 and 1825, five men would serve as President of the United States. Four of them hailed from Virginia. Many of us know details about the lives and presidencies of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. But what do we know about the life and presidency of the fourth Virginia president, James Monroe? Sara Bon-Harper, Executive Director of James Monroe’s Highland, joins us to explore the publ...

Not all historians publish their findings about history in books and articles. Some historians convey knowledge about history to the public in public spaces and in public ways. We conclude the “Doing History: How Historians Work” series with a look at how historians do history for the public with guest historian Lonnie Bunch, the Founding Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Am...

A “little short of madness.” That is how Thomas Jefferson responded when two delegates from New York approached him with the idea to build the Erie Canal in January 1809. Jefferson’s comment did not discourage New Yorkers. On January 4, 1817, New York State began building a 363-mile long canal to link the Hudson River and Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes and the Midwest. Janice Fontanella, site...

Did Canada almost join the American Revolution? Bruno Paul Stenson, a historian and musicologist with the Château de Ramezay historic site in Montréal, joins us to discuss how the American Revolution played out in Canada. This episode originally posted as Episode 041. Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/246   Sponsor Links Omohundro Institute The Ben Franklin's World Shop   Complementary...

It wasn’t always fireworks on the fourth. John Adams predicted Americans would celebrate the Second of July, the day Congress voted in favor of independence, "with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other." He got the date wrong, but he was right about the festivities in commemoration of Independence Day. And yet July...

There’s a saying that tells us we should walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. It’s a reminder we should practice empathy and try to understand people before we cast judgement. As it happens, this expression is right on the mark because it seems when we use shoes as historical objects, we can learn a LOT about people and their everyday lives and actions. Kimberly Alexander, museum specialist, lectu...

For the American Revolution to be successful, it needed ideas people could embrace and methods for spreading those ideas. It also needed ways for revolutionaries to coordinate across colonial lines. How did revolutionaries develop and spread their ideas? How did they communicate and coordinate plans of action? Joseph Adelman, an Assistant Professor of History at Framingham State University and aut...

Delaware may be the second smallest state in the United States, but it has a BIG, rich history that can tell us much about the history of early America. David Young, the Executive Director of the Delaware Historical Society, joins us to explore the early American history of Delaware from its Native American inhabitants through its emergence as the first state in the United States. Show Notes: http...

Spain became the first European power to use the peoples, resources, and lands of the Americas and Caribbean as the basis for its Atlantic Empire. How did this empire function and what wealth was Spain able to extract from these peoples and lands? Molly Warsh, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh and author of American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492-170...

Have you ever had one of those really conversations where the person was so fascinating that you wished the conversation didn’t have to end? Flora Fraser joins us for one of those conversations. We’ll talk about biography, and in doing so, she’ll tell us what it was like to grow up as the daughter and granddaughter of two famed, British biographers and about the genre of biography and how it devel...

How did the postal system work in Early America? How did people send mail across the North American colonies and the British Empire? Joseph Adelman, an Assistant Professor of History at Framingham State University and author of Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing, 1763-1789, joins us to further explore how the early American postal system worked and how people and mail tr...