Ben Franklin's World

The Declaration of Independence stands first in a series of documents that founded the United States. It also stands as an early step in the long process of establishing a free, independent, and self-governing nation. Since 1776, more than 100 nation-states and freedom organizations have used the Declaration of Independence as a model for their own declarations and proclamations of independence. G...

Nathaniel Bowditch worked as a navigator, mathematician, astronomer, and business innovator. Over the course of his lifetime, his fellow Americans hailed him as the “American Sir Isaac Newton.” Tamara Thornton, a professor of history at the University of Buffalo and author of Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers: How a Nineteenth-Century Man of Business, Science, and the Sea Changed America...

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. He also played a central role in the European adoption of Indian or Native American slavery. When we think of slavery in early America, we often think of the practice of African and African-American chattel slavery. However, that system of slavery wasn’t the only system of slavery that existed in North America. Systems of Indian slavery existed too. In fact...

Did you know that Connecticut and Virginia once invaded Pennsylvania? During the 1760s, Connecticut invaded and captured the northeastern corner of Pennsylvania just as Virginia invaded and captured parts of western Pennsylvania. And Pennsylvania stood powerless to stop them. In this episode, Patrick Spero, the Librarian of the American Philosophical Society and author of Frontier Country: The Pol...

George Washington was an accomplished man. He served as a delegate to the First and Second Continental Congresses, Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, first President of the United States, and on top of all that he was also a savvy businessman who ran a successful plantation. George Washington was also a slaveholder. In 1789, he and his wife Martha took 7 slaves to New York City to serve t...

What do the objects we purchase and use say about us? If we take the time to think about the material objects and clothing in our lives, we’ll find that we can actually learn a lot about ourselves and other people. The same holds true when we take the time to study the objects and clothing left behind by people from the past. Jennifer Van Horn, an Assistant Professor of History and Art History at...

If early Americans desired slaves mostly to produce sugarcane, cotton, rice, indigo, and tobacco, what would happen if Europeans and early Americans stopped purchasing those products?
 Would boycotting slave-produced goods and starving slavery of its economic sustenance be enough to end the practice of slavery in North America? Julie Holcomb, an Associate Professor of Museum Studies at Baylor Univ...

In Colonial America, clergymen stood as thought leaders in their local communities. They stood at the head of their congregations and many community members looked to them for knowledge and insight about the world around them. So what happened to these trusted, educated men during the American Revolution? How did they choose their political allegiances? And what work did they undertake to aid or h...

The institution of African slavery in North America began in late August 1619 and persisted until the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States in December 1865. Over those 246 years, many slaves plotted and conspired to start rebellions, but most of the plotted rebellions never took place. Slaveholders and whites discovered them before they could begin. Therefore...

When we explore the history of early America, we often look at people who lived and the events that took place in North America. But what about the people who lived and worked in European metropoles? What about Native Americans? Today, we explore early American history through a slightly different lens, a lens that allows us to see interactions that occurred between Native American peoples and Eng...

The United States has a complicated history when it comes to ideas of empire and imperialism. Since it’s earliest days, the United States has wanted the power that came with being an empire even while declaring its distaste for them. Therefore, it should not be surprising that the man who drafted the Declaration of Independence, which severed the 13 American colonies’ ties to the most powerful emp...

On April 18, 1775, Paul Revere rode to Lexington, Massachusetts to spread the alarm that the Regulars were marching. Revere made several important rides between 1774 and 1775, including one in September 1774 that brought the Suffolk Resolves to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. So why is it that we remember Paul Revere’s ride to Lexington and not any of his other rides? Why is it tha...

How did the colonists of Massachusetts go from public protests meant to shame government officials and destroy offending property, to armed conflict with British Regulars in Lexington and Concord? John Bell, the prolific blogger behind Boston1775.net and the author of The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War, leads us on an investigation of what brought colonists a...

Historians often portray the American Revolution as an orderly, if violent, event that moved from British colonists’ high-minded ideas about freedom to American independence from Great Britain and the ratification of the Constitution of 1787. But was the American Revolution an orderly event that took place only between Great Britain and her North American colonists? Was it really about high-minded...

In many ways, the Enlightenment gave birth to the United States. Enlightened ideas informed protests over imperial governance and taxation and over whether there should be an American bishop. If we want to understand early America, we need to understand the Enlightenment. Caroline Winterer, a Professor of History at Stanford University and author of American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in t...

What happened to the loyalists who stayed in the United States after the War for Independence? After the war, 60,000 loyalists and 15,000 slaves evacuated the United States. But thousands more opted to remain in the new nation. Rebecca Brannon, an Associate Professor of History at James Madison University and author of From Revolution to Reunion: The Reintegration of South Carolina Loyalists, join...

Early America was a diverse place. It contained many different people who had many different traditions that informed how they lived…and died. How did early Americans understand death? What did they think about suicide? Terri Snyder, a Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton and author of The Power to Die: Slavery and Suicide in British North America, helps us answe...

What did the American Revolution mean and achieve? What sort of liberty and freedom did independence grant Americans and which Americans should receive them? Americans grappled with these questions soon after the American Revolution. They debated these issues during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, in the first congresses, and as they followed events in revolutionary France and Haiti during...

In December 1773, the Cape Cod Tea Crisis revealed that the people of “radical” Massachusetts were far from united in their support for the American Revolution. An observation that leads us to wonder: How many Americans supported the Patriot cause? In this episode we speak with four scholars to explore the complexities of political allegiance during the American Revolution. Show Notes: http://www....

Did the Americans win the War for Independence? Or did the British simply lose the war? The history of the American War for Independence is complicated. And history books tell many different versions of the event, which is why we need an expert to guide us through the intricacies of whether we should look at the war as an American victory, a British defeat, or in some other light. Andrew O’Shaughn...

The Spanish, French, and English played large roles in the origins of colonial America. But so too did the Dutch. During the 17th century, they had a “moment" in which they influenced European colonization and development of the Atlantic World. Wim Klooster, a Professor of History at Clark University and author of The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth Century Atlantic Wor...

How do you build colonies without women? Most of the colonial adventurers from England and France who set out for Jamestown, New France, and colonial Louisiana were men. But how do you build and sustain societies and spread European culture—in essence, fulfill the promises of a colonial program—without women? You can’t. Which is why Marcia Zug, a Professor of Law at the University of South Carolin...

On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia moved that the Second Continental Congress resolve “that these United Colonies are, and of right out to be, free and independent States…” The Second Continental Congress adopted Lee’s motion and on June 11, 1776, it appointed a committee to draft a declaration of independence. Today, Steve Pincus, the Bradford Durfee Professor of History at Yale Unive...

How did the smallest colony and smallest state in the union became the largest American participant in the slave trade? Christy Clark-Pujara, an Assistant Professor in the Department of African-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island, joins us to explore the history of Rhode Island and New England’s involvement with s...

Thomas Jefferson wrote about liberty and freedom and yet owned over six hundred slaves during his lifetime. He’s a founder who many of us have a hard time understanding. This why we need an expert to lead us through his life, so we can better understand who Jefferson was and how he came to his seemingly paradoxical ideas about slavery and freedom. Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor of history and le...