Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire

Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire PDF Author: Carla Mulford
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199384193
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Get Book Here

Book Description
A study of Franklin's writings on the British Empire and its relationship to the British North America, Mulford assesses the founding father's thoughts on economics, society, politics, and the environment.

Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire

Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire PDF Author: Carla Mulford
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199384193
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Get Book Here

Book Description
A study of Franklin's writings on the British Empire and its relationship to the British North America, Mulford assesses the founding father's thoughts on economics, society, politics, and the environment.

Empire for Liberty

Empire for Liberty PDF Author: Richard H. Immerman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691156077
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Get Book Here

Book Description
How could the United States, a nation founded on the principles of liberty and equality, have produced Abu Ghraib, torture memos, Plamegate, and warrantless wiretaps? Did America set out to become an empire? And if so, how has it reconciled its imperialism--and in some cases, its crimes--with the idea of liberty so forcefully expressed in the Declaration of Independence? Empire for Liberty tells the story of men who used the rhetoric of liberty to further their imperial ambitions, and reveals that the quest for empire has guided the nation's architects from the very beginning--and continues to do so today.

Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire

Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire PDF Author: Carla Mulford
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780199384211
Category : Statesmen
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


Slave Empire

Slave Empire PDF Author: Padraic X. Scanlan
Publisher: Robinson
ISBN: 1472142322
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 461

Get Book Here

Book Description
'Engrossing and powerful . . . rich and thought-provoking' Fara Dabhoiwala, Guardian 'Path-breaking . . . a major rewriting of history' Mihir Bose, Irish Times 'Slave Empire is lucid, elegant and forensic. It deals with appalling horrors in cool and convincing prose.' The Economist The British empire, in sentimental myth, was more free, more just and more fair than its rivals. But this claim that the British empire was 'free' and that, for all its flaws, it promised liberty to all its subjects was never true. The British empire was built on slavery. Slave Empire puts enslaved people at the centre the British empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In intimate, human detail, Padraic Scanlon shows how British imperial power and industrial capitalism were inextricable from plantation slavery. With vivid original research and careful synthesis of innovative historical scholarship, Slave Empire shows that British freedom and British slavery were made together.

Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement

Benjamin Franklin and the Politics of Improvement PDF Author: Alan Craig Houston
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300152396
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Young Benjamin Franklin

Young Benjamin Franklin PDF Author: Nick Bunker
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101872802
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this new account of Franklin's early life, Pulitzer finalist Nick Bunker portrays him as a complex, driven young man who elbows his way to success. From his early career as a printer and journalist to his scientific work and his role as a founder of a new republic, Benjamin Franklin has always seemed the inevitable embodiment of American ingenuity. But in his youth he had to make his way through a harsh colonial world, where he fought many battles with his rivals, but also with his wayward emotions. Taking Franklin to the age of forty-one, when he made his first electrical discoveries, Bunker goes behind the legend to reveal the sources of his passion for knowledge. Always trying to balance virtue against ambition, Franklin emerges as a brilliant but flawed human being, made from the conflicts of an age of slavery as well as reason. With archival material from both sides of the Atlantic, we see Franklin in Boston, London, and Philadelphia as he develops his formula for greatness. A tale of science, politics, war, and religion, this is also a story about Franklin's forebears: the talented family of English craftsmen who produced America's favorite genius.

Benjamin Franklin

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

Get Book Here

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

Benjamin Franklin in London

Benjamin Franklin in London PDF Author: George Goodwin
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300220243
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Get Book Here

Book Description
An account of Franklin's British years.

The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin

The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin PDF Author: Gordon S. Wood
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101200901
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Get Book Here

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.

Benjamin Franklin's Intellectual World

Benjamin Franklin's Intellectual World PDF Author: Paul E. Kerry
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson
ISBN: 1611470293
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume attempts to throw fresh light on two areas of Benjamin Franklin’s intellectual world, namely: his self-fashioning and his political thought. It is an odd thing that for all of Franklin’s voluminous writings—a fantastically well-documented correspondence over many years, scientific treatises that made his name amongst the brightest minds of Europe, newspaper articles, satires, and of course his signature on the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution—and yet scholars debate how to get at his political thought, indeed, if he had any political philosophy at all. It could be argued, that he is perhaps the American Founder most closely associated with the Enlightenment. Similarly, for a man who left so much evidence about his life as a printer, bookseller, postmaster, inventor, diplomat, politician, scientist, among other professions, one who wrote an autobiography that has become a piece of American national literature and, indeed, a contribution to world culture, the question of who Ben Franklin continues to engage scholars and those who read about his life. His identity seems so stable that we associate it with certain virtues that apply to the way we live our lives, time management, for example. The image of the stable figure of Franklin is applied to create a sense of trust in everything from financial institutions to plumbers. His constant drive to improve and fashion himself reveal, however, a man whose identity was not static and fixed, but was focused on growth, on bettering his understanding of himself and the world he lived in and attempted to influence and improve.