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Ben Franklin's World

Ben Franklin's World

Liz Covart

  • 1 hour 8 minutes
    BFW Revisited: Valley Forge

    Most of us learned the same story: During the winter at Valley Forge, George Washington's army suffered and endured. Ragged soldiers huddled together in frozen huts and gnawed on shoe leather for food.

    But what if that story is mostly myth?

    Military historian Ricardo Herrera, author of Feeding Washington's Army: Surviving the Valley Forge Winter of 1778, reveals what was really happening during the winter of 1777–1778.

    Valley Forge wasn't a place of frozen inactivity, it was a hub of military operations. The army's survival depended not on virtue and willpower alone, but on the armed foraging columns Washington sent into the Pennsylvania countryside to seize food, horses, and supplies from the civilians he was fighting to protect.

    Rick’s Website | Book |
    Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/348
     
    RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES
    🎧 Episode 158: The Revolutionaries' Army
    🎧 Episode 189: The Little Ice Age
    🎧 Episode 301: Innoculation to Vaccination, Part 1
    🎧 Episode 302: Innoculation to Vaccination, Part 2
    🎧 Episode 332: Occupied Philadelphia
    🎧 Episode 333: Occupied Yorktown
    SUPPORT OUR WORK
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    WHEN YOU'RE READY
    🗞️ BFW Gazette Newsletter 
    👩‍💻 Join the BFW Listener Community
    🌍 Join the History Explorers Club
    TAKE THE QUIZ
    🧭 Discover How You Explore History (under 2 minutes)
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    *Book links are affiliate links. Every purchase supports the podcast.

    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    26 May 2026, 5:00 am
  • 1 hour 15 minutes
    441 The Escapes of David George

    When David George lay sick with smallpox in Savannah during the Revolutionary War, he faced three possible outcomes: death, re-enslavement, or freedom.

    Greg O'Malley, Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz, follows David George across six decades and three continents, from enslaved Virginia to the Muscogee Creek nation, and from British-occupied Georgia to Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone, in his new book, The Escapes of David George: An Odyssey of Slavery, Freedom, and the American Revolution. It's a story that will change how you think about what the Revolution actually delivered, and for whom.

    Greg’s Website | Book 
    Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/403
     
    EPISODE OUTLINE
    00:00:00 Introduction 
    00:01:14 Welcome to Ben Franklin's World
    00:02:31 Introducing Greg O'Malley and David George
    00:05:43 David George's Odyssey Begins
    00:08:12 The Rare Narrative of David George
    00:11:07 Authenticating David George's Voice
    00:13:39 David George's Multiple Escapes from Slavery
    00:20:30 David George's Conversion to Christianity
    00:24:53 Why Baptist? The Appeal of Evangelical Faith
    00:29:52 David George's Family and Name
    00:37:12 Life in Nova Scotia as a Refugee Preacher
    00:42:03 Journey to Sierra Leone
    00:54:44 Piecing Together David George's Later Years
    00:59:49 Discovering the Silver Bluff Baptist Church
    01:06:24 Time Warp: What If David George Stayed?
    01:10:29 Reflections and Takeaways
    RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES
    🎧 Episode 008: Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade 
    🎧 Episode 322: Running from Bondage in Revolutionary America
    🎧 Episode 424: Dunmore's Proclamation
    🎧 Episode 434: The Frank Brothers: Freeborn Black Soldiers
    🎧 Episode 440: Brooke Newman, Jefferson's Cut Grievance and the British Monarchy's Role in Slavery


    SUPPORT OUR WORK
    🎁 Make a Donation to Ben Franklin’s World
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    WHEN YOU'RE READY
    🗞️ BFW Gazette Newsletter 
    👩‍💻 Join the BFW Listener Community
    🌍 Join the History Explorers Club
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    🧭 Discover How You Explore History (under 2 minutes)
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    *Book links are affiliate links. Every purchase supports the podcast.

    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    19 May 2026, 5:00 am
  • 57 minutes 40 seconds
    BFW Revisited: Running from Bondage in the American Revolution

    She fled on horseback in the thick of war. Her six-year-old son rode with her. The white tailor at her side would pass, when anyone asked, as her husband.
    Her name was Sarah. She was one of tens of thousands of enslaved people who self-emancipated during the American Revolution, and one of the many women earlier histories barely noticed.
    In this Revisited episode, Karen Cook-Bell, author of Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and the Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America, recovers their stories.
    We learn how Lord Dunmore's 1775 proclamation reshaped the landscape of resistance, why motherhood drove women to flee rather than keeping them in place, and what creative, subversive strategies they used to slip out of bondage and into freedom.

    This is the companion conversation to Ep. 440's exploration of Jefferson's cut grievance. If Brooke Newman gave us the view from the throne, Karen Cook-Bell gives us the view from the ground. And it changes what the proclamations look like.

    Karen's Website | Book |
    Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/322
    RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES
    🎧 Episode 137: The Washingtons' Runaway Slave, Ona Judge
    🎧 Episode 157: The Revolution's African American Soldiers
    🎧 Episode 162: Dunmore's New World
    🎧 Episode 312: The Domestic Slave Trade
    🎧 Episode 424: Dunmore's Proclamation and the American Revolution in Virginia
    🎧 Episode 440: Jefferson's Cut Grievances and the British Monarchy's Role in Slavery
    SUPPORT OUR WORK
    🎁 Make a Donation to Ben Franklin’s World
    REQUEST A TOPIC
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    WHEN YOU'RE READY
    🗞️ BFW Gazette Newsletter 
    👩‍💻 Join the BFW Listener Community
    🌍 Join the History Explorers Club
    TAKE THE QUIZ
    🧭 Discover How You Explore History (under 2 minutes)
    👉 https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/quiz
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    *Book links are affiliate links. Every purchase supports the podcast.

    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    12 May 2026, 5:00 am
  • 1 hour 16 minutes
    440 Jefferson's Cut Grievance and the British Monarchy's Role in Slavery

    Thomas Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence contained 28 grievances against King George III — not 27.

    The final grievance, the one Congress cut before signing, accused the British king of waging cruel war against human nature by trafficking enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, forcing slavery onto unwilling American colonists, and then inciting those same enslaved people to rise up and kill their enslavers.

    Did King George III and the British monarchy actually bear responsibility for slavery in the 13 colonies? Or was Jefferson's grievance a strategic sleight of hand — an attempt to pin a uniquely American system onto the crown he wanted to escape?

    Historian Brooke Newman, author of The Crown's Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery, joins us to find out. She traces the British monarchy's involvement in the transatlantic slave trade from Queen Elizabeth I through King George III, examines what Jefferson got right and what he got wrong, and delivers her verdict on one of the most explosive what-ifs in United States history.

    Brooke's Website | Book |
    Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/440
     
    EPISODE OUTLINE
    00:00:00  Introduction
    00:01:24 Episode Welcome and Jefferson's Cut Grievance
    00:03:15 Guest Introduction: Brooke Newman
    00:04:58 Jefferson's Claim and Brooke's Research Origins
    00:09:28 Timeline of Monarchies and Terminology
    00:12:03 England Enters the Slave Trade under Elizabeth I
    00:17:41 Crown Investments and Royal African Company
    00:30:15 Colonies Structured for Slavery
    00:37:02 Logistics of the Slave Trade by Revolution
    00:47:01 King George III's Views on Slavery
    00:52:20 Virginia's 1772 Slave Trade Ban and Royal Veto
    00:57:35 Dunmore's Proclamation: Not a Royal Act
    01:01:17 Was George III to Blame? Jefferson's Strategy
    01:04:26 Time Warp: If George III Abolished Slavery
    01:10:56 Conclusion
    RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES
    🎧 Episode 141: A Declaration in Draft
    🎧 Episode 206: Christian Slavery
    🎧 Episode 351: Wealth and Slavery in New Netherland
    🎧 Episode 360: Slavery & Freedom in Massachusetts
    🎧 Episode 394: The Pursuit of Happiness
    🎧 Episode 438: The American Revolution and the Fate of the World
    SUPPORT OUR WORK
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    REQUEST A TOPIC
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    WHEN YOU'RE READY
    🗞️ BFW Gazette Newsletter 
    👩‍💻 Join the BFW Listener Community
    🌍 Join the History Explorers Club
    TAKE THE QUIZ
    🧭 Discover How You Explore History (under 2 minutes)
    👉 https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/quiz
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    *Book links are affiliate links. Every purchase supports the podcast.

    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    5 May 2026, 5:00 am
  • 1 hour 15 minutes
    BFW Revisited: Whose Fourth of July?

    On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass stood before the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society and asked one of the most searing questions in American history: "What, to the slave, is the Fourth of July?"

    To answer Douglass's question, we have to go back to the Revolution itself; to the choices Black Americans made in wartime, to the ways they read, used, and interrogated the Declaration of Independence, and to the alternative celebrations they created when the Fourth of July felt like someone else's holiday.

    Historians Christopher Bonner and Martha S. Jones help us explore what the Fourth of July meant for African Americans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and how their experiences with the Fourth contributed to the larger history of the nation's founding.

    Christopher's Website | Book 
    Martha's Website | Book
    Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/277
     
    RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES
    🎧 Episode 157: The Revolution's African American Soldiers
    🎧 Episode 166: Freedom and the American Revolution
    🎧 Episode 245: Celebrating the Fourth of July
    🎧 Episode 255: Birthright Citizens
    🎧 Episode 434: The Frank Brothers, Freeborn Black Soldiers in the American Revolution
    🎧 Episode 439: When the Declaration of Independence Was News
    SUPPORT OUR WORK
    🎁 Make a Donation to Ben Franklin’s World
    REQUEST A TOPIC
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    WHEN YOU'RE READY
    🗞️ BFW Gazette Newsletter 
    👩‍💻 Join the BFW Listener Community
    🌍 Join the History Explorers Club
    TAKE THE QUIZ
    🧭 Discover How You Explore History (under 2 minutes)
    👉 https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/quiz
    LISTEN 🎧
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    *Book links are affiliate links. Every purchase supports the podcast.

    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    28 April 2026, 5:00 am
  • 1 hour 17 minutes
    439 When the Declaration of Independence Was News

    The Second Continental Congress voted for independence on July 2, 1776, but it had absolutely no plan for telling the world about it.

    Congress sent just one copy of the Declaration to France. It was lost at sea. Printers ran the text however they liked. And the first formal acknowledgment of American independence came not from a European court, but from a Native American chief responding to a verbal translation of the Declaration in the middle of a treaty negotiation.

    Historian and Declaration expert Emily Sneff joins us to explore what the Declaration of Independence looked like when it was just news — urgent, imperfect, and far beyond anyone's control.

    Emily’s Website | Book |
    Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/439
     
    EPISODE OUTLINE
    00:00:00  Introduction
    00:04:07 The Declaration as a Congressional Product
    00:06:28 Jefferson's humble signature
    00:11:10 Congress Has No Plans for Circulation
    00:16:22 News of the Declaration Breaks
    00:24:36 Pubilc Readings of the Declaration
    00:27:27 Ministers Spread News of the Declaration
    00:32:57 German-American Translation of the Declaration
    00:42:04 French Translation Failures
    00:46:42 Verbal Translations of the Declaration
    00:51:52 No Official Copy Sent to King George III
    00:58:43 The Declaration of Independence as News
    01:02:17 Time Warp
    01:07:48 Upcoming 250th Exhibitions
    01:11:24 Conclusion
    RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES
    🎧 Episode 018: Our Declaration
    🎧 Episode 119: The Heart of the Declaration
    🎧 Episode 141: A Declaration in Draft
    🎧 Episode 388: John Hancock
    🎧 Episode 415: The Many Declarations of Independence
    🎧 Episode 431: Thomas Paine's Common Sense at 250
    SUPPORT OUR WORK
    🎁 Make a Donation to Ben Franklin’s World
    REQUEST A TOPIC
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    WHEN YOU'RE READY
    🗞️ BFW Gazette Newsletter 
    👩‍💻 Join the BFW Listener Community
    🌍 Join the History Explorers Club
    TAKE THE QUIZ
    🧭 Discover How You Explore History (under 2 minutes)
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    LISTEN 🎧
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    *Book links are affiliate links. Every purchase supports the podcast.

    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    21 April 2026, 5:00 am
  • 1 hour 20 minutes
    BFW Revisited: Age of Revolutions

    Between 1763 and 1848, revolutions swept across four continents. We tend to remember three of them — the American, the French, and the Haitian Revolutions. But what about all the rest? And what connected them to each other?

    In this episode, we're bringing back our conversation with Janet Polasky, Presidential Professor of History Emerita at the University of New Hampshire and author of Revolutions Without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World, and Paul Mapp, Associate Professor of History at William & Mary, who helps us understand why historians are increasingly looking at the American Revolution through an international lens.
    Together, they reveal why the Age of Revolutions happened when it did, how the American Revolution fit within this larger Atlantic-wide moment of upheaval, and how revolutionary ideas traveled across borders through people, print, and rumor.


    Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/165
     
    RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES
    🎧 Episode 161: Smuggling and the American Revolution
    🎧 Episode 428: Canal Dreamers
    🎧 Episode 432: How France & Spain Helped Win American Independence
    🎧 Episode 433: Haiti, France, and the American War for Independence
    🎧 Episode 438: The American Revolution and the Fate of the World
    SUPPORT OUR WORK
    🎁 Make a Donation to Ben Franklin’s World
    REQUEST A TOPIC
    📨 Topic Request Form
    📫 [email protected]
    WHEN YOU'RE READY
    🗞️ BFW Gazette Newsletter 
    👩‍💻 Join the BFW Listener Community
    🌍 Join the History Explorers Club
    TAKE THE QUIZ
    🧭 Discover How You Explore History (under 2 minutes)
    👉 https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/quiz
    LISTEN 🎧
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    *Book links are affiliate links. Every purchase supports the podcast.

    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    14 April 2026, 5:00 am
  • 1 hour 11 minutes
    438 The American Revolution & the Fate of the World

    What if the American Revolution didn't just create the United States, but also created Australia?

    Most of us learned about the Revolution as a story of thirteen North American colonies pushing back against a distant king. But this episode reveals something far wilder: a genuinely global war whose consequences rippled across every inhabited continent — reshaping empires, forcing migrations, and planting the seeds of more than a hundred declarations of independence that would follow over the next two and a half centuries.

    Joseph Adelman joins historian Richard Bell to explore the American Revolution as a world war. They discuss:

    • Why the Declaration of Independence was really a Declaration of Interdependence
    • How Hyder Ali, the Muslim ruler of Mysore in southern India, became George Washington's ally by the logic of wartime coalitions
    • How Spain's campaign to recapture Florida tied down thousands of British troops
    • How Britain's convict crisis, caused by losing access to Maryland and Virginia, led to the founding of Australia at Botany Bay.

    Rick's Website | Book |
    Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/438
     
    EPISODE OUTLINE
    00:00:00  Introduction
    00:06:28 Differences in Perception of the American Revolution
    00:09:00 Reframing the Declaration of Independence
    00:17:32 Molly Brandt and Haudenosaunee Diplomacy
    00:24:38 Baron von Steuben: A Mercenary's Tale
    00:29:15 The American Revolution: Myth vs. Reality
    00:35:02 The American Revolution and Florida
    00:43:39 The American Revolution's Impact on India
    00:50:24 The Connection Between the American Revolution and Australia
    00:56:50 Themes of the American Revolution
    00:59:16 The Time Warp
    00:62:00 Conclusion


    RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES
    🎧 Episode 141: A Declaration in Draft
    🎧 Episode 163: The American Revolution in North America
    🎧 Episode 238: Benedict Arnold
    🎧 Episode 348: Valley Forge
    🎧 Episode 325: Everyday People of the American Revolution
    🎧 Episode 437: The Home Front
    SUPPORT OUR WORK
    🎁 Make a Donation to Ben Franklin’s World
    REQUEST A TOPIC
    📨 Topic Request Form
    📫 [email protected]
    WHEN YOU'RE READY
    🗞️ BFW Gazette Newsletter 
    👩‍💻 Join the BFW Listener Community
    🌍 Join the History Explorers Club
    TAKE THE QUIZ
    🧭 Discover How You Explore History (under 2 minutes)
    👉 https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/quiz
    LISTEN 🎧
    🍎 Apple Podcasts 
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    CONNECT
    🦋 Liz on Bluesky
    👩‍💻 Liz on LinkedIn
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    SAY THANKS
    💜 Leave a review on Apple Podcasts
    💚 Leave a rating on Spotify
    *Book links are affiliate links. Every purchase supports the podcast.

    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    7 April 2026, 5:00 am
  • 1 hour 10 minutes
    BFW Revisited: British-Occupied Philadelphia, 1777–1778

    In September 1777, just fourteen months after declaring independence, Philadelphia fell to the British Army. For nearly nine months, the new nation's capital was occupied territory.

    But what did that actually mean for the people who lived there? 

    Not the generals, not the Congress: ordinary Philadelphians who had to decide whether to flee or stay, share their homes with British officers, watch their fences get chopped up for firewood, and figure out which neighbors to trust when it was all over.

    In this episode, Aaron Sullivan, a professor of History at Rider University, George Boudreau, a public historian and Executive Director of the Ebenezer Maxwell Mansion Museum in Germantown, PA, and historical interpreter Kalela Williams, now the Director of the Virginia Center for the Book, take us inside occupied Philadelphia.

    Together, they reveal how a city that was never fully committed to independence experienced nine months of British rule, and what the occupation cost everyone who lived through it: Quaker women negotiating with soldiers at their back gates, merchants whose fortunes rose on British hard currency while their neighbors went hungry, and Black Philadelphians who looked at the upheaval and asked whether it might open a door to freedom.

    Plus: the most extravagant party thrown in eighteenth-century America, staged while the city's almshouses overflowed.


    Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/332
    RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES
    🎧 Episode 050: Betsy Ross & the Making of America
    🎧 Episode 306: The Horse's Tail
    🎧 Episode 325: Everyday People of the American Revolution
    🎧 Episode 333: Life in Occupied Yorktown
    🎧 Episode 380: The Tory's Wife
    🎧 Episode 437: Civilian Life in America's Occupied Cities
    SUPPORT OUR WORK
    🎁 Make a Donation to Ben Franklin’s World
    REQUEST A TOPIC
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    WHEN YOU'RE READY
    🗞️ BFW Gazette Newsletter 
    👩‍💻 Join the BFW Listener Community
    🌍 Join the History Explorers Club
    TAKE THE QUIZ
    🧭 Discover How You Explore History (under 2 minutes)
    👉 https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/quiz
    LISTEN 🎧
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    *Book links are affiliate links. Every purchase supports the podcast.

    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    31 March 2026, 5:00 am
  • 1 hour 5 minutes
    437 Civilian Life in America's Occupied Cities

    The British Army is at your door. They need a room. What do you do?
    For thousands of civilians living in cities occupied during the American War for Independence — Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Newport, Charleston, Savannah — this wasn't a hypothetical. It was a reality that upended daily life and revealed a side of the revolution we rarely talk about.
    Lauren Duval, author of The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupations, and the Making of American Independence, joins us to explore what the War for Independence actually looked like from inside the household. Women who negotiated quartering terms and held their ground. Men who came to blows over who controlled the parlor. Enslaved people who used the chaos of occupation to reunite families and reach British lines.
    The revolution didn't just happen on battlefields. It happened at kitchen tables, in back gardens, and on doorsteps.
    Lauren's Website | Book |
    Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/403
     
    EPISODE OUTLINE
    00:00:00  Introduction
    00:01:38  The Home Front of the American Revolution
    00:05:24  The Gensis of the Revolutionary Household
    00:10:49  Why Focus on Urban Port Cities
    00:19:46  The British Occupation's Impact on City Life
    00:25:55  Quartering a British Officer: The Drinker Household
    00:33:38. Quartering Experiences in Male-Headed Households
    00:39:22  Lower-Class Experiences During British Occupation
    00:40:55  The Impact of British Hard Currency on Urban Labor Markets
    00:44:21  Black Experiences During British Occupation
    00:51:21  The Overall American Experience of the War for Independence
    00:54:01. The Time Warp
    00:59:47 Conculsion
    RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES
    🎧 Episode 050: Betsy Ross & the Making of America
    🎧 Episode 175: The War in Ben Franklin's House
    🎧 Episode 306: The Horse's Tail
    🎧 Episode 332: Experiences of Revolution: Occupied Philadelphia
    🎧 Episode 333: Experiences of Revolution: Occupied Yorktown
    🎧 Episode 380: The Tory's Wife
    SUPPORT OUR WORK
    🎁 Make a Donation to Ben Franklin’s World
    REQUEST A TOPIC
    📨 Topic Request Form
    📫 [email protected]
    WHEN YOU'RE READY
    🗞️ BFW Gazette Newsletter 
    👩‍💻 Join the BFW Listener Community
    🌍 Join the History Explorers Club
    TAKE THE QUIZ
    🧭 Discover How You Explore History (under 2 minutes)
    👉 https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/quiz
    LISTEN 🎧
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    🦋 Liz on Bluesky
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    SAY THANKS
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    *Book links are affiliate links. Every purchase supports the podcast.

    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    24 March 2026, 5:00 am
  • 1 hour 1 minute
    BFW Revisited: Longfellow House-Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site

    250 years ago, the British evacuated Boston: driven out by cannon that had traveled 300 miles from Fort Ticonderoga. But where did the plan for those cannons take shape?
    In this Revisited episode, we return to our conversation with Garrett Cloer, now Program Manager for Interpretation and Visitor Experience at Saratoga National Historical Park, to explore the Longfellow House–Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
    This Georgian mansion served as George Washington's home and headquarters for nearly nine months during the Siege of Boston. In this house, Washington forged the Continental Army and plotted the moves that liberated the city. Garrett reveals the house's Loyalist origins, life inside during the siege, and how poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow later transformed it into a literary landmark.
    A companion to Episode 436 on Henry Knox's Noble Train of Artillery.


    Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/194
    RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES
    🎧 Episode 112: The Tea Crisis of 1773
    🎧 Episode 228: The Boston Massacre
    🎧 Episode 296: The Boston Massacre: A Family History
    🎧 Episode 409: The Battles of Lexington & Concord
    🎧 Episode 413: Dr. Joseph Warren & the Battle of Bunker Hill
    🎧 Episode 436: Fort Ticonderoga & Henry Knox's Noble Train of Artillery
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    17 March 2026, 5:00 am
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