Ben Franklin's World

Ben Franklin's World

Liz Covart

48 minutes 37 seconds

BFW Revisited: World of the Wampanoag, Pt. 1
It’s November, the time of year when we Americans get ready for the Thanksgiving holiday. Although the federal holiday we know and honor today came about in 1863, Thanksgiving is a day that many modern-day Americans associate with the Indigenous peoples and religious separatists of Plymouth, Massachusetts.

What do we know about the Indigenous people the so-called Pilgrims interacted with?

This month, in between our new episodes about Indigenous history, the Ben Franklin’s World Revisited series explores the World of the Wampanoag. The World of the Wampanoag originally posted as a two-episode series in December 2020. This first episode will introduce you to the life, societies, and cultures of the Wampanoag and Narragansett peoples the Plymouth colonists interacted with before the colonists’ arrival in December 1620.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/290 Sponsor Links
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12 November 2024, 5:00 am
1 hour 2 minutes

397 Native Nations: A Millennium in North America
The North American continent is approximately 160 million years old, yet in the United States, we tend to focus on what amounts to 3300 millionths of that history, which is the period between 1492 to the present.

Kathleen DuVal, a Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, asks us to widen our view of early North American history to at least 1,000 years. Using details from her book, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, DuVal shows us that long before European colonists and enslaved Africans arrived on North American shores, Indigenous Americans built vibrant cities and civilizations, and adapted to a changing world and climate.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/397 Sponsor Links
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5 November 2024, 5:00 am
1 hour 40 minutes

BFW Revisited: Committees & Congresses of the American Revolution

Ben Franklin’s World Revisited is a series where Liz surfaces one of our earlier episodes that complements and adds additional perspectives to the histories we discuss in our new episodes.

Given the conversation we just had in Episode 396 about Carpenters’ Hall & the First Continental Congress, Liz would like to offer you an episode she produced in 2017 as part of our Doing History: To the Revolution series. Episode 153: Committees and Congresses: Governments of the American Revolution, furthers the discussion we just had about the First Continental Congress by helping us investigate how the American revolutionaries formed governments as imperial rule in British North American disintegrated and the American Revolution turned to war.

29 October 2024, 5:00 am
42 minutes 33 seconds

396 Carpenters' Hall & the First Continental Congress
“Monday, September 5, 1774. A number of the Delegates chosen and appointed by the Several Colonies and Provinces in North America to meet and hold a Congress at Philadelphia assembled at the Carpenters’ Hall.”

That statement begins the Journals of the Continental Congress, the official meeting minutes of the First and Second Continental Congresses. Between September 1774 and March 1789, the congressmen filled 34-printed volumes worth of entries.

Join Michael Norris, the Executive Director of the Carpenters’ Company of the City and County of Philadelphia, for a tour of Carpenters’ Hall, the meeting place of the First Continental Congress, and discover more about this historic building and the historic work of the First Continental Congress.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/396 Sponsor Links
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22 October 2024, 5:00 am
56 minutes 36 seconds

395 The Great New York Fire of 1776
When we think about the American Revolution, textbooks, documentaries, and historic sites have trained most of us to think about American triumphs in battles or events when American revolutionaries overcame moments of despair, when all seemed lost, to triumph in the cause of American independence.

Benjamin L. Carp will help us look at the American Revolution differently. The Daniel M. Lyons Chair of History at Brooklyn College, Ben will use details from his book The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution to help us consider the strategic military importance of New York City and its capture by the British Army and how both armies used fire as an instrument of war.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/395 Sponsor Links
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8 October 2024, 5:00 am
1 hour 20 seconds

394 The Pursuit of Happiness
What did Thomas Jefferson and the members of the Second Continental Congress mean when they wrote “the pursuit of Happiness” into the United States Declaration of Independence? And why is pursuing happiness so important that Jefferson and his fellow Founding Fathers included it in the Declaration of Independence’s most powerful statement of the new United States’ ideals?

Jeffrey Rosen, the President and CEO of the National Constitution Center and a law professor at George Washington University Law School, joins us to investigate and answer these questions with details from his book, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/394 Sponsor Links
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24 September 2024, 5:00 am
1 hour 5 minutes

393 Politics & Political Culture in the Early American Republic
The Constitution is a document of “We the People.” The ways Americans have supported, debated, and interpreted the Constitution since 1787 have played a vital role in the rise of politics and political parties within the United States.

What kind of political culture did the United States Constitution and its interpretations help establish? What were the expectations, practices, and cultural norms early Americans had to follow when debating the Constitution or its interpretation in the early American republic?

In honor of Consitution Day on September 17, the day the United States commemorates the signing of the United States Constitution, we speak with two historians–Jonathan Gienapp, an Associate Professor of History and Associate Professor of Law at Stanford University and Rachel Shelden, Director of the Richard Civil War Era Center and an Associate Professor of History at Penn State University– about early American political culture and political civility in the early American republic.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/393 Sponsor Links
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10 September 2024, 5:00 am
53 minutes 44 seconds

392 Religion and Race in Early America
What does history have to tell us about how we, as Americans, came to define people by their race; the visual ways we have grouped people together based on their skin color, facial features, hair texture, and ancestry?

As you might imagine, history has a LOT to tell us about this question! So today, we’re going to explore one aspect of the answer to this question by focusing on some of the ways religion shaped European and early American ideas about race and racial groupings.

Kathryn Gin Lum is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University. She’s also the author of Heathen: Religion and Race in American History.

Show Notes:https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/392 Sponsor Links
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27 August 2024, 5:00 am
1 hour 1 minute

391 Government in Colonial Virginia
Do you ever wonder how governments met and worked in colonial British America?

Williamsburg, Virginia, served as the capital of Virginia between 1699 and 1779. During its 80 years of service as capital, Williamsburg represented the center of British authority in Virginia. This meant the Royal Governor of the colony lived in Williamsburg. Indigenous, colonial, and other delegations came to Williamsburg to negotiate treaties and trade with Virginia. And, the colonial government met in Williamsburg’s capitol building to pass laws, listen to court cases, and debate ideas.

Katie Schinabeck, a historian of historical memory and the American Revolution and the Digital Projects Researcher at Colonial Williamsburg’s Innovation Studios, takes us on a behind-the-scenes tour of Williamsburg’s colonial capitol building to explore how the government of colonial Virginia worked and operated.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/391 Sponsor Links
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13 August 2024, 5:00 am
1 hour 1 minute

390 Objects of Revolution
When we think about the American Revolution, the French Revolution, or the Haitian Revolution, we think about the ideals of freedom and equality. These ideals were embedded and discussed in all of these revolutions.

What we don’t always think about when we think about these revolutions are the objects that inspired, came out of, and were circulated as they took place.

Ashli White, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Miami in Florida, joins us to investigate the “revolutionary things” that were created and circulated during the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions with details from her book Revolutionary Things: Material Culture and Politics in the Late Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/390 Sponsor Links
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30 July 2024, 5:00 am
54 minutes 55 seconds

389 Indigenous Justice in Early America
Early North America was a place that contained hundreds of distinct Indigenous nations and peoples who spoke at least 2,000 distinct languages. In the early sixteenth century, Spain began to establish colonies on mainland North America, and they were followed by the French, Dutch, and English, and the forced migration of enslaved Africans who represented at least 45 different ethnic and cultural groups. With such diversity, Early North America was full of cross-cultural encounters.

What did it look like when people of different ethnicities, races, and cultures interacted with one another? How were the people involved in cross-cultural encounters able to understand and overcome their differences?

Nicole Eustace is an award-winning historian at New York University. Using details from her Pulitzer-prize-winning book, Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America, Nicole will take us through one cross-cultural encounter in 1722 between the Haudenosaunee and Susquehannock peoples and English colonists in Pennsylvania.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/389 Sponsor Links
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16 July 2024, 5:00 am
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