Ben Franklin's World

Ben Franklin's World

Liz Covart

42 minutes 42 seconds

400 Ben Franklin's world
How do historians define Ben Franklin’s “world?” What historical event, person, or place in the era of Ben Franklin do they wish you knew about?

In celebration of the 400th episode of Ben Franklin’s World, we posed these questions to more than 20 scholars. What do they think? Join the celebration and discover more about the world Ben Franklin lived in.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/400 Sponsor Links
- Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
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17 December 2024, 6:00 am
57 minutes 19 seconds

BFW Revisited: The Nat Turner Revolt
In our last episode, Episode 399, we discussed Denmark Vesey’s revolt and the way biblical texts and scripture enabled Vesey to organize what would have been the largest slave revolt in United States history if the revolt had not been thwarted before Vesey could put it into action.

Early American history is filled with revolts against enslavers that were thwarted and never made it past the planning stage. But, one uprising that did move beyond planning and into action was the Southampton Rebellion or Nat Turner’s Revolt in August 1831.

In this BFW Revisited episode, Episode 133, which was released in May 2017, we met with Patrick Breen, an Associate Professor of History at Providence College. Patrick joined us to investigate Nat Turner’s Revolt with details from his book The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/133 Sponsor Links
- Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
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10 December 2024, 6:00 am
55 minutes 49 seconds

399 Denmark Vesey's Bible
Denmark Vesey’s failed revolt in 1822 could have been the largest insurrection of enslaved people against their enslavers in United States history. Not only was Vesey’s plan large in scale, but Charleston officials arrested well over one hundred rumored participants.

Jeremy Schipper, a Professor in the departments for the Study or Religion and Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Toronto and the author of Denmark Vesey’s Bible: The Thwarted Revolt that Put Scripture and Slavery on Trial, joins us to investigate Vesey’s planned rebellion and the different ways Vesey used the Bible and biblical texts to justify his revolt and the violence it would have wrought.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/399 Sponsor Links
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3 December 2024, 6:00 am
52 minutes 20 seconds

BFW Revisited: World of the Wampanoag, Pt. 2
This week is Thanksgiving week in the United States. On Thursday, most of us will sit down with friends, family, and other loved ones and share a large meal where we give thanks for whatever we’re grateful for over the last year.

In elementary school, we are taught to associate this holiday and its rituals with the religious separatists, or pilgrims, who migrated from England to what is today Plymouth, Massachusetts. We are taught that at the end of the fall harvest, the separatists sat down with their Indigenous neighbors to share in the bounty that the Wampanoag people helped them grow by teaching the separatists how to sow and cultivate crops like corn in the coastal soils of New England.

In this BFW Revisited episode, Episode 291, we investigate the arrival of the Mayflower and the Indigenous world the separatists arrived in. We’ll also explore how the Wampanoag and Narragansett peoples interacted with their new European neighbors and how they contended with the English people who were determined to settle on their lands.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/291 Sponsor Links
- Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
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26 November 2024, 6:00 am
1 hour 7 minutes

398 The Shawnee-Dunmore War, 1774
After the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763), Great Britain instituted the Proclamation Line of 1763. The Line sought to create a lasting peace in British North America by limiting British colonial settlement east of the Appalachian Mountains.

In 1768, colonists and British Indian agents negotiated the Treaties of Fort Stanwix and Hard Labour to extend the boundary line further west. In 1774, the Shawnee-Dunmore War broke out as colonists attempted to push further west.

Fallon Burner and Russell Reed, two of the three co-managers of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s American Indian Initiative, join us to investigate the Shawnee-Dunmore War and what this war can show us about Indigenous life, warfare, and sovereignty during the mid-to-late eighteenth century.

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/398 Sponsor Links
- Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
- Colonial Williamsburg American Indian Initiative
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19 November 2024, 6:00 am
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
- Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
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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
- Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
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24 September 2024, 5:00 am
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